Ecuador

Since the inauguration of President Lucio Gutiérrez, relations between the press and government sources have deteriorated. In two months of the new government, there have been several incidents that foreshadow problems and obstacles to the free flow of information. No legislation has been changed either favoring or threatening press freedom. At the end of the election campaign in October of 2002, the president of the Electoral Court, citing the Law to Control Election Costs, said that the media should not accept advertising from one of the candidates because that campaign had passed its spending limit. Some media outlets obeyed the request; others did not. Some in the press consider the law unfair, because it only regulates formal spending by candidates, that is, advertising in the major media. It does not cover informal expenditures which form an important part of campaign budgets in Ecuador. The law does not have clear guidelines for determining the origin of money used to finance campaigns. It only concentrates on how much is spent, and where. In January the Children’s and Adolescent’s Code went into effect. It prohibits “distribution of publications, videos, recordings directed at children and adolescents that contain images, texts or messages that are inappropriate for their development.” The code also provides that the state “demands,” “requires,” and “prevents” the media’s handling of this information. The law specifies that “those texts, images, messages and programs that incite to violence, exploit fear or take advantage of the immaturity of boys, girls and adolescents to lead them to behavior that is harmful or dangerous to their health and personal security and everything that puts morality or modesty at risk are considered inappropriate for their development.” The law does not provide for sanctions for the media outlets or individuals that do not comply with it. It is likely that regulations will be issued, but they have not been made public. In February, the army confiscated from a journalist of the television program Día a Día a videocassette with images taken while covering the discovery of the wreckage of an airplane that crashed more than two decades ago in the mountains of Ecuador. For unknown reasons, the security forces prevented the press from going to the site. In March, Patricio Acosta, public administration secretary, confiscated a cassette that Katherine Mendoza of the daily Expreso of Guayaquil was using to record an interview. In addition, the reporter said, he threatened her and launched insults and accusations at her newspaper. The official was annoyed because the newspaper had published an article in which Transparency International said the perception of corruption could increase in the country because relatives of the president held important government positions. The president of the Solidarity Fund, a government agency, filed a criminal complaint against the television channel Teleamazonas in Quito. The official felt that the channel’s report called “The Government’s Tough Man Accused of Illicit Enrichment” had caused him harm. A prosecutor asked the director of the channel to hand over a cassette of the program, the names of journalists who made the report and those who had authorized its broadcast. The channel sent in a copy of the cassette, but refused to give the names of the reporters who had worked on the report. Teleamazonas executives reported that ever since the report ran, they had received calls from government officials expressing indignation and accusing the channel of trying to destabilize the government. Jorge Glas, the general manager of the channel Televisión Satelital, reported that the owners of the main television cable network of the country, TVCABLE, have prevented the broadcast of Televisión Satelital on their network for more than a year. The manager said that stockholders blocked his signal because of a program on which a legislator critically analyzed the case of Filanbanco, a bank that was closed during the banking crisis of recent years. There were reports that the stockholders, who also own TVCABLE, took depositors’ money, in a legal concept known as “bank embezzlement” in Ecuador. According to its representative, Televisión Satelital, exhausted every possible effort to have its signal broadcast without success. The Ecuadoran Publishers Association (AEDEP) is sponsoring legislation that would guarantee transparency and access to government information. The bill is currently before Congress.