AP Photo

Palacio plays a little bit loose with words when he calls Correa a “dictator.” For the time being, Correa is a narcissist populist leader who spends too much time trying to grab absolute powers, and too little to improve his country’s living standards. Yet, Ecuador is not Cuba — yet. Still, opinions such as Palacio’s don’t justify Correa’s all-out attacks on press freedoms. As Time magazine’s Tim Padgett rightly pointed out in a recent article, Obama is attacked daily by critics who claim — against all available evidence — that he was not born in the United States, and yet he’s not going around shutting down Fox News and other right-of-center media, or suing critical columnists.