Another virus is causing major damage in Ecuador: It’s called fake news

It’s very possible that fake news farms in Venezuela, Mexico and Cuba are trying to destabilize Latin American countries by exploiting the coronavirus crisis to create public outrage against democraticallyelected governments. If you’re a skeptic, as I was, you should take a look at what’s happening right now in Ecuador.

Ecuador has made news worldwide recently for its explosion of coronavirus cases. Videos with horrifying scenes of alleged coffins being burnt on the streets in the coastal city of Guayaquil went viral and were reproduced by major media.

Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas

Maduro and the presidents of Mexico and El Salvador, among others, expressed horror at the situation in Guayaquil.

Problem is, as Ecuador’s Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo and independent fact-checking organizations told me, many of the gruesome videos allegedly coming from Guayaquil were fake news.

“There has not been one single case of a body burnt on the streets of Guayaquil,” Romo told me. “The video of the bodies being burnt on the streets was fake.”

Romo told me that many of these fabricated videos are spread by bot farms tied to former radical leftist President Rafael Correa, who is in exile and was recently sentenced in absentia by an Ecuadorean court to eight years in prison for massive corruption.

Correa was denounced by international press-freedom and human-rights groups for censoring the media and creating bot farms that spread massive social media posts during his 2007-2017 presidency. Many of the false social media accounts created at the time are still active and now operate from Venezuela, Mexico and Cuba, Ecuadorean officials say.

Asked about the video showing alleged burnt bodies, Romo told me that the police went to the place where the incident supposedly occurred and found that the smoke seen in the video was from burning tires. People had set tires afire to protest the hospitals’ failure to pick up the body of a person who had died at home, she said.

Ecuador’s government readily concedes that there has been an explosion of coronavirus in there, with more than 3,500 cases of COVID-19, more than in most other Latin American countries.

Still, fake news videos have taken advantage of Guayaquil’s crisis “to try to destabilize” the country, Romo told me.

“They seek to generate fear, to sell the idea that there is chaos in the country, that the government is not in charge and that there’s an urgent need for a change of government,” she added.

Correa, in recent days, publicly has called for Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno’s resignation and his temporary replacement by an interim president.

Several independent Ecuadoran news-verification sites have confirmed that the videos of burnt corpses in the streets of Guayaquil are fabricated.

Fundamedios, a well-known press-freedom advocacy group that runs the EcuadorChequea.com fact-checking site, has posted 104 examples of other fake news linked to the coronavirus crisis in Ecuador.

They include a picture of a mass grave allegedly depicting a mass burial in Guayaquil, with the headline: “That’s the way they are burying them! Their families don’t even know it!” In fact, the picture was from a New York hospital and had appeared in the British Daily Mail newspaper on April 2, it said.

Fundamedios director Cesar Ricaurte told me that, “It’s true that the pandemic has hit Guayaquil especially hard, but there have also been a lot of fake news about it, such as the video of the burning corpses.”

Similar cases of attacks spread by Venezuelan-backed fake-news bot farms were denounced by the governments of Chile, Colombia and Ecuador during anti-government protests late last year.

Here’s the bottom line: There’s nothing wrong with news criticizing governments for their handling of the coronavirus crisis, whether it’s in Ecuador or in the United States. But it’s different when the media use fabricated videos circulating in social media.

Several Latin American independent fact checking groups have created a network (www.chequeado.com/latamcoronavirus/) to monitor and identify coronavirus-linked fake news.

My message? Beware of Whatsapp and Telegram, because they are being used by fake-news farms as their biggest lie-spreading platforms. And step up the pressure on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to weed out fake news.

Otherwise, the virus of disinformation may be as harmful to our societies as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Don’t miss the “Oppenheimer Presenta” TV show at 8 p.m. Sunday on CNN en Español. Twitter: @oppenheimera