Will the CIA Kill or Oust Ecuador’s President?

[Maggie Hansen]

http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2008-04-22.asp

Will the CIA Kill or Oust Ecuador’s President?

By Jacob G. Hornberger

23/04/08 "fff" -- -- Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa may not be long for this world, both in a political sense and in genuine life-or-death sense. He recently fired his defense minister, army chief of intelligence, and commanders of the army, air force, and joint chiefs.

Why might those firings cost Correa his job or even his life? Because the reason he fired them was that Ecuador’s intelligence systems were “totally infiltrated and subjugated to the CIA.” As other rulers around the world, including democratically elected ones, have learned the hard way, bucking the CIA is a real no-no that sometimes leads to coups and assassinations.

What’s the CIA doing infiltrating Ecuador’s military intelligence systems? Good question! Maybe it’s because the CIA still fears the threat of communism. Don’t forget that that was the apparent rationale for the U.S. government’s support of Operation Condor, the campaign of assassination and torture co-sponsored by the brutal regimes in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru during the 1970s. Don’t forget also that many of the brutal military personnel in those regimes received their training at the U.S. Army’s infamous School of the Americas, famous for, among other things, its torture manuals.

To make matters worse for Correa, he promises to throw the U.S. military out of his country when the U.S. government’s lease at its base in Manta expires in 2009. The U.S. government spent $60 million to build the base in 1999, securing a 10-year lease that provided no rent to be paid to Ecuador.

So, why does the U.S. military have a $60 million military base in Ecuador? The base is part of the U.S. government’s much-vaunted 30-year-old war on drugs, one of the U.S. Empire’s never-ending wars around the world. The base houses Awacs surveillance planes whose purported mission is to search for international drug smugglers.

What irked President Correa is that apparently his CIA-infested intelligence services fed classified information to Colombian officials that led to a Colombian military attack on a Colombian rebel camp that was located inside Ecuador. One big problem was that when Correa’s intelligence services leaked the information to Colombia, they left Correa (their boss) out of the loop.

The final nail in Correa’s coffin might be the fact that he is an ally of Venezuela’s Marxist president Hugo Chavez, who himself is a likely target of CIA ouster or assassination.

The good news for Americans in all this is that the Ecuadorian people are doing their best to rid their country of the CIA and the U.S. military. Maybe the Ecuadorans will start a trend in which all other countries will do the same. While it would obviously be best if the American people were to dismantle their government’s overseas empire themselves, having foreigners do it instead by throwing the CIA and the Pentagon out of their countries would be just as effective and beneficial — to both the United States and the people of the world.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.

The following links are also of interest in this topic

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41945

http://www.antiwar.com/ips/lucas.php?articleid=12676

http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5058

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Chavez is not a Marxist but anyway.... Interesting to see what happens. Correa also pulled out of military exercises with the US a while ago and will not renew the lease of the US base there. He said if Ecuador could put a military base in Miami he would consider renewing the lease but until that day comes no way.

In many countries around the world the CIA have been paying key people (their true employer) and maneuvering them into positions of influence. In effect running the country for the US. Probably we will see the same in Paraguay. The new president, while the lesser of two evils has ties to the secret police (as do many in the church there). I don't think he will disappoint the elite. All the files for Operation Condor are in Paraguay and they don't want them released until Kissinger is dead.