The Leftist Turns Right

Ecuadorian President Moreno wants to keep his country from becoming Venezuela

- Ethan Bronner and Stephan Kueffner

For WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the morning of April 11 arrived as most others had over the almost seven years he’d lived as a refugee at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Granted asylum there in 2012, he was hiding from British authorities after jumping bail to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations and to the U.S. for publishing secret government documents. Australian by birth, Assange had been granted Ecuadorian citizenship and was therefore officially an Ecuadorian sleeping on Ecuadorian soil. He was untouchable.

At 9:27 a.m., police entered the embassy and arrested him. The question most have asked since is whether Assange, viewed as either a free-speech icon or a Russian-sponsored nihilist, will be extradited first to Sweden or to the U.S., where he was recently indicted on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act. Less attention has been paid to the man who, half a world away, made the decision to expel him: Ecuador’s president, Lenín Moreno. Moreno’s shift on Assange was the latest but also the most dramatic signal that Ecuador, previously linked with the authoritarian Left in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, is moving in a new direction—and back into the good graces of the U.S. Following a trip to Ecuador last summer by Vice President Mike Pence, the first such visit since Richard Nixon’s in the late 1950s, other governments whose relations with Ecuador had been cool have joined in supporting Moreno. In recent months, Moreno’s government has hosted German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, South Korean Prime Minister Lee Nak-yeon, and U.K. Trade Minister George Hollingbery, who in May became the first British cabinet minister to visit the country in almost a decade.