MANTA, Ecuador: Chafing at ties between U.S. intelligence agencies and Ecuadorean military officials, President Rafael Correa is purging the armed forces of top commanders and pressing ahead with plans to cast more than 100 U.S. military personnel out from an air base in this coastal city.
Correa, who dismissed his defense minister, army chief of intelligence and commanders of the army, air force and joint chiefs this month, said that Ecuador's intelligence systems were "totally infiltrated and subjugated to the CIA." He accused senior military officials of sharing intelligence with Colombia, the top ally in Latin America of President George W. Bush's administration.
The dismissals point to a willingness by Correa, an ally of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, for aggressive confrontations with Ecuador's military, a bastion of political and economic power in this coup-prone country of 14 million people. Correa's moves indicate a clear break with his predecessors, illustrating his wager that Ecuador's institutions may finally be resilient enough to implement 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 in Manta has been the most prominent U.S. military outpost in South America and an important facet of the U.S. drug fight. About 100 anti-narcotics flights leave there each month to survey the Pacific in an elaborate cat-and-mouse game with drug traffickers bound for the United States.
But many Ecuadoreans are bothered by the U.S. presence and the perceived challenge to the country's sovereignty, and Correa promised during his campaign in 2006 to close the outpost.
So far, Ecuador's armed forces, arbiters in the removal of three presidents in the past 11 years, have bent to the will of 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 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 Aisalla, information that was not shared with the president, but apparently was shared with Colombian forces and their U.S. military advisers.
The leak became evident when video images and photographs surfaced in Colombia and Ecuador showing Aisalla meeting with FARC commanders.
"I, the president of the republic, found out about these operations by reading the newspaper," a visibly indignant 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 so he would have greater direct control over them.
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/21/america/ecuador.php
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