Left-leaning Latin America is taking an increasingly defiant line against the United States over whistleblower Edward Snowden. The spook without a country for two weeks is getting offers of a home away from his home country, where he not only faces prosecution but perhaps persecution, too, for intelligence leaks that stunned the world.
Left-leaning Latin America is taking an increasingly defiant line against the United States over whistleblower Edward Snowden. The spook without a country for two weeks is getting offers of a home away from his home country, where he not only faces prosecution but perhaps persecution, too, for intelligence leaks that stunned the world.
Latin America has often tried to show it is not under the thumb of its powerful northern neighbour, and its extreme reaction now is a fallout of the way the US and its allies recently harassed Bolivia’s President Evo Morales in the skies over Europe. The last hasn’t yet been heard in this intriguing drama of a fugitive holed up in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport without a valid passport, and asylum requests rejected by 21 countries he had applied to. Even Russia seems a bit embarrassed by the American’s presence on its soil in this almost comical international drama.
The bold stand by Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia to invest a leaker of intelligence secrets with the mantle of a fighter for individual freedoms may well be politically inspired, but it recognises Snowden has done the world a favour by exposing what a superpower is capable of in this modern age. With most of America’s allies unwilling to stand up to the depredations of a surveillance system that seems to have spared no one, it may not entirely be a bad thing that South America is ideologically driven to support the likes of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and Snowden.