Whose Rights? Freedom-of-Expression Critiques of Ecuadorian Media Democratization

Freedom of Expression, Liberalism, and Socialism for the Twenty-First Century

Classically liberal conceptions of freedom of expression have rested on the principle of negative liberty, according to which speech, religion, association, and so on, are innate human capacities, unalterable and inalienable rights that must not be infringed upon. Positive liberty, by contrast, demands attention to the means by which individuals are able to fulfill their aims in the fields of speech, religion, association, or whatever else they do if they are to be considered truly free. The contentious nature of arguments for positive liberty, with their inevitable implication of economic rights, has meant that broadest agreement on the right to freedom of expression has historically been reached in the sense implied by negative liberty.

An eminent contemporary example of free expression conceived in this sense is the work of Michael Schudson. He opens Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press (2008: 2) with a citation from that giant of postwar liberal theory, Hannah Arendt, who argued, “The political realm has recognized . . . that it has a stake in men and institutions over which it has no power” (1968: 261). Here Schudson situates freedom of expression in the context of “this battle between politics and truth” (2008: 1), revealing the harmony between the notion of a God-given capacity for individual reason (and therefore free will) and the conceptualization of freedom in terms of negative liberty, according to which the freedom of the a priori rational individual could only be threatened by some external force. This force is politics (also manifested as the state), the supposed opponent truth, which is relegated in such a schema to the territory reserved for the masses inside Plato’s Cave. Such a timocratic vision of freedom of expression, originally formulated in the days of the liberalism of white male property owners (e.g., Quiggin, 2015), finds its archetypical actor in the man “of independent means.” This formula necessarily clashes with other views in which the means for realizing freedoms are claimed not as private property but as the patrimony of society as a whole and subject to democratic accords.

However, other liberal theorists of free expression pay more attention to the means by which this freedom is realized and, in particular, the danger of a small minority’s reserving the right to free expression—and therefore the right to speak for the whole of society—for itself. Free expression is still typically framed in terms of negative liberty, but heed is also paid to economic inequality as a threat to the majority’s capacity for free expression. Thomas Gibbons is one theorist who focuses on the imperative that the media, as a surrogate for free expression, be free from external impositions: “The goals of truth and participation in a democracy can best be achieved when communication is free from domination by particular concentrations of power.” For Gibbons (1998: 36) the natural conclusion then is “that ownership and influence of the media should be distanced from the State.” He goes on, however, to acknowledge that entry barriers in the media industry may mean that media ownership is not dispersed and “the media themselves may become a seat of extra-constitutional power instead of enhancing democratic government” (38). Censorship is here conceptualized as just as likely to originate in corporations’ monopoly market position as in politics and the state.

Greater diversity of opinion arises when debate moves on to the steps necessary to resolve such limitations upon free expression. Gibbons (1998: 38) quite conservatively advocates “regulation to ensure a diversity of media sources.” One is left without a clear impression of what substantive set of circumstances could generate media diversity; it is recommended instead that regulation be passed against lack of diversity. Larry Alexander (2013: 709) takes a comparable stance, recognizing that “laws that seem quite removed from speech concerns . . . have enormous message effects. For they together affect the distribution of resources.” He seems unwilling, however, to extend this point toward a conclusion that would entail consideration of economic democracy or economic rights.

John Keane (1991: 89) presents an exemplary case of recognizing limitations on freedom of expression in the sense of both positive and negative liberty. He argues that economic realities restrict freedom of expression by “shifting the prevailing definition of information from that of a public good to that of a privately appropriable commodity.” The difference between liberal and left-populist theory practically vanishes at this point; we find ourselves in precisely the terrain of the political problematic sketched by Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa in the epigraph. As we shall see, this is precisely the ground upon which human rights organizations clash with contemporary theorists of freedom of expression, with the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) arguing that “Ecuador’s plan to make communications a public service” is a “threat to free press” reminiscent of “the way dictators such as Stalin and Hitler used the press as a propaganda tool” (Otis, 2015). In this extreme version of liberalism, any state consideration of the social good becomes indistinguishable from totalitarianism.

As a consequence of understanding information as a public good, Keane (1991: 164) goes on to advocate a democratic restructuring of the media, “a new constitutional settlement, state regulation and restriction of private media markets and the development of a plurality of non-market, non-state communication systems.” In a similar vein, Vincenzo Zeno-Zencovich (2008: 8) argues that undue emphasis has historically been placed on “freedom of the press” as opposed to “freedom to print,” a point that clearly redirects freedom-of-expression theory toward the perspective of positive liberty. Zeno-Zencovich too sees the solution in a renegotiation of the social contract with respect to the role of the media: “Affirming the freedom of the press, as a constitutionally privileged regime for business engaged in mass communication, thus entails a consideration of what the quid pro quo of that freedom might be” (9). Both of these writers see freedom of expression not simply as a product of the absence of state involvement but as a human potential that depends upon favorable conditions to thrive.

In fact, the more extensive liberal treatments conform less to the classical conceptualization of freedom from state censorship and evolve into considerations of what Silvio Waisbord (2012) calls “media democracy”—the place of media in democracy, bringing discussion of structural conditions and economic rights to the center of the analysis. In fact, one could argue that the primary flaw in Waisbord’s illuminating typology of populist and liberal views on the media-in-democracy question is the lack of credit it gives to the depth of “the model represented by the Anglo-American tradition of the liberal press” (2012: 506). This short review of the liberal literature on freedom of expression demonstrates that many of the problems raised and solutions proposed by contemporary “populist” and left-wing leaders in Latin America are the same ones explored and supported in the more thorough treatments of the topic by liberal scholars.

This seeming paradox in definitions can be resolved by accepting that, since the instatement of neoliberal hegemony over three decades ago, the political spectrum has shifted in such a way that the supposedly radically left socialism for the twenty-first century is in many respects the equivalent of twentieth-century Rawlsian social democracy. The apparent difference is often a matter of rhetoric. As an example Waisbord (2011: 101) cites Latin American populist leaders’ “exaltation of ‘the people’ against ‘the oligarchy,’” but he proceeds to note that with regard to the media such a representation is essentially accurate because “without exceptions, media systems in the region have been dominated by private corporations with extensive interests in media and key industries (e.g., banking, mining, agriculture).” This “populist” trait, then, is precisely equivalent to the liberal concern with concentration of media ownership. This is a pattern that we shall see continually in the next section, where critiques of the state of free expression under a left-populist government avoid the complexities of the issue of freedom of expression and rely instead on a distaste for Latin American political rhetoric and invocations of caudillo clichés. Here we encounter the subtle colonial implication that no one understands democracy and other such trappings of modern civilization quite like the leaders and intellectuals in North Atlantic centers of power.

The Early-Modern Liberalism of Human Rights Critiques

The critique of the Eurocentrism of current expressions of human rights and the desirability of relatively opaque nongovernmental organizations’ acting as global rights watchdogs are important debates. If, however, for the purposes of this article we assume that human rights organizations continue to pursue their foundational project of advancing liberal values throughout the world, then these organizations should at least found their critiques on the political-philosophical principles of mainstream liberalism as understood by contemporary theorists. This section will discuss Ecuadorian media reform and human rights organizations’ criticisms of it in light of the previous review of the literature on freedom of expression. Human rights reports have been taken from HRW and the CPJ.

International interest in the state of freedom of expression in Ecuador peaked at the beginning of the Assange affair and continued as the Snowden revelations coincided with the passage of the Ecuadorian Media Law in June 2013. The law had a long history. Its immediate impetus came from the commitment in the 2008 Constitution to pass a media law that would guarantee the right to “free, intercultural, inclusive, diverse, and participatory media” (Article 16.1), to “access under equality of conditions to the frequencies of the radio-electric spectrum” (Article 16.3), and to information that is “truthful, verified, timely, contextualized, plural, and uncensored” (Article 18). The constitution also included a ban on finance and media companies’ holding interests in companies outside their own sectors (Article 312), with a two-year grace period for major shareholders in banking to sell their interests in media companies (29th Transitional Provision). Following the defiance of major figures in Ecuadorian finance (Checa-Godoy, 2012: 141–142), a 2011 plebiscite confirmed a majority’s insistence on this provision as well as on the enactment of new media legislation as promised in the constitution. Nonetheless, it was not until the sweeping electoral victory of February 2013 that Alianza País (AP), the party of President Rafael Correa, was able to pass a law to reform the media.

Ecuador’s constitutional and legislative framework clearly drew inspiration from preceding reforms in the region. In Argentina the 2009 Audiovisual Communication Services Law mandated that one-third of the radio spectrum be dedicated to nonprofit community media (Article 89), a provision that matched Uruguay’s 2007 Community Radio Broadcasting Services Law (Article 5; see Tabra, 2013) as well as Bolivia’s 2011 General Law of Telecommunications, which apportions 17 percent of the spectrum to indigenous media and another 17 percent to the “community social sector” (IFEX-ANP, 2011). Venezuela, meanwhile, has seen an explosion of growth in the community media sector, with 1,200 outlets in operation as of 2013 thanks to a combination of legislative and financial state mechanisms (Gómez and Ramos-Martín, 2014: 495).

In the same vein, the Ecuadorian law’s central premise was the reallocation of the radio and television spectrum to public and community media. Where previously the corporate sector had dominated the spectrum, the allocation was now to be one-third private, one-third public, and one-third community media (Article 106). This measure was framed by “the principle of affirmative action,” which according to Article 11 requires “measures of public policy whose objective is to improve the conditions for the access to and exercise of rights to communication of those groups that are rightly considered in a situation of real inequality with respect to the majority of the population.” Clearly, then, the legislation reflects the positive-liberty imperative to consider “access to and exercise of rights” rather than simply outlawing infringement of those rights. This link between positive liberty and community media rights was emphasized by María Pía Matta (2013: 161–162), director of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters, at a symposium in Quito in September 2013. She argued that the state can impose “positive obligations” as well as “negative obligations” in the cause of “overcoming the deficit of participatory democracy” represented by a lack of diversity in media ownership. Similarly, the director of the publicly owned newspaper El Telégrafo commented, “That is what laws are for: not just to regulate what exists but to advance what is absent” (La Línea de Fuego, 2012).

At the same time, it is worth recognizing that positive liberty is not the only discourse employed in the service of media democratization and that Ecuador’s media reform is part of a longer-standing demand to decolonize Ecuadorian society. ² Community radio was a central demand of indigenous sectors in campaigns for bilingual education beginning in the 1960s, a project generally implemented by indigenous federations in concert with the Catholic Church (Moya, 1987: 394), which maintains a strong presence in Ecuador’s nonprofit community sector to this day (IPP, n.d.: 11–15). Ricardo Ulcuango (2008), former president of the Kichwa federation ECUARUNARI and current Ecuadorian ambassador to Bolivia, speaks of the importance of community media both in “supporting the great process of recovery of cultural identity” and in “constructing alternative communication that responds to the impoverished peoples that have been exploited throughout the colonial period.” In this sense, the campaign for media democratization can be considered both class-motivated (antioligarchical) and culturally and historically inspired (anticolonial). Both aspects materialized in the landmark occupation by indigenous protesters of the TV and radio antennae belonging to private media companies on Mount Pilisurco in Tungurahua during the 1999 banking crisis (ICCI, 1999).

Ecuadorian media reform can therefore be said to respond to domestic social movements, regional-level political shifts, and the democratic mandate of its government. The need for the law was very clear. At the time of the 2008 Constitution, according to an audit carried out in conformity with constitutional provisions, just eight families controlled the largest private media outlets in the country (Comisión de Auditoría, 2009: 257) and the commercial sector controlled more than 90 percent of radio and television frequencies (216). By contrast, as of 2015 only 4 percent of the country’s 1,149 registered media outlets were being operated by community organizations. A state agency is managing a program of training and loans for community media with the goal of increasing the number of outlets in operation by 45 annually by providing financial, legal, and organizational assistance (Barriga, 2015).

This aspect of the law was widely praised by Ecuadorian civil society. Pedro de la Cruz, the historic leader of the National Federation of Peasant, Indigenous, and Black Organizations and now an AP congressman, called on his fellow indigenous members of Congress to vote in favor of the law, citing the provisions for community media. Humberto Cholango, then president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, raised concerns about the potential for presidential abuse of the law but was broadly supportive (Cholango, 2014) and cited the redistribution of frequencies when he called on the indigenous party Pachakutik to vote yes on it (El Tiempo, June 14, 2013). ECUARUNARI (2012) was more guarded: “When it is said that 34 percent will be for community media, we ask ourselves who they’ll hand this to. Perhaps it will only be to their people and not to the [indigenous] peoples and nationalities of which we are the true representatives.” Others, such as the director of the International Center for Advanced Studies in Communication for Latin America, criticized the slow implementation of the law and its “technocratic” aspects, including the requirements for community media to provide business plans and market research (Sputnik, 2015).

Nonetheless, the great majority of the damning commentary on the law within Ecuador originated not from civil society and social movements but from the corporate media themselves. In an editorial, the independent news site La Línea de Fuego (2012) described the private media’s opposition to the law as “an unprecedented crusade in the country’s media history.” In comparing the private media’s hostility to the generalized support for the Media Law on the part of civil society and the public sector, one begins to see why Hernán Reyes (2014: 116) described the situation as “a classic case of a dispute for hegemony.” Despite the mobilization of a discourse of universal rights in opposition to the law, the debate appeared to be fueled by the competition that would inevitably surround efforts to found a new democratic accord on the place of the media in society.

In the reporting of HRW and the CPJ, this historical and political context was strikingly absent. Article 106—the redistribution of frequencies—was not mentioned. In fact, the CPJ denied the need to diversify media ownership. Its senior program coordinator for the Americas wrote that “today’s media landscape [in Ecuador] is generally diverse and vibrant, CPJ research shows. . . . Hundreds of radio stations operate around the country, among them numerous community and indigenous broadcasters in provincial regions” (Lauría, 2011). A 2010 audit put the number of community outlets at just 0.2 percent of the total for radio and 0 for television (UNESCO, 2011: 14).

It is in this context of media concentration that content regulation becomes pressing. The Media Law establishes rights designed to prevent misleading and discriminatory portrayals of various social actors by media oligopolies—the right to correction (Article 23) and the right of reply (Article 24). Failure to comply with the requirement that information be “verified, contrasted, precise, and contextualized” (a higher standard than simply that news be nondefamatory) triggers the rights to correction and reply rather than, as HRW and the CPJ suggest, criminal and civil sanctions. Indeed, fines are applicable not for the publication of an offending piece but for failure to publish replies and corrections. Groups that have been portrayed discriminatorily in the media may demand the right to reply citing the Media Law’s provisions against discriminatory content (Articles 61–63), as did the LGBT rights group Silueta X in a claim against Teleamazonas in 2014 (Silueta X, 2014).

HRW takes a hardline stance against this regulation. It argues that the Media Law “opens the way to censorship,” which it defines, with the Organization of American States, as “direct or indirect interference in or pressure exerted upon any expression, opinion, or information transmitted through any means.” In these terms, regulation of any kind of discriminatory or blatantly false media publication would be impermissible. As evidence of censorship, HRW highlights Article 19 as one of the Media Law’s “problematic provisions” in that “journalists must ‘assume the subsequent administrative consequences of disseminating content through the media that undermines constitutional rights, in particular . . . the public security of the State’” (HRW, 2013a). It is worth noting, first, that this article is explicitly applicable to “all persons,” not just “journalists.” More significant, it is absurd for HRW to advocate for a state so liberal that it makes no provisions for public safety or its own continued existence. In contrast, in Britain in May 2015 the Society of Black Lawyers requested the investigation of a columnist at the Sun for violating the Public Order Act of 1986 in advocating violence against refugees (Selby, 2015), but there was no demand from human rights organizations for the repeal of the act as “an assault on free speech.” Through such positions HRW reveals a fundamentalist interpretation of freedom of expression through the prism of negative liberty that pays no heed to the notion of a social contract governing the place of the media in a democracy.

Part of this fundamentalism is an antistatist bias that translates into insinuations that any effort at state-led regulation is a cover for creeping single-party totalitarianism. For example, HRW argued that the requirement that media reports be “verified, contrasted, precise, and contextualized” is equivalent to “giving the government the power to decide whether or not information is ‘truthful’” (HRW, 2013a, my emphasis). The regulation does indeed set standards for accuracy in reporting, ³ as specified in Article 22. However, the agency responsible for its enforcement—the Superintendency of Information and Communication—should not be characterized as a government agency; it is part of the state. The superintendent is chosen from a short-list provided by the president to the Council of Citizens’ Participation and Social Monitoring, which is part of the fourth power of the state (Transparency and Social Monitoring) and is responsible for appointing certain public officials, such as the attorney general, operating citizens’ observatories, and investigating state corruption.

The Superintendency has itself shown willingness to sanction the state media for failing to abide by the standards of the Media Law, as when it upheld a complaint by the privately owned television station Ecuavisa against the public channel RTV for its report on a telethon broadcast on Ecuavisa (El Telégrafo, February 7, 2015). This fact was evidently not considered by the CPJ when it called the Superintendency “the government’s new watchdog agency” (Otis, 2013). The Council for the Regulation and Development of Information and Communication (the state body responsible for implementing policies for the media sector, including stimulating the community media sector) has five members, one each from the executive, the provincial governments, the Council of Citizens’ Participation, the Ombudsman, and the National Councils on Equality (gender, intergenerational, [indigenous, Afro-descendent, and Montubio ⁴ ] peoples and nationalities, the disabled, and migrants and refugees). The process is exemplary of the greater attention paid to the separation of powers in Ecuador than elsewhere, especially in those countries following the Westminster system.

This bias toward interpreting freedom of expression in terms of an overreaching state infringing on the rights of the individual generates certain mischaracterizations in human rights reporting. Both HRW and the CPJ seize upon nonexclusivity clauses at the close of certain articles to suggest that the Media Law allows for draconian criminal punishments (HRW, 2013a; Otis, 2013). Article 26, for example, regarding the “media lynching” provisions, empowers the Superintendency to demand a public apology from a media outlet that engages in a concerted, reiterative campaign designed to damage someone’s credibility and prestige. It concludes by stating, “These administrative measures will not be to the exclusion of criminal and/or damages claims and compensation payments for which the authors may be held liable.” The mention of potential criminal implications stems from provisions in the 2014 Penal Code regarding various criminal speech acts, including conveyance of false information for the purpose of share-market profiteering (Article 322) and the false imputation of a crime (Article 182). Media lynching is not a criminal offense in itself, but HRW reports that Article 26 “would allow the authorities to order the media outlet to issue a public apology and states that they are also subject to criminal and civil sanctions.”

Human Rights Observatories’ Partisan Politics

The biases and inaccuracies in human rights reporting are an important matter for social scientists because of the permeation of social research with information provided by these organizations. In a context such as Ecuador’s, where so much of the media landscape appears to be at stake, drawing one’s sources from the private sector alone is a highly questionable method of research. Reyes’s (2014: 109) observation that Latin American private media outlets are “antistatist in the great majority of cases” certainly holds true for Ecuador. Nonetheless, the CPJ’s sources include an editor from the Guayaquil daily El Universo, the newspaper that accused Correa of crimes against humanity during his own kidnapping, and an anonymous newspaper editor said to operate in Quito.

Much of the reporting on freedom of expression in Ecuador also relies on Fundamedios. ⁵ The organization, which according to the U.S. ambassador in Quito received US$25,000 per month from the United States in 2012 (El Telégrafo, July 23, 2012), is described by the CPJ as an “Ecuadorian press freedom group” (Rafsky, 2014). In fact, it would be more accurately described as a private media industry advocacy body. Fundamedios was founded in 2007, the year Rafael Correa assumed the presidency, by a number of key figures in the Ecuadorian privately owned press, including Roberto Aguilar, Ivonne Guzmán, and Ana Karina López, columnists for El Universo, El Comercio, and the now defunct Hoy, respectively (Varas, n.d.). Though it speaks out on behalf of the private sector, critics argued that Fundamedios refused to denounce acts of aggression and intimidation against public-sector journalists during the violent protests in August 2015 (TeleSUR, 2015). Fundamedios’s role is indicative of the paradox of freedom of the press expounded by Zeno-Zencovich (2008: 19–20): “Through the centuries there has been a struggle with de facto or self-proclaimed power and a struggle to bring it within the ambit of rules and counterweights. . . . The demand for freedom of expression has been instrumental, in the proper sense of that term, in these struggles.” The unreliability of human rights reporting on Ecuador was evidenced during the most internationally infamous case of supposed human rights violations in Ecuador’s recent history: the trial of the El Universo columnist Emilio Palacio. Palacio (2011) had written that during the attempted coup on September 30, 2010 (now known as 30-S), Correa ordered forces to fire upon a hospital full of civilians and had held him responsible for crimes against humanity. HRW reported that Palacio was being charged with “offending” the president: “Punishing a journalist and directors of a newspaper for ‘offending’ the president is likely to have a very negative impact on the news media and public debate in Ecuador,” opined José Miguel Vivanco (HRW, 2011). In fact, Palacio was charged with “the false imputation of a crime,” an offense that was at the time punishable by three months to three years in prison (one to three years if the victim was a public official). This fact is not in dispute and can be verified in legal advice contracted by Palacio and his codefendants, which recognizes that the complaint was not based on decades-old Ecuadorian criminal provisions against offending the honor of a public official (Rovayo, n.d.: 1) that were repealed in 2014. The current provision (Article 182) makes no distinction between public officials and other figures in penalizing false imputation of a crime, which it retains as a criminal offense.

HRW even misled its readers in its coverage of the changes to the antidefamation provisions that it had so actively sought. In its World Report 2015 it stated that “a new criminal code that entered into force in August 2014 eliminates several defamation provisions, but retains slander, a criminal charge used repeatedly by Correa to target his critics” (HRW, 2015). A highly questionable translation is used here: where “slander” means divulging false information in order to harm someone’s reputation, the term calumnia is defined in the Penal Code as “the false imputation of a crime,” and the code goes on to state: “There will be no criminal liability if the author of the calumny voluntarily retracts his or her statements before a sentence is pronounced. . . . The retraction does not constitute an admission of guilt” (Article 182). One could certainly dispute the value of the Ecuadorian norm; what is indisputable is the misleading nature of HRW’s reporting on the issue, which obscures valuable debate.

The most concerning example of criminalization of speech under the Correa government was the charge of “false imputation of a crime” brought against Mónica Chuji, an indigenous Amazonian representative and former AP congresswoman who distanced herself from the government over Amazonian oil extraction. In 2011 she described the secretary of communications, Vinicio Alvarado, as “one of the nouveau riche of the government.” Alvarado brought a complaint arguing that the phrase falsely imputed to him the crime of graft and corruption, which was substantiated by the courts before Alvarado withdrew it (with the result that Chuji was never imprisoned) (INREDH, 2011). It speaks volumes of the class bias of international human rights organizations that they conducted tireless advocacy for Ecuadorian corporate media but could find no space at all to report on Chuji’s case. Criminalization of speech acts should face extremely strict requirements with regard to the specificity of the act that seem to be absent in Chuji’s statement. Unfortunately, the way in which Ecuadorian legislators might improve the current law is not a topic for which international human rights organizations have offered any constructive criticism.

Human rights coverage was, moreover, egregiously misleading in its refusal to mention the context of 30-S as an attempted coup. The CPJ’s Carlos Lauría (2011) referred to it as “a violent labor standoff with national police,” and HRW referred to “violent incidents” (2013b) and a “police rebellion” (2011). These organizations thereby completely overlooked the threat to democracy and human rights presented by the coup attempt against an overwhelmingly popular government. In fact, they actually spoke out against the prison sentence handed down to one of the participants, María Alejandra Cevallos, a member of Ecuador’s right-wing opposition, the Social Christian Party, as though she were a victim of human rights abuse (HRW, 2015). Cevallos was part of the mob that stormed the public broadcaster ECTV on 30-S and then went on camera and spoke out against Correa.

One of the Social Christians’ principal political figures is Jaime Nebot, current mayor of Guayaquil. Nebot was a leading intellectual author of the police death squads that roamed the Ecuadorian coast under President León Febres-Cordero (1984–1988) when Nebot was governor of Guayas. (It is worth noting that the director of the nationwide newspaper La Hora, Francisco Vivanco, was a minister in Febres-Cordero’s government.) At the inauguration of a police battalion in 1985, Nebot encouraged the men to use their weapons: “If a minimal proportion, an infinitesimal proportion, the putrefied part of the citizenry, has to be shot down, then it has to be shot down. I repeat, this is not an order to shoot to kill. This is an order to shoot to live” (Nebot, 1985). In its obsession with curbing overreaching state interference, HRW can easily find itself agitating for the rights of the same powerful individuals and “legal persons” who have most grievously violated human rights.

In light of the inaccuracy of their coverage, it is unfortunate that human rights organizations are uncritically cited by social researchers. Silvio Waisbord (2012: 508), for one, simply cited “CPJ 2000–2011” as backing for his claim that Latin American populist governments “ordered the expropriation of private broadcasting networks and newspapers from companies that had strongly opposed their policies.” Likewise, Ashley Mason (2012: 387) cites Carlos Lauría’s aforementioned 2011 article, as well as 2011 and 2012 HRW reports on Ecuador. Conaghan (2015: 12) cites Carlos Lauría in arguing that Correa insults critical journalists on a weekly basis and cites Fundamedios several times as “a media watchdog group” (2015: 18) rather than a U.S.-backed industry advocacy body. Grinffiel (2011: 581) cites HRW and the CPJ numerous times and argues that the most satisfactory way to support freedom of expression is to increase their funding.

Defenders of Whose Rights?

The emerging hegemony of Western-based multinational corporations provided a powerful incentive for liberal rights conceived in terms of negative liberty, with these agents of global power claiming individual rights and protection against state intervention through the dubious notion of corporate legal personhood. This status quo mirrors the pre–World War II world order, in which liberalism in the guise of “free trade” was invoked on behalf of Western resource extraction companies that sought the elimination of barriers to foreign direct investment in countries emerging from colonialism and dependency (Rodman, 1988: 52–55). As important as it has become for resolving opposed positions in religion and other matters of private morality, liberalism always presents this risk of disguising the tyranny of the powerful as a form of freedom. For this reason, discussions of liberalism and human rights are always incomplete when it is left unclear whose rights are in question. As we have seen in the case of Ecuador, the vigorous defense of the rights of the powerful in the form of international denunciations of human rights violations has the potential to obscure systemic social analysis considerate of historical and political context and the imperative of reform.

It is essential, then, that social researchers avoid the uncritical employment of the reports of human rights observatories as primary sources for academic work. Academic researchers should exercise caution in using human rights reports as the foundation for research projects, and intellectuals in the field of human rights should aim to stimulate among human rights professionals a more nuanced appreciation of the notion of rights in the context of the distribution of society’s resources, as well as attention to socio-historical difference. One must wonder if it is too much to hope that human rights organizations might acknowledge necessary limitations on the notion of universal human rights. A discourse of universal rights is often inimical to realistic appraisals of the imperative of resolving society’s inevitable conflicting interests through a social contract reached by democratic means. Once we accept that the economy itself must be subject in certain respects to democratic accords, many classes of human rights must be understood as relative and subject to democratic negotiation, for their fulfillment rests on the social question of the distribution of resources. The current media oligopoly is likely but one example of an anachronistic status quo in which rights that have classically been understood as absolute must become subject to democratic accords. Latin America’s stark class divisions merely bring this worldwide question into clearer relief.