Ecuador's President Rafael Correa sounds the bugle By Sean Burges (*) Is Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa really saying that we cannot trust the judicial systems in Britain and Sweden? By granting Julian Assange asylum, he has implicitly stated the British judicial process is flawed and that Sweden is a slavish servant of the US government. His argument would seem to be that there is a Western imperialist plot to squash and repress any who challenge the ruling political elite. Love him or loathe him, few who know Latin America would deny His argument would seem to be that there is a Western imperialist plot to squash and repress any who challenge the ruling political elite. Love him or loathe him, few who know Latin America would deny that Correa is a very bright man and canny political operator. It thus beggars belief that he thinks Sweden, a country with a long tradition of non-alignment, will bow to US pressure. More to the point, any move to extradite Assange from Sweden would have to go through the courts that consistently refuse to release records on the ownership of anonymous internet fileservers that North American security gurus see as major threats to the national interest. So what is Correa up to? Why interject his country into such a loaded issue in a way that doesn't so much tweak British and US noses as poke them directly in the eyes? One likely answer is that granting Assange asylum is a low cost strategy