Granting Assange Asylum is ‘Political Theater’ Says Former Ambassador

John Maisto served as a US ambassador to Nicaragua and Venezuela. He tells host Marco Werman that Ecuador’s decision to grant asylum to Julian Assange and the Latin American backing for that decision is in large part political theater.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: Retired ambassador John Maisto has long experience in Latin America. He was US ambassador to Nicaragua from 1993-1996 and to Venezuela from 1997-2000. Maisto says Latin American nations are eager to make a point to Washington.

John Maisto: It’s pretty clear that there’s a great deal of politial theatre going on. I think part and parcel of this with regard to the Latin American countries comes with the opportunity to take a swipe at the United States, which the president of Ecuador certainly has done. This is part of the old “foreign devil” theory that you learned in International Relations 101. Always look for somebody outside of your own borders to point the finger at, and this has been going on in certain countries for a long time.

Werman: Right, now back to that political theatre. Help us understand the relationship between Ecuador and the United States. Was there bad blood between the two nations before Assange sought asylum in the embassy there in London?

Maisto: The current government in Ecuador is certainly leftist. It aligns itself with President Chavez in the hemisphere. There is a lot of anti-US rhetoric that comes out of governments like this. And by the way, the other governments in Latin America also have leftist constituencies, and it’s pretty easy to line up to do “gringo bashing” in the home capital and have it play out in the home media. That usually always is a winner. In the case of the Assange situation the Wikileaks cable exposure gives an added dimension to it, a hugely added dimension to it, because what the United States is doing in other parts of the world, particularly in the Middle East, is not particularly popular in Latin America.

Werman: So diplomatically , how does one back away from the brink in this situation?

Maisto: The essence of diplomacy is trying to work out solutions to very thorny problems. I don’t have an easy answer to this. I think the countries have to keep on talking. I think the UK is handling this the way a sovereign nation can and should. It’s keeping it strictly within the realm of international law and practice, and what happens farther down the line should also be carried out on the basis of international law and diplomatic practice. Our Latin American friends often talk about international law. The United States, I think, carries out much of its diplomacy within the realm of international law. But there is such a thing as sovereignty. The UK is sovereign, Sweden is sovereign, and the United States is sovereign, and sovereign countries look after their own interests. By the way let me make a comment. A Latin American commentator who is very popular in Latin America–his name is Moisas Naim–wrote in El Pas. When he looked through the Wikileak cables, he made three observations which I found interesting. One, he said the cables were very well written. He said he would like to have journalists who write as well as some of those cables were written. Number two, he saw that the Americans were saying the same thing privately that they were saying publicly with regard to their policies. And number three, it was evident that many Latin Americans said one thing privately and another thing publicly.

Werman: So given all that why is Julian Assange such a lighting rod?

Maisto: Because he’s revealed things that countries like to keep private. It’s very similar to what papparazzi do. It’s very similar to what a certain type of investigative journalism does, not investigative journalism that really focuses on digging out the facts–Watergate-style investigative journalism for example–but the sensational type of stuff. And that’s what you see. 98% of the stuff that’s in those cables–I haven’t read them, but I understand that 98% of the stuff that’s in those cables is not news, but what might be news, what one embassy says about about one particular individual and this particular individual’s relationship with the president, and questions about a country in the Andes. There are always questions about international criminal activity. Just look at the geography in that part of the world and it’s not difficult to figure out.

Werman: John Maisto, former US ambassador to Nicaragua and Venezuela. Thank you for your time and your thoughts.

Maisto: You’re welcome.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.