When the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, publicly claimed asylum from the tiny Ecuadorean embassy in London on the 19th of August 2012, the British foreign office—citing the 1987 Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act—had already threatened to skirt the inviolability of the Ecuadorean mission. The standoff that ensued cut through the intrigue of the “Assange Affair,” and was caught in the undercurrent of the emerging geopolitical dynamics of the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region.