By omitting crucial information about the recent presidential election in Ecuador, such as how the leftist front-runner Andrés Arauz has had to overcome countless obstacles in order to participate, the US media once again contribute to the effort to undermine a free and fair election, says media analyst and Ecuador specialist Joe Emersberger.

Transcript

Greg Wilpert

Welcome to theAnalysis.news, I'm your guest host, Greg Wilpert.

On Sunday, February 7th, Equador held a presidential election in which leftist candidate Andrés Arauz led the election result with 33 percent of the vote, Arauz is the standard-bearer of the Citizens' Revolution movement that former leftist President Rafael Correa launched in 2007. Arauz's nearest challenger was the conservative banker and one of Ecuador's wealthiest individuals, Guillermo Lasso, who won about 20 percent of the vote, and surprisingly, the third candidate was Yaku Pérez of the Pachakutik indigenous party, which also nearly got 20 percent of the vote.

Now it looks like there will be a runoff election between Arauz and Lasso on April 11th. I say that it looks that way because there have been several concerted efforts, including from international actors, to derail the runoff election in order to prevent Arauz from winning the presidency in April. Joining me now to discuss the situation in Ecuador is Joe Emersberger. Joe writes regularly on Latin America, particularly on Ecuador and Venezuela, for a wide variety of outlets such as Counterpuncher, FAIR, and ZNet, among others.

Thanks for joining me today, Joe.

Joe Emersberger

Thanks, I appreciate you having me.

Greg Wilpert

So I should add that we both have a bit of a history with regard to Ecuador. I lived there for nearly five years from 2014 to 2018 while I was working first for Telesur English and then for The Real News Network, and you have a family background in Ecuador, even though you're Canadian, both your wife and your mom are Ecuadorian, right?

Joe Emersberger

Yes. I've been back and forth from Ecuador all my life since I was a little boy.

Greg Wilpert

So I want to start with this article that you recently published for the media watch group FAIR, where you pointed out many of the distortions in the U.S. media with regard to Ecuador. So let's start with how they – that is the U.S. media – have tended to characterize the presidencies of Rafael Correa and his successor, the current president in Lenín Moreno. That is first. How would you say are the two usually depicted and what is wrong with their depiction?

Joe Emersberger

OK, well, Correa, I should say, was depicted basically as authoritarian, and he especially got rapped for having a poor record on press freedom because he had a very contentious relationship with the press, that's certainly true, but he was depicted as basically clamping down on press freedom, and that Ecuador was a very dangerous or difficult place to be critical of Correa's government, which was a total falsehood. Mind you, there are things that you could criticize about Correa's government along that lines, which is the fact the libels part of the criminal code, things like that.

Like any country, there are definitely things you could criticize, but I would say just the press that Correa got was very bad. Private media was constantly against him and he answered back through the public media, and there was basically an ongoing battle going on. What happened when Moreno won the presidency in 2017,