An $80,000 fine levied against an Ecuadorean magazine accused of spreading political propaganda constitutes a direct attack on freedom of expression, the International Press Institute (IPI) said today.

Ecuador’s Electoral Arbitration Tribunal (TCE, according to its Spanish acronym) ruled last week that a May 4, 2011 editorial published by Vistazo magazine urging voters to reject elements of a popular referendum held three days later amounted to political propaganda, thereby violating Article 277 of the country’s electoral law, known as the “Democracy Code.”

IPI Deputy Director Anthony Mills, who led an IPI press freedom mission to Ecuador in May, strongly condemned the tribunal’s ruling. “Having an opinion clearly stated as such is not a crime. Vistazo, just like any private citizen, has the right to express its views to members of the public, who are in turn free to accept or reject those views.”

In the editorial, Vistazo advocated “a robust NO” to questions three and nine, which proposed investment restrictions on media owners and the creation of a communications law that would include a government-led regulatory council, respectively. Both were ultimately narrowly approved by the Ecuadorean electorate, in spite of significant opposition by media and press freedom groups.

In a statement following the ruling, Vistazo wrote that the sentence “penalizes the right to have an opinion, as it confuses opinion with electoral propaganda.” It added: “the sentence claims that the editoral is propaganda because it was published two days before the elections and confirms that there would not have been a crime … if the editorial had been published a week earlier, which is a contradiction.”

The magazine added that the publicly funded newspaper El Telégrafo had published an editorial one day before the referendum urging voters to approve all 10 propositions, but had not been subject to any judicial action.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa applauded the tribunal’s ruling, declaring, “Good that we are starting to have justice in this country, and beginning to limit the many abuses of certain media who believed themselves to be above the law … hopefully this will set a precedent to avoid such abuses.”

However, Diego Cornejo, president of the Ecuadorean Association of Newspaper Editors (AEDEP, according to its Spanish acronym), said the sentence “sought to intimidate the media, which is dangerous for demoracy and the freedom of [Ecaudor’s] citizens.”

Mills noted that the ruling was of particular concern to IPI given controversial changes to the Democracy Code approved earlier this year. Those changes ban the media from “promoting, directly of indirectly” any candidate of ballot option in the months preceding an election and from disseminating “electoral advertising, opinion, or images 48 hours prior to the day of the vote and before 24:00 on election day.”

“As we approach the beginning of the Ecuador’s presidential campaign, we are concerned that this decision may be a sign that the government, armed with a set of troubling new provisions in the electoral law, is prepared to clamp down on private media in an attempt to control campaign coverage,” Mills explained. “By restricting the activities of the media during a democratic election, the amended electoral law threatens the public’s ability to make informed choices about the candidates.”

IPI this week is preparing to release a full report on its May mission to Ecuador, which describes a media landscape beset by tension as the Correa government continues its harassment of the private press.