Four years ago, on April 11, 2019, the Metropolitan Police entered the Ecuadorian embassy in London and seized Australian journalist Julian Assange. Officially, British police were arresting the WikiLeaks founder for the misdemeanor offense of bail hopping. But the real reason for the arrest was that the United States was seeking Assange’s extradition.

Assange had lived inside the embassy since the government of Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, correctly fearing Assange would be prosecuted in the United States for his journalism, granted him asylum. He never made it to Ecuador, as the British government staged a siege of the embassy, trapping him in a situation a United Nations working group deemed arbitrary detention. But Correa’s successor, President Lenín Moreno, reversed course, revoking Assange’s asylum and allowed British police to enter the embassy. “The greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history, Lenín Moreno, allowed the British police to enter our embassy in London to arrest Assange,” Correa said afterward. “What he has done is a crime that humanity will never forget.”

That same day, the United States unsealed an indictment against Assange for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.” The bail-hopping charges, it would later be revealed, were brought by the UK at the request of the White House as part of a plan to arrest him. A month later, the United States would bring seventeen more counts, stemming from Assange’s role in publishing revelations about US war crimes and abuses of power.