Edward Snowden, a 30-year-old who leaked top-secret details about U.S. surveillance programs, asked for asylum in Ecuador after federal prosecutors announced they would be charging him with espionage. He had been hiding out in Hong Kong until WikiLeaks helped him move to Moscow. 
James "Whitey" Bulger spent more than a decade on the FBI's Most Wanted list before being arrested in June 2011 in Santa Monica, California. Bulger is accused of running Boston's notorious Winter Hill gang and faces murder, extortion, and money laundering charges. 
Eric Toth, 31, was a third grade teacher at the National Cathedral's Beauvoir school in Washington, in 2008 and wanted on child pornography charges. He is one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted fugitives and was apprehended April 20, in Nicaragua, according to a federal law enforcement official. 
Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev, 19, was arrested on Friday, April 19, in Watertown, Massachusetts, after a massive manhunt following an overnight shootout with police that resulted in the death of his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. Here's a look at other U.S. manhunts: 
Former Los Angeles police officer Christopher Dorner led police on a days-long chase before he was tracked to a hideout in the San Bernardino Mountains. He took his own life on February 12. 
Ted Bundy raped and murdered dozens of women across the country in the 1970s. He escaped from prison twice before being captured during a traffic violation in 1978. He was executed in Florida in 1989. 
The FBI is still searching for Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the February 26, 1993, World Trade Center bombing in New York that killed six and injured more than 1,000 people. Six other suspects were convicted in the attack. 
Eric Robert Rudolph -- who was convicted of a string of bombings, including the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta -- eluded capture until 2003. He was arrested in Murphy, North Carolina, and is serving four consecutive life sentences plus 120 years. 
Once a fixture on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs in an Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound on May 2, 2011. 
Lovebird bandits Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are believed to have committed 13 murders and several robberies and burglaries during the Great Depression before they were ambushed and killed by police in 1934. - Ecuador seems willing to consider giving asylum to Edward Snowden
- Steve Striffler: Many around the world question the morality of American policy
- He says the Snowden case affords opponents a chance to put U.S. on defensive
- Striffler says Ecuador's president has legitimate questions about U.S. policy
Editor's note: Steve Striffler holds the Doris Zemurray Stone Chair in Latin American Studies and is a professor of anthropology and geography at the University of New Orleans.
(CNN) -- Ecuador remains the frontrunner in the Edward Snowden sweepstakes. Hong Kong let him go, neither ready to arrest him on behalf of the United States nor willing to let him stay.
Russian authorities have played coy, looking to avoid open conflict with the United States but hardly forthcoming with any details. Even Cuba is in the mix, perhaps as a temporary detour on the way to somewhere else. But it is Ecuador, of all places, that appears consistently as the country most willing to openly challenge the United States, apparently not averse to allowing Snowden to land in Quito while considering a request for asylum.
How do we understand the inability of the United States to capture a U.S. citizen who has been charged with espionage and no longer has a valid U.S. passport? Why won't anyone help the United States get this guy? And why does Ecuador in particular appear willing to embrace Edward Snowden and oppose the United States?
Ecuador's president to defy U.S.? 
NSA leaker is on the move 
Snowden asylum questions remain Part of the explanation lies in the fact that the United States does not appear to be garnering much sympathy on this issue within the international community as a whole. China, Russia, Cuba and Ecuador are hardly alone in wanting to poke at the United States by helping Snowden. Foreign observers are much less interested in the relative virtues of Snowden (traitor? hero? refugee? attention-seeker?) and much more willing to focus on the actions of the U.S. government, which outside our borders tends to be understood as part of a long history of out-of-control surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies.
In this sense, the United States may have the law on its side when demanding the arrest of Snowden, but it does not, from the perspective of many foreign observers, have a moral leg to stand on.
Our past use of covert surveillance at both home and abroad, combined with our current pursuit of an individual who exposed questionable surveillance programs, has meant that our attempts to capture Snowden, however sound legally, have been effectively undermined by our own moral bankruptcy within international circles (at least with respect to issues of surveillance, privacy, espionage, etc.).
This perception is all the more pervasive in Latin America, where decades of U.S. support for repressive military dictatorships was enforced by a wide range of surveillance programs that were often permitted and justified by legal statutes.
Still, why Ecuador? The prevailing explanation among U.S. pundits is that Edward Snowden and Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa are "unlikely allies" and thus Correa's stance has nothing to do with Snowden's actions or the fact the United States is pursuing him. In other words, it is all about scoring political points. This is too simplistic an explanation and relies on a misunderstanding of Correa and the leftward shift that has swept Latin America during the past 25 years.
Politicians are always looking to score political points, and Correa has certainly had his moments. But when Correa offered Wikileaks journalist Julian Assange asylum in 2012, he had relatively little to gain politically beyond raising his international profile. At the time, he was expected to easily win re-election (which he did), in large part because under his administration unemployment levels had reached record lows, public spending on education had more than doubled and medical care was more accessible than ever. This was despite the fact that Ecuador had been hit harder than almost any country in the region by the financial crisis of 2008.
Correa pumped money into the economy, reformed the financial system, took control of the central bank and otherwise worked, however imperfectly, to build a government and economy that serves the interests of the people.
Simply put, Correa's popularity insured that there was relatively little to be gained by taking on Assange in 2012. Quite the opposite, Correa's embrace of Assange produced an intense backlash by the media in Ecuador, which then amped up opposition during the election.
Similarly, Correa will score relatively few political points by embracing Snowden in 2013. Correa's stance is best seen as a principled one. In broad terms, Correa's openness to Assange and Snowden, as well as his decision to close a U.S. military base in Ecuador, is part of an effort to deepen Ecuadorian sovereignty while strengthening Latin America's ability to limit the influence of the United States in the region.
This is perfectly within the rights of an independent nation, even one that has historically followed the U.S. lead. More immediately, Correa's willingness to take on Snowden should be seen for what it is, as a refreshingly principled stand by a small country against a powerful nation engaged in what many see as the political persecution of one of its own citizens.
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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Steve Striffler.
