Profiled: Xavier Bonilla against Ecuadorian state censorship

Interesting piece Committee to Protect Journalists regarding Xavier Bonilla, better known as Bonil and his struggles with a state sponsored media review commission.

Called to testify before a government media oversight commission, editorial cartoonist Xavier Bonilla–known by his penname Bonil–showed up with a pair of four-foot-long mock pencils. But rather than having a small eraser on the tip, one of Bonil’s giant pencils was nearly all eraser.

It was a fitting prop. At the January hearing, Bonil was ordered, in essence, to erase one of his cartoons criticizing the government and to redraw it more to the commission’s liking. The strange decision prompted some critics to suggest that Ecuador be renamed “Borrador,” which means eraser in Spanish.

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