Word: correa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Colombian military made its controversial incursion into neighboring Ecuador two months ago, it may well have removed more than just a camp full of leftist Colombian guerrillas. The raid may wind up taking out a $70 million U.S. Air Force base as well. On Monday, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa said he's "convinced" the U.S. aided Colombia in the March 1 attack and reiterated his suspicions that U.S. intelligence agencies had infiltrated Ecuador's armed forces and police - remarks that seem to all but assure that the small South American nation will not renew the lease for the U.S. antinarcotics...
...Correa, an ally of Venezuela's left-wing, anti-U.S. President Hugo Chavez, has made no secret of wanting to give the Manta base the boot since he became President last year. He views the facility - which the U.S. Air Force calls a Forward Operating Location (FOL) and not a full-fledged military base - as an affront to Ecuadorian sovereignty. Many if not most Ecuadorians agree, if only because of what they consider the questionable circumstances under which it was established in 1999. That year the U.S. failed to reach a deal with Panama on continued...
...Colombian incursion, which sparked an Andean diplomatic crisis, appears to have given Correa the leverage he was looking for to make sure Ecuador's National Assembly doesn't renew that lease. "I'm convinced that the United States provided information and cutting-edge technologies without which the [March 1] attack wouldn't have been possible," Correa said on a visit to France this week. In addition to breaking off diplomatic relations with Colombia since the March raid, Correa has also alleged that U.S. spies have burrowed into his military and security forces. Last month he purged his top military brass...
...FARC on civilian targets or sensitive infrastructure like its oil pipelines. It refuses to list the FARC as a terrorist organization, as the U.S. and the European Union do; but it also won't recognize the rebels as legitimate belligerents, as left-wing Venezuelan President Chavez, a Correa ally, urges the region to do. Correa knows that Uribe, a key U.S. ally, is likely to keep his military's border pressure strong while George W. Bush is still the U.S. President, says Freddy Rivera, a security researcher at FLACSO University in Quito, Ecuador's capital. Ecuador isn't just neighbors...
...Thursday meeting with foreign journalists, Correa reiterated that the lucrative coca trade is attractive among the remote and economically threadbare border communities. "A large part of the population, above all in Amazonia, on [both] the Ecuadorian and Colombian sides support the FARC," he said, "because the Colombian and Ecuadorian [governments] don't reach them, and the ones who provide jobs, in drug cultivation, etcetera, are the FARC...