Ecuador challenges U.S. over Snowden

QUITO, Ecuador – President Barack Obama tried to cool the international frenzy over Edward Snowden on Thursday as Ecuador stepped up its defiance and said it was preemptively rejecting millions in trade benefits that it could lose by taking in the fugitive from his limbo in a Moscow airport.

The country seen as likeliest to shelter the National Security Agency leaker seemed determined to prove it could handle any repercussions, with three of its highest officials calling a news conference to “unilaterally and irrevocably renounce” $23 million a year in lowered tariffs on products such as shrimp and frozen vegetables.

Fernando Alvarado, the secretary of communications for leftist President Rafael Correa, sarcastically suggested the U.S. use the money to train government employees to respect human rights.

Obama, meanwhile, sought to downplay the international chase for the man he called “a 29-year-old hacker” and lower the temperature of an issue that has raised tensions between the U.S. and uneasy partners Russia and China. Obama said in Senegal that the damage to U.S. national security has already been done and his top focus now is making sure it can’t happen again.

“I’m not going to have one case with a suspect who we’re trying to extradite suddenly be elevated to the point where I’ve got to start doing wheeling and dealing and trading on a whole host of other issues, simply to get a guy extradited so he can face the justice system,” Obama said at a joint news conference with Senegal’s President Macky Sall.

While the Ecuadorean government appeared angry over U.S. threats of punishment if it accepts Snowden, there were also mixed signals about how eager it was to grant asylum. For days, officials here have been blasting the U.S. and praising Snowden’s leaks of NSA eavesdropping secrets as a blow for global human rights.

But they also have repeatedly insisted that they are nowhere close to making a decision on whether Snowden can leave Moscow, where he is believed to be holed up in an airport transit zone, for refuge in this oil-rich South American nation.

“It’s a complex situation, we don’t know how it’ll be resolved,” Correa told a news conference Thursday in his first public comments on the case aside from a handful of postings on Twitter.

The Ecuadorean leader said that in order for Snowden’s asylum application to be processed, he would have to be in Ecuador or inside an Ecuadorean Embassy, “and he isn’t.” Another country would have to permit Snowden to transit its territory for that requirement to be met, Correa said.

The renunciation of trade benefits was a dramatic but mostly symbolic threat. The U.S Congress was widely expected to let the benefits lapse in coming weeks, for reasons unrelated to the Snowden case. And if they continued, it appeared highly unlikely that the Ecuadorean government would be able to unilaterally cancel tariff benefits that went directly to their country’s exporters.