The brutal decade of the fugitive in Belgium

Carlos Jijón
Guayaquil, Ecuador

I remember the night when we thought we had to leave the country and seek refuge from the dictatorship of Rafael Correa .

The president had asked the prosecutor 's office to investigate my alleged involvement in 30S on the basis of a tweet that I had issued this fateful morning of September 30, 2010, and we were aware that almost everyone that Correa had He had been prosecuted and most of them were in jail. That must have been in 2014. After being fired in 2010 from the information program he was running, because of relentless government pressure, like most dozens of journalists who had been killed for the same cause, I was unemployed for years. the one that more than one advertiser had let me know that I could not plan to displease the regime.

These are the first hours of a night I remember fresh. My wife and I had just parked in front of our house and we were upset when she broke the silence with her lawyer's logic: "Why not go?" I thought of Colonel Cesar Carrión who was in prison, accused by an attorney of attempted murder of the President of the Republic, to have said that he did not go to court. had never been removed. In Fidel Araujo including a false witness presented by the Office of the Prosecutor, said at the trial that he had given her a weapon in the form of a camera and a hundred dollars for shoot Correa and kill him in the midst of the revolt In Francisco Endara who, along with ten other people, was a fugitive, accused of terrorism for forcing Ecuadorian television to protest the manipulation of the information the September 30th. And then I looked at my wife and I replied, "No. I'm staying here, let them go."

I'm still here. Some of them too, like Jorge Glas in prison. Others remain in power. Rafael Correa is a fugitive. This is not the first time that an ex-president has fled justice. Jamil Mahuad remains in Boston for ordering the freezing of bank deposits and although he never believed that he had appropriated a penny of that money, he is still being sued for embezzlement. Lucio Gutiérrez was sentenced for the incredible cause of the refusal to recognize that his overthrow had been legal. Fabián Alarcón for embezzlement. I think everyone remembers the causes of the 1945 exile Abdalá Bucaram . But never has an Ecuadorian president been prosecuted for ordering the kidnapping of an opponent to power and illicit financing with public money.

Never a general of the Republic was murdered for denouncing corruption. It is still necessary to investigate who shot, and why, in front of the house of his mother, my friend, the journalist Fausto Valdiviezo . The mysterious death of a soldier who did not open his parachute and ended up crashing into the central square of Portoviejo. The traffic accident of the former chairman of the bank COFIEC, who denounced a loan of 800 thousand dollars, without collateral, to an Argentine named Gastón Duzac and who s 39; is crushed one night, for no apparent reason, against a rock on one of the roads that surrounds Quito.

There is a fundamental difference between the murders that occurred under Febres Cordero and those of the last decade. Unjustifiable, horrendous, the crimes perpetrated between 1984 and 1988 were committed in the midst of a fratricidal struggle against a faction that had decided to ignore democracy and take power by force of arms. The deaths that have occurred in the last decade are almost all those who have denounced corruption.

I must say here that Prosecutor Galo Chiriboga did not allow me to conduct an investigation despite Correa's public pressure. He accused dozens of innocents, but not me. He often appealed when the judges failed, releasing individuals against whom no evidence existed. But against me, no. I do not know why. I have never been able to stop feeling a strange sensation, a rare empathy for a man who has put an end to so many people's lives, but it has allowed me to stay unscathed.