Latin America rallies behind Julian Assange , by Meriem Laribi (Le Monde diplomatique

There’s one America that persecutes Julian Assange, another that supports him. When WikiLeaks made its explosive revelations of classified documents in 2010, Fidel Castro said that Assange had ‘morally brought [the US] to its knees’. He wrote that Assange was ‘demonstrating that the most powerful empire in history can be defied. I must congratulate the people from WikiLeaks on their bravery and courage.’

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez went further, saying he feared for the Australian-born whistle-blower’s life. Brazil’s president, Luis Inácio (Lula) da Silva, declared that Assange had ‘exposed a diplomacy that had seemed untouchable’, adding that ‘the guilty party here is not the person who disclosed [the diplomatic cables] but the person who wrote them’. Not to be outdone, Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, granted Assange diplomatic immunity in the country’s London embassy, where he stayed from 2012 to 2019.

Even today the majority of South American governments support Assange, who has been held in a high-security prison in London for nearly four years, awaiting a decision on his extradition to the US, where he could face a 175-year prison sentence. Diplomatic pressure has been mounting. While successive US administrations and their intelligence agencies have threatened Assange financially, physically and legally over the past 13 years, nine Latin American heads of state are demanding his release. They include Xiomara Castro (Honduras), Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Mexico), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua), Miguel Díaz-Canel (Cuba), Nicolás Maduro (Venezuela), Gustavo Petro (Colombia), Luis Arce (Bolivia), Alberto Fernández (Argentina) and Luis Inácio da Silva (Brazil).

Offer of protection

Lula has even suggested that Assange should be awarded the Nobel peace prize for having ‘shed light on the shady dealings of the CIA’ (RT, 6 January 2023), while Mexico’s Obrador has offered Assange asylum and protection (4) and has pleaded his case in an (…)

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