Lawfare in times of coronavirus: Telling the truth in Ecuador is a cause for persecution

During the last week Ecuador has unfortunately become the headline of terrible news. In both, the large and small media, in their various versions account for the horror and nightmare that citizens have to live in the midst of the huge outbreak of the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus. But that is not all, because apart from the very poor handling of the crisis, the government has undertaken the task to go against all those who dare to denounce this by the uploading of videos to social networks where they show the whole world the horror that is now being lived in different Ecuadorian cities.

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Hundreds of corpses give evidence of the terror that the citizens of Guayaquil have to live, in the same city in which President Lenín Moreno took refuge, when in October 2019 the people in anger took to the streets to claim for their rights after a series of neoliberal measures were  agreed by the head of state with the International Monetary Fund and the Ecuadorian business oligarchy.

A truth made of corpses is seen and smelled in the streets, in the houses and in the hospitals of Guayaquil, a truth that at the same time makes birds of prey not only to circle the city to satisfy their animal instinct, but are also seen walking on the ground following the pestilence to devour it.

Images in photos and videos certify the apocalyptic, grim and dantesque scene that has made Ecuadorians themselves go to digital media and social networks as the only way to express what they are witnessing and the suffering that overflows them and how uncontrolled the pandemic has become. Guayaquil, a situation that is not only biased by the Morenista regime but also the media that is partial and defends the regime, they have decided not to report and even join the President’s position of saying that it all lies, all false and manipulated news, created by alleged opposition information laboratories that intend to overthrow him.

But the truth of Guayaquil is shouted not only by the presence of corpses and birds of prey, it is also denounced by nursing personnel, doctors, journalists with ethics, local administrative, health and police authorities, and even the massive international media like the BBC, CNN, DW, The Washington Post, The New York Times, amongst others, who have decided to show what is happening.

And this is that Guayaquil is a city that is being beaten over by COVID-19, the same virus that weeks before destroyed Italy and Spain, which today has the United States as the epicenter of the outbreak; as well as the vast majority of the planet that now sees how – due to the negligence and mismanagement of the Lenin Moreno government – Ecuador seems to become a country that is on its way to the worst health crisis in its history.

The contagion figures in Ecuador have maintained an exponential curve since the first case was detected on February 29.

Despite calls from the World Health Organization (WHO) for countries to dictate preventive measures of collective quarantine and social distancing, the Moreno regime refused to apply them until the pandemic had already become uncontrolled in the country.

On March 21, the then Minister of Health of Ecuador, Catalina Andramuño, presented her resignation in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, alleging that the imposition of officials who have no knowledge of public health was unacceptable.

Another reason for his resignation was the difficulty of facing reality in the crisis situation generated in the country by COVID-19, since she denounced that facing a health emergency without economic resources is «complicated», since almost a month after the detection of the first contagion, the health portfolio had not received «any budget allocation by the competent authority, for the management of the emergency.»

In fact, after Andramuño’s resignation, Lenín Moreno himself gave statements to report on the provision for prevention teams, for the nursing and medical staff that face the pandemic which from the first contagion had no enough supplies to attend the sanitary emergency.

Persecution against freedom of expression in Ecuador

The whole situation is denounced by independent journalists who take advantage of digital platforms such as Twitter, to show the reality of the country that the Government is not willing to admit or doesn’t want it to be shown.

These journalists, politicians and users of this platform among other social networks, such as Facebook, Whatsaap, Telegram, among others who work to supply information on the pandemic that is silenced by the traditional mass media, they have become political and judicial targets of the Lenin Moreno regime, that tries to accuse them of media terrorism, of spreading false information, and even branding them as being worse than the virus itself that killed hundreds of Ecuadorians.

But this position of Moreno, of attacking and persecuting those who oppose him, of trying to silence them at any cost, and of labelling them as liars and slanderers is not something new, because in his presidency he already has a clear history of how to act with those who confront him with the truth and the facts.

First was the coup and betrayal against the people who elected him, who in their grand majority thought that he would give continuity to the Citizen Revolution. In fact, he achieved his victory led by hand – throughout the electoral campaign – by his predecessor Rafael Correa.

Once he assumes power, he begins to show his true colours, the pacts worked under the blanket with the traditional Ecuadorian conservative oligarchy come to light and in that same order of things came the information bias accompanied by the closure of fundamental media means to combat the media siege.

The clearest example of the pact reached with the powerful economic sectors that led Ecuador to misery and inequality, was seen when the now president, Lenín Moreno, former vice president of Correa, openly linked himself with the radical right and after agreeing what, how and with whom he was going to administer the country, he began to curtail the rights to freedom of the press, to free opinion and thus ordered the direct closure of the official ANDES news agency, a medium created during the Correismo that spread what the Traditional right wing media has never been willing to inform.

ANDES disappeared with the stroke of a pen, a slamming door that hit freedom of expression and the fundamental right of Ecuadorians to be free and properly informed. That’s where it all started.

Journalists in Ecuador began to be persecuted and judicialized, with the complicity of a government that prefers and agrees to the obedient and biased stance of the traditional media that follows with its vast dissemination network and with new tools for the mass proliferation of messages such as social networks, web portals and with them the spread of bias or false news, better known as «Fake News».

Nurses face alone against coronavirus

«There are no doctors, that’s the truth, we are not lying, and the nurses always doing their jobs, the others flew. There are no doctors, we are alone, “allege a group of nurses who attend the Children’s Hospital of Guayaquil.

The health worker adds that in the hospital centers they are full of coronavirus patients and in that same way the spaces are crowded also by the corpses that die because of the few resources they have to attend and treat them in the midst of the pandemic.

A nurse who was infected with COVID-19, and in critical condition with oxygen, denounced that since March 16 she has symptoms and nobody has done anything to help her, except her own colleagues.

“I have been like this since March 16, sick. I went to the public hospital and they only gave me paracetamol and left me waiting, then I went to another place and they told me that everything was perfect, I have gone to private institutions and they do not treat me either. Now I am on oxygen, after I had a period of apnea, I had to come to the hospital to get oxygen. What are they waiting for, for me to die? Well, if God wants me to die, I will have to die”.

«People are hypocritical,» says the nurse, referring to the country’s authorities, «we are not here for hypocrisy, they have to respect us, consider us, because that is why we are here, caring for the patient, but nobody cares for us , nobody cares. We are surrounded by hypocrites. «

In Ecuador the figures do not lie

Ecuador is one of the countries with the highest average contagion rate in the world, around 150 people for every million inhabitants, a figure that even exceeds the indicator of infections in the world, which stands at 125 for every million inhabitants.

On Saturday, April 4, the official figures from Ecuador indicated that the infections reached over 3,465 people and the number of deaths reached 172. But, that data does not seem to relate with the critical reality of Guayaquil, where the police authorities, the local administration, the families and the medical personnel of the hospitals tell a totally different story, where the dead are piled by the dozen and thrown into containers; others are abandoned on the streets or die and many other corpses remain inside the homes rotting.

Unofficially only in Guayaquil, the death toll could rise to over 500 people. This is the type of information that the Moreno government does not like and dismisses as false, manipulated, lying and seeking political ends.

However, the truth is that even Moreno himself recently admitted that the figures in Ecuador do not reflect the sad reality, and therefore they should be revised. But those who are dedicated to reporting what is happening in the Andean country, will not stop being persecuted and classified as computer assassins, because telling the truth in Ecuador is a matter of political and judicial persecution.

One of these independent journalists, classified by the Moreno regime as a computer hitman, liar, leader of the Correísmo information networks, among other adjectives that try to disqualify his work, is Patricio Mery Bell, a reporter with a long history in Latin American countries such as Chile. , Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, who currently lives in Europe.

In his career Mery Bell has written three books, directed a documentary, and has also worked as a political consultant. His experience has led him to be criminalized and attacked for his critical opinions, for denouncing the corruption of Chile, Peru and Ecuador, but in the Ecuadorian case, his opinions are more heard on social networks because he has become a communicational reference that people follow against the bias of the Ecuadorian media.

All this has made Mery Bell a political target of the Lenin Moreno government, and his government attempt to silence him represents an attack on press freedom.

Patricio Mery Bell, a political target in Ecuador

Several publications in the media allied to the Moreno regime are already opening a kind of file against this Chilean journalist, this seeks to justify, through unfounded reports, without evidence and totally biased, the creation of a file or report that allows the Ecuadorian Prosecutor’s Office to take this as evidence to mount a judicial and political persecution against him.

The construction of this scenario, has the special work of digital portals, all media defenders of Moreno, such as: 4pelagatos, Code Glass and Plan V, who have served as «sources» that publish alleged «investigation» reports, based on alleged «intelligence reports» that have served to mount prosecution files against former President Rafael Correa; former Vice President Jorge Glas; and that now, by all accounts, go against Mery Bell, among other political and social activists who spread real and accurate information that is not liked by Moreno.

In an interview with El Ciudadano, Mery Bell agreed to narrate the media plot that runs against him and how the Moreno regime seeks to silence him by telling the truth about what is happening in Ecuador and what the people are suffering.

«They seek to attack an independent journalist with a recognized track record in order to silence his right to express himself, to inform, and to keep Latin American audiences with truthful and verified information that meets the high levels of investigative methodology that should have any type of journalistic or communicational work,”says Mery Bell.

In the case of the Chilean journalist, there is already a pre-existing  conflict with the Government, when the Minister of the Presidency, Juan Sebastián Roldán, publicly threatened him, through Twitter, for denouncing the corruption of the Government.

Mery Bell denounced a case involving a nephew of the Chancellor, who went to the United States with $ 250,000 that he could not declare, which is supposed to be bribery  paid by companies linked to the Presidency of Lenín Moreno. For this reason, there is a revenge against him, due to the repeated allegations  for corruption and crimes that involve the current government, where the chancellor Pablo Celi, and senior leaders such as Juan Sebastián Roldán, and their relatives with some ministers for the scandalous «Petro Ecuador – Miami» case.

In addition, Mery Bell has at least two reports against him from the Code Glass portal, others carried out by 4pelagatos and another by Plan V media, that in turn are republished among themselves and which are then taken by the mainstream traditional media, who are in charge of spreading in mass media the alleged investigations.

«They denounce a supposed international network of social media that plans to destabilize the Ecuadorian Government, which is absolutely false, because it is only exercising freedom of expression, the right to inform, the right to political opinion, as in the case of former President Rafael Correa and other leaders, to denounce the mismanagement of COVID-19 by the Lenin Moreno government, «emphasizes Mery Bell.

The journalist also warns that these digital media are developing another third report where they will accuse people close to former President Rafael Correa, the journalist Patricio Mery Bell and political consultant Amaury Chamorro, among others, of having political relations with the indigenous sector of the CONAIE, a movement that starred in the mobilizations in October 2019 and that as a result of the police repression unleashed by the Moreno regime, left 12 dead and at least 1,200 injured.

With this report, they intend to link them to an alleged destabilization plan organized by Rafael Correa, based on an interview that Mery Bell does with Leonidas Iza Salazar, indigenous leader, for the newspaper El Ciudadano, where they hold a public conversation, broadcasted live by this media mean to publicize the positions of the indigenous movement.

He adds that based on the unfounded reports against Mery Bell, the Ecuadorian justice, that Moreno controls, is going to makeup an intelligence report where the Chilean journalist allegedly would have offered financing to these indigenous groups to radicalize the protests against the Lenin Moreno government.

«This is going to be made up from lies and false intelligence reports that seek once again to generate judicial cases against people who have a critical, libertarian, democratic and more pluralistic vision of information. What Lenín Moreno is doing is criminalizing journalism, freedom of expression and preventing information further of what he controls from being known by the Ecuadorian public, «he warned.

Truth saves lives, lies kill people

Mery Bell maintains that what happens in Ecuador at this juncture can be understood with a simple phrase:  “truth saves lives, lies kill people»

For Mery Bell, using the necessary means to spread the truth in the midst of the pandemic is essential to help save the lives of millions of innocent people who are at the expense of certain decisions or the omissions and errors of their rulers. What in Ecuador has become evident, since the inaction of a government that has caused thousands to end up infected and hundreds of others to have died, when such a tragedy that now wants to be silenced and hidden could of been avoided.

«What we are doing is reporting on the serious situation in Guayaquil. The BBC, The New York Times, the German information agency are saying what the Lenin Moreno government does not want you to know, that you are at risk, that your life is in danger. The lie kills people, the truth: saves, cares, protects and also allows you to prevent what is happening with the COVID-19 virus, which is a global pandemic, «he stressed.

«The time has come for the fight between the truth and the lies», warns Mery Bell and adds: «We have to continue doing our job, informing to save your life, to take care of yourself and so that you know that you are in danger and that you are at risk. It is not about generating unnecessary alert campaigns, it is the moment to act and it is the moment that you demand transparency and truth”.

«Contrast the sources, recognise that here is a campaign to criminalize journalism, once again Lenín Moreno wants to cover up his shortcomings with smokescreen campaigns, political marketing, to stop the truth, but the truth is unstoppable. They will not be able to stop us, neither with prison nor with death, because we will continue forward, until you are informed, until you defend your rights, wake up to defend your life. The truth heals and cares for you, lies kill people. ”

Mery Bell recalls that the fight between the truth and lies during the Moreno regime has precedents such as the attack on freedom of expression which meant the surrender of the editor of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, which also broke with the regulations of international diplomacy, the right to asylum and the right to refugee were violated, to be handed over to the English courts on the assumption that he would not be extradited to the United State, all this meant international law was not respected.

«Lenín Moreno handed over Julian Assange, violating freedom of expression and becoming an enemy of international journalism. Then he jails Free Software activist Ola Bini accused of being a Russian hacker, when in real life he has Swedish nationality making him spend time in jail for having a relationship with Assange. ”

«Several journalists were also put in prison for the mere fact of having worked in the Government of Rafael Correa, such as Carlos Bravo, who was a member of the Ministry of Communication,» he added.

Lenín Moreno did nothing to avoid the pandemic

Mery Bell denounces that the Government of Lenín Moreno had enough time to prepare for this pandemic as other countries such as Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, and others.

«Based on the situation experienced in Asia and Europe, the Government was asked to apply safeguard measures for people such as total isolation, the purchase of mass tests, to have the ability to care for doctors to face what was coming, but the government turned a deaf ear,”he denounces.

At the time of the first cases in Ecuador, no measures were taken, the Chilean journalist stresses, a complaint that has also been highlighted by large communication networks based on complaints from the health sector.

«This caused the virus to proliferate massively, mainly in the city of Guayaquil, where terrible images emerge. We as journalists began to communicate and spread these truths that were systematically denied by the Government, but until international media such as the BBC, CNN, and others, which are not left-wing media but right-wing oligopolistic companies, began to show the bodies in the streets, people dying outside hospitals, lack of medical protection for health personnel and poor conditions to face the outbreak. «

The Government, he explains, instead of taking actions to prevent the proliferation of the virus, began to attack a sector of journalists and used a media portal called the Glass Code, that together with Plan V and 4pelagatos media are the hands of the secret services of United States intelligence within Ecuador.

«What is the modus operandi? They put together false intelligence reports and begin to generate judicial cases that are taken by the Prosecutor, Diana Salazar, and from these «intelligence» reports, replicated by the press without any type of check, or investigation methodology, they put together court cases to start attacking certain political groups. ”

«The serious thing is that today not only is a political group being attacked, but they are also attacking a group of independent journalists, such as Amaury Chamorro, who is an international political consultant and other leaders and influencers on social networks and in the media, with a long history and thus attacking freedom of expression. «

The Moreno regime, according to Mery Bell, seeks to configure a crime against the internal security of the State and that of illicit association, for supposedly having an international coordination to denounce the truth of what was happening in Ecuador about the COVID-19 pandemic. , among the facts were, the poor sanitary management and the economic problems that Ecuador was having for paying the debt of the International Monetary Fund of 328 million dollars, even when the IMF itself had asked that this debt not be paid, leaving the country without resources to face neither the economic crisis nor the sanitary problems caused by the coronavirus.

«What the government of Lenín Moreno does is instead of worrying about working for the people, caring, protecting, and  making prevention plans in favour of people, it goes out to attack independent journalists and build judicial cases with a mechanism that it has already used three times, first it in the case of the Arroz Verde bribery, with the same Glass Code media portal, that nobody knows how and who finances it, nobody knows if the journalists who work there are really journalists, there is no sources check, its a way of presenting the news in a biased and malicious way, resorting to injury and slander, based on alleged intelligence reports, for which public resources are used, that should really be used, for example, to face the COVID19 crisis, or the food crisis, or the economic crisis that is going to come to Ecuador ”.

The lawfare against the truth

In this sense, Mery Bell warns that what is happening in the country «is a coercion, a torn struggle against freedom of expression and political participation, which goes against international treaties, persecuting journalists, politicians, citizens, social media activists, criminalizing political opinion and the participation also freedom of expression.

«It is a modus operandi that has been applied with the practice of lawfare, by using low-credibility news portals such as the Glass Code, 4pelagatos and Plan V, so that later they can be taken as sources by larger media who validate the information, and then the Prosecutor Diana Salazar take this journalistic information, supposedly based on intelligence information, to start blaming certain political figures and in this case journalists, «he points out.

«This is a persecution, it is a journalistic, judicial and communication attack and it is nothing more than a witch hunt against certain sectors of the population that, paradoxically, journalists reporting so that people can save their lives, because in Ecuador there is a latent risk of losing life due to poor management by the Government, «he adds.

Mery Bell maintains that in the midst of this persecution and with the health crisis overwhelming, the only one who should be prosecuted is Lenín Moreno, for “committing the crime of wrongful death, because he did not take the appropriate measures to make people save their lives, and by remaining in this error it would constitute the crime of homicide ”.

“That should be investigated by lawyers and experts in international law. But from a communicational and political point of view, here is a persecution in which intelligence services are used, intelligence reports that are falsified to build judicial files and records, where people such as Cristian Zurita, Fernando Villavicencio and Arturo Torres, journalists who belong to these before mentioned media portals and who have confessed to their relationship with the FBI, the CIA and the American embassy”.

«They are, as far as we know of their links to construct stories, the executors of State terrorism against freedom of expression, entrepreneurs and intelligence services to attack independent journalists this is the criminal association made up by Lenín Moreno.»

Genocide by negligence and media fence

José Ariza, member of the “Red de Psicólogos Nuestroamericanos” and of the “Red de Solidaridad entre los Pueblos” denounced that unfortunately Ecuador, in recent days, has become “an example of the worst scenarios and what not to do”.

«The international media, all of them, show images that no Ecuadorian media has shown, there is an internal media fence to cover ineptitude and negligence of this Government, of the coward and hiding  Moreno, who at this moment should already be accused of genocide for negligence.»

Adds Ariza that the government team «is worse plague than the virus, the government minister, María Paula Romo, believes that you can solve everything  as in the protests and strikes of last October, with bullets and threats, her clumsy arrogance in the control of the situation, are achieving disobedience in all sectors and governability can can reach really catastrophic levels ”.

«The government does not have a coherent plan to contain the almost 100 daily deaths, they are already preparing the militarization and the declaration of a national state of shock to prevent freedom of information, to persecute the opponents, especially the correistas,» he warns.

Ariza notes that in the face of the death of citizens, “the only thing that this government can think of is to start selling all the most profitable assets, such as the energy company, the telecommunications company, the Banco del Pacífico, at coronavirus prices., to pay the holders of the public debt, many of them, Ecuadorians, but many of those people don’t give a damn about the hundreds of dead (some of them cremated) thrown in the streets.”

For Ariza  at the current moment Ecuador is “a failed state, even before the humanitarian crisis, because the rights and will of the people under the neoliberal views are not important. Everything is collapsed, the health system, mobility control, not even the police phone number 101, nor the medical emergency phone number 171, people wait hours for urgent care. Corpses spend several days in their rooms without picking up, there is extreme overcrowding, many people sleep in one room and they have to take their dead to the streets. Many family members who are sick also stay on the street and watch them die from the outside. ”

All this, denounces Ariza, generates social stress, collective hysteria and people’s mental health is deteriorating, also plagued by extreme poverty in which the majority of people live, who earn their livelihood by working informally on the street.

“The vast majority of the people of Guayaquil live in neighbourhoods without water, without sewerage, with mud streets, single-space houses for a whole family, where they have to put their dead grandfather on the street and other families decide to pour gasoline and burn it for fear of contagion. That is the misery in which millions of citizens live, and they are being blamed for poverty they live in. The national government avoids assuming its responsibility and ends up hiding the figures. Society is without leadership, «emphasizes Ariza.