How the West Enabled Snowden’s Bid for Latin American Asylum

Tim Padgett, Time, 07/10/13

Let’s say, as Bolivian President Evo Morales insists, that the U.S. did urge European officials to deny Morales their air space on his flight home from Moscow last week because fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden was rumored (falsely) to be onboard. If that’s true — and we may never know, since U.S. officials aren’t commenting — did the Obama Administration just make it easier for Snowden to win political asylum in Latin America?

Up until that July 2 incident, it wasn’t at all certain that the Latin American left, which includes Morales, would follow through on its threats to grant asylum to Snowden, who is wanted in the U.S. on espionage charges after he exposed secret NSA communications surveillance at home and abroad. Socialist Venezuela—which confirmed July 9 that it had received Snowden’s asylum request—and the rest of the region’s anti-U.S. bloc seemed to be waiting for a stronger pretext for giving Snowden refuge, and preferably their favorite kind of pretext, an act of U.S.-backed imperialismo. That’s exactly the gift that Spain, Portugal, France and Italy provided by forcing Morales’ plane to land in Vienna for inspection.

Suddenly, South America’s leftist presidents, whose hemispheric influence had been waning of late, found their mojo again. They rushed breathlessly to Bolivia to greet Morales, who shouted, “United we will defeat American imperialism!” while calling for the closure of the U.S. embassy there. By Friday evening, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, in need of a political boost after just barely winning a special April election to succeed his mentor, the late Hugo Chávez, formally offered the “young American” Snowden asylum from “persecution from the empire.” Bolivia said it too was willing to give refuge to the 30-year-old Snowden, who has been holed up in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport since June 23. Nicaragua said it would also consider it, as has Ecuador.

Bottom line: Snowden may well now elude U.S. authorities after he seemed to be cornered in Sheremetyevo’s transit lounge. “If the U.S. was involved in diverting Evo’s plane, it was a bit of old-style cold-war maneuvering that backfired,” says Ariel Armony, director of the University of Miami’s Center for Latin American Studies. “But even if it wasn’t [involved], the global perception is that those four European countries wouldn’t have decided to do this of their own volition. Either way, it puts the U.S. at risk of failing to get Snowden in the end.”

Perhaps most baffling is that the U.S. and Europe had already seen something like this play out last summer. It was then that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who had released thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables, showed up at Ecuador’s embassy in London. He hoped to avoid extradition not just to Sweden, where he faced sexual assault charges, but possibly to the U.S. as well. Leftist and anti-U.S. Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa hemmed and hawed about giving Assange asylum — until British authorities made the blunder of reminding Correa that U.K. law revokes an embassy’s diplomatic immunity if it’s judged to be harboring a fugitive.

That was all Correa needed to hear: He accused the Brits of practicing imperialista gunboat diplomacy in the service of Washington. Feeling global opinion shift in his favor, Correa used what he called London’s threat to storm his embassy as justification for going ahead and granting Assange asylum as the only honorable thing for Ecuador to do. (Assange, however, is still holed up in the embassy building.)

What the Brits failed to remember then, and what the U.S. and its European allies seemed clueless about last week, was the centuries of often ugly foreign intervention that Latin American countries have experienced. That resentment is bound to get stoked when world powers even appear to be pushing around the President of South America’s poorest nation (its first indigenous head of state to boot) on the flimsy basis of a rumor that he’s ferrying a U.S. fugitive at 40,000 feet.

Even so, John Maisto, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela and Nicaragua, says he doesn’t believe the Venezuela-led bloc was necessarily waiting for an excuse to offer Snowden sanctuary and kick the “empire” in the shins. “I don’t think they needed a pretext,” says Maisto, now chairman of the Washington-based American Committees on Foreign Relations board of advisers. “For them, this is about thwarting the national interests of the U.S., which has a real, justified and important interest in getting Snowden.” Without or without Morales’ flight diversion, he adds, one of those anti-yanqui allies was bound to give Snowden asylum.

But did the Morales episode make that easier to do? Before Snowden leaked the NSA surveillance details to the media last month, for example, Venezuela and the U.S. had begun a post-Chávez process of rapprochement. If Venezuela had come forward before July 2 and given Snowden asylum as a poke in the Obama Administration’s eye, Maduro may well have looked diplomatically churlish. He decided that the Morales fiasco gave him an out — in other words, international political cover for jilting the new outreach between Caracas and Washington.

And he could do so amid a sudden air of tacit moral support from the rest of Latin America. Even as Morales was fuming on the tarmac in Vienna last week, new Snowden media leaks revealed a massive NSA surveillance operation in more U.S.-friendly Brazil, prompting its Foreign Minister to voice “deep concern” and Brasília to launch an investigation. (The U.S. insists the program is standard intelligence-gathering practiced by all nations.)

Yet if Snowden does go to Venezuela — and that may depend on whether communist Cuba’s leader, Raúl Castro, who is involved in his own fledgling detente with the U.S. right now, lets Snowden stop in Havana enroute to Caracas — he’ll face the irony of receiving asylum from a government that’s hardly a champion of his own free speech and open information values. Under Chávez and now Maduro, in fact, Venezuela is better known for tough anti-defamation laws, including criminal prosecution for insulting officials like the President. Ditto for Assange: Correa just pushed through a measure that essentially makes him Ecuador’s media censor.

That’s just one more reason to ask whether what happened last week in the skies over Europe was the height of folly.

http://news.yahoo.com/west-enabled-snowden-bid-latin-american-asylum-161401728.html

Analysis: Snowden's options appear to narrow in bid to evade U.S. arrest

Matt Spetalnick/Lidia Kelly, Reuters, 06/28/13

WASHINGTON/MOSCOW (Reuters) - Nearly a month after Edward Snowden exposed top secret U.S. surveillance programs, the former spy agency contractor looks no closer to winning asylum to evade prosecution at home - and his options appear to be narrowing.

Stuck in legal limbo in a Moscow airport transit area and facing uncertainty over whether any of the destinations he is said to be contemplating - Ecuador, Venezuela and Cuba - will let him in, Snowden seems to be at the mercy of geopolitical forces beyond his control.

Unseen in public since arriving in Moscow last weekend, much remains unclear about Snowden's overtures to various countries and how they have responded behind the scenes.

Russia may no longer have sufficient reason to continue harboring Snowden if, as is widely believed, its intelligence services have already questioned him about the classified documents that he has admitted to taking from the National Security Agency.

The leftist government of Ecuador, already sheltering WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at its London embassy, is reviewing Snowden's asylum request, though officials have sent mixed signals, suggesting the process could drag on for weeks.

Venezuela's new president, Nicolas Maduro, has spoken favorably of granting refuge to Snowden but has taken no action, and he may think twice about risking a setback in tentative steps toward post-Chavez rapprochement with Washington.

And even if Ecuador or Venezuela decide to take Snowden, there is no guarantee that communist Cuba, the likely transit point for any flight from Moscow to those South American countries, would let him pass through and further complicate its own thorny relations with the United States.

Adding to Snowden's troubles, the Obama administration, embarrassed by his disclosures on U.S. surveillance programs and his ability to dodge extradition when he fled Hong Kong last Sunday, is bringing heavy pressure to bear on any country that might consider accepting him, diplomats say.

"Thus far, he has chosen his destinations carefully," said Carl Meacham, a foreign policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "His time, even in those countries, however, may be running out."

Another potential complication is the role of anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, whose alliance with Snowden further politicizes his case. British legal researcher Sarah Harrison, a top WikiLeaks lieutenant and Assange confidante, escorted Snowden on the flight from Hong Kong to Moscow and is believed to have remained with him.

FOCUS ON RUSSIA

Russia remains the chief focus of the diplomatic scramble, and while President Vladimir Putin has clearly delighted in the chance to tweak Washington, there are questions whether he wants a prolonged saga that threatens deeper damage to already-chilly U.S.-Russia relations.

The former NSA contractor's trek took him to Moscow because he had little choice of any other route that would keep him relatively safe from his American pursuers, former Russian intelligence officers and political and security analysts said.

"He has almost nowhere to go. He does not have much of a choice," said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs and a member of an influential foreign policy council.

"Considering that he came out with a serious statement that is seen by the United States as treasonous, he needs to lay out an itinerary through countries where he can feel more or less certain that he will not be handed over."

Despite Putin's insistence that Russian intelligence agencies had not been "working with" Snowden, a Russian security service source said they would certainly have interviewed him.

U.S. authorities are already operating on a "worst case" assumption that all of the classified material in Snowden's possession has made its way to one or more adversary intelligence services, U.S. national security sources said.

While top U.S. officials have warned of serious damage to national security interests from Snowden's leaks, Lukyanov suggested that in intelligence terms he was probably not a very valuable prize. "He is not some kind of special agent," he said.

Putin has built his return to the presidency on strident nationalism. If he hands Snowden back to the United States, he could face a backlash from Russians who see the American as a whistle-blowing hero.

"No matter what, we should not give him back. Let him go somewhere, or even stay in Russia - we are a big country and we have room for him as well as (French actor Gerard) Depardieu," said Viktor, a pensioner who was at Sheremetyevo airport on Friday for a vacation flight to Ukraine.

CONFUSION OVER ECUADOR

However, Snowden's protracted stay at the Moscow airport may have more to do with his problems reaching a deal with Ecuador than with any Russian desire to keep the American fugitive from moving on, the Russian security source said.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa has inserted his small Andean nation into the saga by offering asylum to Snowden, whom he has praised for exposing U.S. espionage efforts. However, he may also be trying to fill the void left by the death of Venezuelan socialist President Hugo Chavez - for a decade Washington's most vocal adversary in the region.

While Ecuador seems like Snowden's best bet as a place of refuge, its intentions are unclear.

Assange said earlier that Ecuadorean diplomats in London had issued a temporary travel document intended for Snowden, whose U.S. passport had been revoked. But the Quito government denied this.

In the meantime, Correa has said Ecuador cannot move forward with the asylum request until Snowden is in the country or makes his way to one of its embassies. Correa has indicated he is not planning to arrange transit for Snowden.

Returning to Quito on Friday from a tour of Asia, Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said his government had been involved in talks with the Russian government about Snowden's fate, but without any result.

For now, Venezuela also was not looking promising for Snowden. Maduro has made clear several times that he would take a positive view of an asylum request, though he said on Thursday that "no one has asked us for humanitarian refuge."

Since taking office in April, Maduro has at times used thunderous, Chavez-style, anti-U.S. rhetoric but he has also expressed interest in better relations with Washington.

Without help from a sympathetic government, Snowden's ability to travel is limited. The increasingly grim predicament may explain why his father on Friday said he is reasonably confident the 30-year-old Snowden would return if certain conditions were met.

Those conditions include not detaining Snowden before trial, not subjecting him to a gag order and letting him choose the location of his trial, according to a letter that Lonnie Snowden's lawyer, Bruce Fein, sent to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

(Additional reporting by Steve Gutterman and Alexei Anishchuk in Moscow, Jeff Franks in Havana, Brian Ellsworth in Quito, and Susan Heavey in Washington; Editing by Alistair Bell, Tiffany Wu and Eric Beech)

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/analysis-snowdens-options-appear-narrow-bid-evade-u-021130399.html

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