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Ecuador: Media fined for not carrying article

Four newspapers and three TV stations were fined US$3,750 each for not carrying a story on presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso.

Ecuador fines media for not publishing a story

Ecuador has fined seven media companies for not publishing a story that it deemed of public interest.

The state’s media watchdog said the press had a duty to cover a story about the supposed offshore dealings of opposition politician and recent presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso.

The investigation was published in an Argentine newspaper in March.

The watchdog and the media companies have accused each other of censorship. Appeals are under way.

The ruling was made against newspapers El Comercio, La Hora, Expreso and El Universo, and television channels Televicentro, Teleamazonas and Ecuavisa.
. . .

The report, “Lasso: the offshore tycoon”, was first published by Argentina’s left-wing Pagina 12 newspaper, and was picked up by various other Ecuadorean news outlets ahead of the country’s election on 2 April.

The Committee to Protect Journalists asserts that “No government anywhere, including in Ecuador, has any business telling the news media what to cover,” and reports,

In defending its actions before Supercom, lawyers for El Comercio argued that the original Página/12 story was poorly reported, failed to include a response from Lasso, and that publishing the unverified allegations would have violated an Ecuadoran law barring media from promoting or denigrating candidates immediately before elections.

Freedom House has rated Ecuador’s press status as “not free.”

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Ecuador: Partial recount results predictable

Predictably,

Following a recount of almost 1.3 million votes in Ecuador, the electoral council has confirmed left-wing candidate Lenín Moreno as the winner of the presidential poll held on 2 April.

The recount slightly boosted Mr Moreno’s margin over his conservative rival, Guillermo Lasso.

Mr Lasso had demanded a full recount citing allegations of fraud but the national electoral council only agreed to a recount of 10% of the votes.

Cue Capt. Louis,

Where’s the OAS?

But monitors from the Organization of American States said they considered “a recount of this magnitude and under these norms to be an exercise in transparency”.

More like an exercise in futility.

UPDATE:
Linked to by Silvio Canto. Thank you!



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John Batchelor: Ecuador & Argentina discard transparency.

Mary O’Grady was in the Batchelor show discussing how Ecuador & Argentina discard transparency.

Mr. Correa has been president since 2007. He runs the country’s largest media empire and controls the legislature, the judiciary, the top command of the army, and the national police. All members of the CNE have links to his government or his party, the PAIS Alliance. The head of the electoral appeals tribunal is the brother of Mr. Correa’s attorney general.

Mr. Moreno freely used government resources to campaign and played dirty. Fake Lasso ads in which he promised to privatize health care popped up on city buses, though Mr. Lasso had made no such proposal. With government control of more than 20 mass-media organizations, including television and radio stations, newspapers and magazines, Mr. Moreno blanketed the nation with his message. The government often interrupted programming on channels not owned by the state to run campaign spots.

The European Union observed Ecuador’s 2009 presidential election and issued a report critical of Mr. Correa’s use of government resources and power to influence the outcome. This time around the CNE blocked an EU observer mission.

Listen here:

Also don’t miss O’Grady’s column on Venezuela,

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Today’s Capt. Louis Renault moment:

Ecuador National Electoral Council Says Vote Results Are Irreversible. Council says Lenin Moreno got 51.2% of the votes, with 48.8% for Guillermo Lasso, with almost all ballots counted

As you may recall, on election day early results showed Lasso ahead, them the CNE website went down, and when it went back up Moreno was declared the winner.

Now the CNE says the results are “official and irreversible.”

Cue Cpt. Louis,

Lasso is holding a press conference right now,

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Ecuador: OAS congratulates Moreno

Luis Almagro, head of the Organization of American States, made it official,

The WSJ has the details:
Ecuador Presidential Vote Fair, Says Election Observer. International election observes didn’t find evidence of fraud in vote, OAS says; group congratulates ruling-party candidate Lenin Moreno

Mr. Moreno, who changed his profile on his Twitter account to president-elect of Ecuador, was congratulated on Monday by the leaders of Peru, Chile and Argentina, as well as the OAS’s secretary-general. In a statement, the Washington, D.C.-based OAS urged Mr. Lasso to address any of his fraud complaints through Ecuador’s institutions.

“There were no discrepancies between the analyzed ballots and the official data,” it said. The organization sent 77 observers to 480 polling stations across Ecuador, including at the electoral council’s data center.

Many Believe That the Left’s Election Victory in Ecuador Was Fraudulent:

. . . three out of the four exit polls released as voting concluded on Sunday showed Lasso with a lead between three and six points. Exit polls can be wrong, but the one that predicted a Lasso win of six points was spot-on in predicting the results of the first round of voting in February. In that election, leftist Lenín Moreno (yes, his first name was given him for ideological reasons) won 39 percent of the vote, narrowly missing an outright victory that wouldn’t have required a runoff. The final results of that first round were delayed for days, as the government-controlled election machinery stalled and dithered until finally admitting that a runoff was needed.

Even more disturbing was the decision of President Rafael Correa, who handpicked Moreno as his chosen successor, to fire General Luis Castro Ayala as the chief of staff of the Ecuadorean army after the first round. General Castro Ayala is said to have played a crucial role, through his moral influence on the National Election Council, in ensuring an accurate count of the first election round. The day after the first round of voting, he sent a letter to the Joint Command of the Armed Forces, requesting that it consider its constitutional responsibilities to ensure an accurate count. Following his firing, General Castro Ayala told the media that “the armed forces did not handle the entire chain of custody of the ballots in these last elections” as it is normally charged with doing.

Lasso will be challenging the results in all of Ecuador’s 24 provinces,

Part of the problem is the opposition’s distrust of the National Electoral Council, which it says has become an appendage of the executive in the way the electoral board in Venezuela has all but lost independence under President Nicolas Maduro, a key ally of Correa.

As for Assange,

“I cordially invite Lasso to leave Ecuador within 30 days (with or without his tax haven millions)”

UPDATE
The WaPo’s Nick Miroff (who’s married to the daughter of Cuban G-2 founder and KGB protege Manuel “Barbarroja” Piniero) declares that Lenín Moreno, A kinder, gentler leftist aims to bridge angry divisions after Ecuador win.

That’s “democratic socialism” for ya.

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Ecuador: No official winner yet

As of 9:40am Eastern:
As reported yesterday, early results showed opposition candidate Guillermo Lasso as the winner of yesterday’s presidential election, while later in the evening the CNE (National Election Council) declared Lenín Moreno as winning the preliminary count.

The CNE website is now up, showing as of the writing of this post:

Lasso 48.8% with 4,813,217 votes
Moreno 51.16% with 5,0142,295

However, last night the CNE’s results showed otherwise. Argentinian journalist Jorge Lanata tweeted a screen capture showing Lasso ahead on total votes and Moreno ahead by 2+ percentage points, with the comment,
“#IMustSay ECUADOR is the first country where 4,621,654 voters equals 48.93%. And 4,523,513 equals 51.07%. #Fraud”

Lasso tweeted a screen capture, “This is only one example of the records showing inconsistencies. They’ve switched their votes for ours.”

Also last night AP reported

Thousands of outraged supporters of opposition Ecuadorean presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso shouted “fraud” and broke through metal barricades to almost reach the entrance of the electoral council’s headquarters in Quito before being pushed back by police. A similar scuffle took place outside the electoral offices in Guayaquil.

The WSJ this morning,

With 95% of the votes counted late Sunday, Mr. Moreno had 51.11% support, compared with 48.89% for Guillermo Lasso, the national electoral council said on its website. It has yet to officially announce a winner.

A quick count by Participacion Ciudadana, a Quito-based nongovernment organization that promotes democracy, said there was a technical tie between the candidates.

Here’s this morning’s press conference,

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Ecuador: BREAKING NEWS Early results show Lasso win UPDATED

After reading this post,
please go to FOLLOW-UP POST HERE

As surprising as the Brexit and Trump wins, early results show Guillermo Lasso as the winner of today’s runoff presidential election.

Earlier this afternoon, El Universo declared “Guillermo Lasso, nuevo presidente de Ecuador, según exit poll de Cedatos” (Guillermo Lasso, new president of Ecuador, according to Cedatos exit poll). In exit polls of 36,000 voters, Cedatos found

GUILLERMO LASSO 53,02 %
LENÍN MORENO 46,98 %

Polling organization Cedatos had previously shown leftist (and friend of the late Hugo Chávez) president Rafael Correa’s hand-picked successor, Lenín Moreno, ahead by at least five percentage points.

There is no word from the elections commission on how soon official results will be made available, but Lasso tweeted in the last hour,

“Democracy won, FREEDOM won in Ecuador.”

As for Julian Assange,

UPDATE
10:30pm Moreno declared winner by CNE (National Election Council).

Lasso’s coalition press conference on Facebook Live 10:33pm Eastern time. The speaker claims that the CNE is reversing the counts, i.e., assigning Lasso’s votes to Moreno.

The CNE website is still down.

Reuters: Leftist claims victory in Ecuador, conservative asks for recount

The first runoff results were not made public for almost four days.

Listed on PowerLine‘s picks. Thank you!
Linked to by Doug Ross. Thank you!
Trending at BadBlue.

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Ecuador: Leftist mob attacks opposition’s presidential candidate VIDEO

A mob of Lenín Moreno supporters disrupted a soccer game Guillermo Lasso was attending, and attacked attacked Lasso and his family as they left the stadium.

Frances Martel reports,

A leftist mob, some have identified as paid agitators, violently attacked Ecuador’s center-right presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso and his family Tuesday night as they attempted to leave a soccer match in the nation’s capital, Quito.

The mob – reportedly armed with bottles, sticks, stones, and knives – jeered the presidential candidate and his family and injured police detail assigned to escort the family out of Quito’s Atahualpa Olympic Stadium where Ecuador’s national soccer team was facing Colombia’s for a spot in the 2018 FIFA World Cup. The crowd shouted, “out, banker!” at Lasso – whose pre-politics career was in finance – while making noise with vuvuzelas and hurling projectiles at the family.
. . .

“When we left the stadium, Alianza Paz [leftist party] militants began throwing bottles, sticks, and threatened us with knives,” Lasso said in a statement to the press. “All I could do was protect my wife with my body and receive the blows from the objects on my head.”

Lasso tweeted video of the incident,

The video clearly shows violent crowds pelting police officers and the Lasso family while hurling epithets at them. The younger Lasso accuses the government of socialist president Rafael Correa of hiring paid agitators to attack the family.

“My son Santiago narrates what we went through yesterday. The images speak for themselves. We don’t want this Ecuador for our children”

While the official surveys show Moreno ahead by five percentage points, 16 percent of their respondents said they were undecided.

Correa’s party has a lot riding on this election, as Mary O’Grady noted,

Mr. Moreno is Mr. Correa’s proxy in this election. A Moreno triumph is important if Mr. Correa is to be protected from the wide array of corruption investigations that his opponents are demanding.

Mr. Moreno would also act as a placeholder for Mr. Correa until the 2021 election, as Dmitry Medvedev was for Vladimir Putin from 2008-12. Legalized indefinite re-election would take care of the rest.

Correa vowed to annul the election results if Moreno doesn’t win next Sunday, through a maneuver by which the Ecuadorian Constitution allows him to dissolve the Executive and Judiciary branches and call for new elections.

In-country sources confirmed that OAS election monitors will not be allowed to be present at the electoral board headquarters.

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