Ecuador’s President Takes Tough Stand

Rogere Burbach, Z Magazine Online
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Apr2007/burbach0407.html

Ecuador’s leftist government —led by Rafael Correa who won the presidency in a November runoff election—has moved assertively in its relations with the United States during its first month in office. Minister of Foreign Relations, Maria Fernanda Espinosa, in a meeting with the Foreign Press Association in Quito, declared that Ecuador intends to close the U.S. military base located at Manta. “Ecuador is a sovereign nation, we do not need any foreign troops in our country,” she said. The treaty for the base expires in 2009 and will not be renewed.

The largest U.S. base on South America’s Pacific coast was ostensibly set up to help monitor narcotrafficking, but has become a major operations center for U.S. intelligence gathering and for coordinating counterinsurgency efforts against the leftist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia. The base’s air runway, built at a cost of $80 million, is capable of accommodating the largest and most sophisticated U.S. spy and intelligence gathering aircraft. Manta was also being used as a port for U.S. naval operations in the Pacific. Upwards of 475 U.S. military personnel are continually rotated between Manta and the U.S. Southern Command headquarters in Florida.

Popular sentiment in Ecuador overwhelmingly supports the closure of the base at Manta. Since its establishment in 1999 the civil war in Colombia has spread to Ecuador, bringing refugees, violence, and social conflict, particularly in the Amazon region. Aerial spraying of herbicides by planes originating in Colombia eradicates food crops and has deleterious health effects on Ecuadorans. The Colombian and U.S. governments claim that the defoliants are only sprayed on the Colombian side of the border and that there are no flights over Ecuador. But President Correa disagrees: “We will not permit the continual violation of Ecuadorian air space by planes that are not even Colombian, but from the United States. They enter our country and then fly back to Colombia.” Correa has ordered the Ecuadorian air force “to intercept any planes that violate our air space.”

The Correa government is preparing a case for the World Court against the Colombian government for the conflict and damages in northern Ecuador. Foreign Minister Espinosa is emphatic in saying that this is a “violation of human rights. It is not only a question of the health effects, but also of the psychological traumas caused by the constant over flights and the terrorization of the local population, particularly among the children who hear planes flying overhead and are subjected to war-like conditions.” Special teams comprised of international health and human rights representatives are being formed to investigate the conditions on the border. “We want to replace the conflictive conditions with a Plan for Peace and Development in the region,” Espinosa said.

In February Ecuadoran vice president, Lenin Moreno, on a trip to Caracas, Venezuela, stated that the Colombian government “should act more as a friendly neighbor and not respond only to the orders of the empire.” Commenting on President Bush’s March trip to Latin America that excluded Ecuador, Moreno added, “Every time Bush comes to visit our region we worry because we don’t know what proposals he comes to impart and what sorts of statements he will make.” Moreno’s comments caused an uproar and, in an effort to calm the diplomatic waters, Espinosa said that Moreno’s remarks were not officially sanctioned. “We want cordial, normal relations with the U.S. embassy and government in order to resolve any issues between us,” she said.

The Correa government is also moving to break with the neo-liberal trade and commercial policies that have been imposed on Ecuador by Washington and international lending agencies. In line with his campaign platform, Correa has made it clear that he will never sign the free trade agreement with the United States that was being discussed with previous governments. At the same time, Ecuador is negotiating special bilateral trade and economic agreements with Presidents Chavez of Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia. Venezuela has agreed to refine Ecuadorian oil and provide financial assistance for social programs in Ecuador while the Bolivian government has concluded an agreement to import food commodities from small and medium producers in Ecuador.

For the moment Correa has not opted to join the People’s Trade Treaty signed last year between Cuba, Bolivia, and Venezuela. As Rene Baez, an economic analyst at the Catholic University of Ecuador, says, “The treaty is really a series of special accords and financial agreements and in that sense Ecuador is already an informal member of this alternative bloc.”

The financial news that captured recent headlines was the announcement by Economics Minister Ricardo Patino that Ecuador would make a scheduled debt payment of $135 million to foreign bond holders. Known for his long-held belief that paying off the foreign debt undercuts critical social spending programs and keeps Ecuador in a state of perpetual poverty, Patino’s decision came two days after he had announced that Ecuador would not make the $135 million payment.

Informed sources close to the government say that after high level discussions, Correa opted to pay the bond holders, preferring to concentrate on upcoming negotiations with international creditors over a reduction in the schedule of debt payments and on the annulment of part of the debt that resulted from corrupt practices by prior Ecuadorian governments and foreign creditors. As Rene Baez said, “The Correa government decided to be selective in the battles it is taking on for the moment. A default now would have caused an international reaction and possibly provoked a domestic financial crisis, just as the government is trying to get its legs under it.”

Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas in California. He has written extensively on Latin America, including The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice and (with Jim Tarbell) Imperial Overstretch: George W. Bush and the Hubris of Empire.