> Ecuador's Leader Purges Military and Moves to Expel American Base
>
> By SIMON ROMERO
>
> New York Times
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/world/americas/21ecuador.h...
> April 21, 2008
>
> MANTA, Ecuador - Chafing at ties between American
> intelligence agencies and Ecuadorean military
> officials, President Rafael Correa is purging the armed
> forces of top commanders and pressing ahead with plans
> to cast out more than 100 members of the American
> military from an air base here in this coastal city.
>
> Mr. Correa - who this month dismissed his defense
> minister, army chief of intelligence and commanders of
> the army, air force and joint chiefs - said that
> Ecuador's intelligence systems were 'totally
> infiltrated and subjugated to the C.I.A.' He accused
> senior military officials of sharing intelligence with
> Colombia, the Bush administration's top ally in Latin
> America.
>
> The dismissals point to a willingness by Mr. Correa, an
> ally of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, to
> aggressively confront Ecuador's military, a bastion of
> political and economic power in this coup-prone country
> of 14 million people. Mr. Correa's moves mark a clear
> break with his predecessors, illustrating his wager
> that Ecuador's institutions may finally be resilient
> enough to carry out such changes after more than a
> decade of political upheaval.
>
> The gambit also poses a clear challenge to the United
> States. For nearly a decade, the base here in Manta has
> been the most prominent American military outpost in
> South America and an important facet of the United
> States' drug-fighting efforts. Some 100 antinarcotics
> flights leave here each month to survey the Pacific in
> an elaborate cat-and-mouse game with drug traffickers
> bound for the United States.
>
> But many Ecuadoreans have chafed at the American
> presence and the perceived challenge to the country's
> sovereignty, and Mr. Correa promised during his
> campaign in 2006 to close the outpost.
>
> So far Ecuador's armed forces, arbiters in the ouster
> of three presidents in the last 11 years, have bent to
> the will of Mr. Correa, a widely popular left-leaning
> president who has sought to assert greater state
> control over Ecuador's petroleum and mining industries
> while challenging the authority of political
> institutions like the country's Congress.
>
> Still, tensions persist over his clash with top
> generals, which emerged after Colombian forces raided a
> Colombian rebel camp in Ecuador last month. The raid
> against the rebel group, the Marxist-inspired
> Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, put Ecuador and
> its ally Venezuela on edge with Colombia. Twenty-five
> people were killed, including Franklin Aisalla, an
> Ecuadorean operative for the group, known as the FARC.
>
> The face-off between Ecuador and Colombia ended at a
> summit meeting in the Dominican Republic, but it has
> begun again over revelations that Ecuadorean
> intelligence officials had been tracking Mr. Aisalla,
> information that was shared not with the president, but
> apparently with Colombian forces and their American
> military advisers.
>
> The leak became evident when video and photo images
> surfaced in Colombia and Ecuador showing Mr. Aisalla
> meeting with FARC commanders.
>
> 'I, the president of the republic, found out about
> these operations by reading the newspaper,' a visibly
> indignant Mr. Correa said last week during an interview
> in the capital, Quito, with foreign correspondents.
> 'This is not something we can tolerate. He added that
> he planned to restructure the intelligence agencies to
> give him greater direct control over them.
>
> In a rebuke of senior military officials, Mr. Correa
> named as defense minister his personal secretary,
> Javier Ponce, who was an outspoken critic of the armed
> forces in his previous careers as a poet and an
> editorial writer at some of Ecuador's largest
> newspapers.
>
> That move and other dismissals stand in contrast to Mr.
> Correa's conciliatory policies toward the military
> after he took office last year, which included salary
> raises for soldiers; a 25 percent increase in the 2008
> military budget, to $920 million; and lucrative highway
> construction contracts for companies controlled by
> military officials.
>
> Unlike the armed forces of most other countries in
> Latin America, Ecuador's military has retained
> substantial economic might since a military junta
> transferred power to a civilian government in the
> 1970s.
>
> Through holding companies, the armed forces still
> control TAME, one of Ecuador's largest airlines, and
> enterprises in the munitions, shrimp fishing,
> construction, clothing, flower farming and
> hydroelectric industries, making the military one of
> the country's most powerful economic groups.
>
> Mr. Correa has not challenged these financial
> interests. But he and his political supporters are
> moving forward with efforts to shift the military away
> from its traditional reliance on training and
> assistance from the United States and toward
> strengthening ties with the armed forces of other South
> American countries.
>
> The first indication of his plans to shift the
> country's focus was his promise to end the American
> presence at the Manta base once the United States'
> lease expired in 2009.
>
> This month his supporters, in an assembly convened to
> propose a new constitution, took up the cause,
> approving a measure that would go a step further and
> effectively outlaw foreign military bases in Ecuador
> after the lease expires. Since the American post at
> Manta is the only foreign military outpost in Ecuador,
> it was clear the move was a deliberate and very public
> swipe at the United States, which spent more than $60
> million to build the facilities here for Awacs
> surveillance planes and crew members.
>
> The 'forward operating location,' as the American post
> is called, came into existence in 1999 in a 10-year
> deal with Ecuador after the Pentagon and Panama's
> government failed to agree on the use of Howard Air
> Force Base in Panama. The agreement, negotiated under
> extreme economic distress by a Ecuadorean president who
> was overthrown months later, includes no rent for
> Ecuador.
>
> Mr. Correa has long been irked by the agreement, but
> his government's unease intensified in recent weeks
> after reports that the Manta base may have been used
> for support by American military personnel in
> Colombia's bombing raid of the FARC camp last month.
> United States Air Force officials here have denied the
> reports.
>
> 'The only aircraft of ours that was flying at the time
> of the raid was a Coast Guard four-prop that was a
> thousand miles over the Pacific,' Lt. Col. Robert
> Leonard, the ranking United States military officer in
> Ecuador, said in an interview in Manta, while
> acknowledging that the Pentagon was already looking at
> alternatives to the Ecuador base.
>
> Colombia and Peru are the countries most often
> mentioned as potential new sites for the American
> surveillance aircraft, which track small planes,
> speedboats and semisubmersibles 2,000 miles into the
> Pacific Ocean, but no agreement has been reached.
>
> Meanwhile, the assertions that American intelligence
> agencies were exerting too much influence in Ecuador
> have raised concerns among Mr. Correa's critics in
> Ecuador that he could take a radical turn like that of
> Mr. Chávez in Venezuela. Mr. Correa has been relatively
> moderate in his policies so far during his presidency.
>
> American officials gloss over the tension with Mr.
> Correa when speaking publicly.
>
> 'Such relations are completely transparent via official
> and appropriate channels, and based on mutual
> interests,' Arnaldo Arbesú, a spokesman for the United
> States Embassy in Quito, said of ties between American
> intelligence officials and their Ecuadorean
> counterparts.
>
> For now, at least, the last word on the issue may rest
> with Mr. Ponce, the rumpled poet thrust into the public
> eye as Mr. Correa's new defense minister.
>
> In an interview in Quito, Mr. Ponce, 59, mentioned the
> moderately leftist governments of Brazil and Chile as
> potential partners for increased military cooperation,
> subtly suggesting a reluctance to depend heavily on
> Venezuelan aid, as countries like Bolivia have done.
> But he was also clear about relying far less on the
> United States.
>
> 'We must get past our legacy of relying too much on
> military relations with the United States, with
> President Bush showing little regard for national
> borders or sovereignty,' Mr. Ponce said. 'The risk of
> remaining too close to such a partner is one of
> ideological contagion.'
>
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