Dear Editor,

On April 11, 2019 Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, was arrested at an Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The current president of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, who took office in 2017, said: “Ecuador has fulfilled its obligation in the framework of international law. On the other hand, Assange violated repeatedly clear-cut provisions of the conventions on diplomatic asylum of Havana and Caracas…”

Former Ecuadorian President Rafael Cornea stated on Twitter that his successor was the “greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history”.

There is a small chance that it might be connected to the fact that Ecuador got a US$4.2 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) Extended Fund Facility (EFF) — read loan — according to a document dated March 11, 2019 on the IMF’s website.

The IMF is Washington-based and US-dominated.

On Thursday, February 1, 2018 US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson suggested that Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro could be overthrown by a military uprising. He described Venezuela’s armed forces as a possible “agent of change”. He said, “In the history of Venezuela, and in fact the history in other Latin American and South American countries, often at times it is the military that handles that.”

On February 7, 2018, Tillerson visited Jamaica and met with Jamaica’s prime minister and foreign affairs minister.

On February 9, 2018 the Jamaica Peace Council stated, “The Jamaica Peace Council is deeply concerned about the inclusion of our country as part of the five-nation, six-day tour of Latin America and the Caribbean by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, which has been openly declared as a mission to consolidate support for regime change in Venezuela.”

Jamaica currently has an IMF agreement. It could be mere coincidence that both Ecuador and Jamaica are acting to support US interests, and both have IMF agreements.

Brian Ellis Plummer

brianplummer@yahoo.com