Latin American communications routed through the United States, affirms Assange

THE journalist and creator of the Wikileaks website, Julian Assange, affirms that virtually the totality of communications from Latin America are routed through the United States, and that this country intercepts them in order to consolidate its influence in the world.

It is a fact that 98% of telecommunications from Latin America to the rest of the world, including text messages, telephone calls, emails etc, pass through the U.S, Assange noted, in an interview with Russia Today conducted within the Ecuadoran embassy in London, where he has been granted refuge.

Washington’s objective is to obtain information on how Latin America is behaving, where it is making economic transactions and the activities of leaders and major players, the Australian activist added.

In Assange’s opinion, this espionage allows the U.S. to predict, to a certain degree, the conduct of Latin American leaders and interests, and also to exert coercion on almost any significant person.

He explained that the United States had aggressively tried to disprupt economic exchange through intervention and its control of Swift, Visa, MasterCard or monies sent to Latin America via the Bank of America.

The United States is appropriating economic and telecommunications interactions and this poses a threat to national sovereignty, he observed.

In relation to the former CIA technician Edward Snowden, who is living in exile in Russia after having revealed mass espionage on the part of U.S. secret services, Assange noted that Wikileaks was formally and informally implicated in Snowden’s requests for asylum made to approximately 20 countries.

Assange believes that Snowden had a genuine possibility of gaining asylum in several countries and Wikileaks noted others to inform the public of rejections and thus generate debate, and to report how governments were responding to Snowden’s applications for asylum.

The Wikileaks founder recalled that Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador were the Latin American countries which indicated interest in granting asylum to Snowden.

The activities revealed by the former CIA analyst include espionage on Latin American leaders such as Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who cancelled a visit to Washington, scheduled for October 23, since she considered the explanations offered by her counterpart Barack Obama insufficient.