OPINION:
International relations in Latin America took a turn for the worse Friday. Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa ordered the doors of Mexico’s Embassy in Quito battered down so he could extract Jorge Glas, Ecuador’s former vice president, and haul him away in shackles.
As is common in Third World politics, Mr. Glas finds himself accused of corruption. Unwilling to spend his days in a maximum-security prison, he sought and was granted refuge in what was supposed to be a diplomatic sanctuary. Unfortunately for him, respect for international norms went out the window when the United States five years ago put the squeeze on Ecuador to evict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from its embassy in London.
Pressure can flow both ways. It emerged over the weekend that Brazil has been compelling U.S. tech companies to silence critics of the leftist government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Secret censorship orders handed over private information and deleted the accounts of journalists and elected members of Brazil’s parliament who backed former President Jair Bolsonaro in that country’s 2022 election.
Elon Musk says he will no longer give in to ongoing censorship demands issued by Alexandre de Moraes, a justice of Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court. “This judge has brazenly and repeatedly betrayed the constitution and people of Brazil,” the owner of X posted. “He should resign or be impeached.”
Even countries that ought to know better are turning away from fundamental political rights. In Scotland, the left-wing government at the beginning of the month expanded a hate-speech law that makes it a crime to say anything that a “reasonable person” would consider “abusive” or “insulting” to certain classes of people.
British novelist J.K. Rowling believes the statute will be abused to arrest people for “misgendering” men who claim to be women or women who claim to be men. “For several years now, Scottish women have been pressured by their government and members of the police force to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears, repudiate biological facts and embrace a neo-religious concept of gender that is unprovable and untestable,” Ms. Rowling wrote on X.
In the first few days the law took effect, Police Scotland received 4,000 complaints. Many of them reportedly sought to turn in Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, over a 2020 parliamentary speech in which he said it was a problem that all of his colleagues were White.
The United States can’t even complain about the absurdity of Scottish police spending their days scrolling through Facebook on the hunt for purportedly offensive content, as the FBI has been doing just that. A recent viral video captured G-men descending on an Oklahoma woman demanding she explain her online comments regarding Israel. Worse, Douglass Mackey faces an uphill battle in his appeal of a seven-month jail sentence imposed after he posted a meme on X mocking Hillary Clinton.
When the United States fails to defend fundamental freedoms, it should be no surprise that tyrants around the world are inspired to ramp up their own efforts to silence critics and political opponents.
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