AFTER police launched a Boxing Day raid on the apartment of Fernando Villavicencio, an opposition activist, Xavier Bonilla put pencil to paper in his defence. In a cartoon (shown below) published two days later in El Universo, a newspaper, Mr Bonilla—more commonly known by his pen-name, Bonil—depicted officers pretending to pay Mr Villavicencio a Christmas visit, before breaking down his apartment door and gleefully scampering off with his computers.Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s thin-skinned president, did not get the joke. After he denounced the “despicable” satire, Bonil and El Universo found themselves the subjects of the first major investigation by Supercom, a media regulator established by a media-gagging law passed last summer. On January 31st Supercom ordered Bonil to publish a “correction” to his cartoon, which it said had “stigmatised” the police and prosecution service. El Universo was fined 2% of its average monthly sales for printing the drawing and thus “failing to abstain from taking an institutional position over the innocence or guilt of people involved in a legal investigation”.Mr...
via The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1iwC2Ew
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