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Last Updated: Mar 25, 2008 - 10:28:34 AM |
The U.S. air force was granted a 10-year concession in 1999
to use the base, located in the port city of Manta on Ecuador’s northern
Pacific coast, in its counter-drug trafficking activities in the region.
A high-level Ecuadorean military officer, who preferred to
remain anonymous, told IPS that "a large proportion of senior
officers" in Ecuador share "the conviction that the United States was
an accomplice in the attack" launched Mar. 1 by the Colombian military on
a FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) camp in Ecuador, near the
Colombian border.
FARC’s international spokesman Raúl Reyes and 24 other
people were killed in the bombing raid, which prompted Quito to break off
diplomatic relations with Colombia, although ties were restored several days
later.
"Since Plan Colombia was launched in 2000, a strategic
alliance between the United States and Colombia has taken shape, first to
combat the insurgents and later to involve neighbouring countries in that
war," said the officer. "What is happening today is a consequence of
that."
Plan Colombia is a U.S.-financed and supported
counterinsurgency and anti-drug strategy carried out by Bogotá.
The information gathered by IPS from military and
diplomatic sources indicates that the Manta air base played a role in locating,
and carrying out reconnaissance of, the FARC camp in Ecuador.
Ecuadorean Defence Minister Wellington Sandoval said there
should be an investigation of whether the Manta air base was used for the
attack on the rebel camp in Ecuador. According to the agreement signed by
Washington and Quito, it is the Ecuadorean armed forces that should carry out
such a probe.
The Manta air base lease clearly stipulates that the base
can only be used for counter-narcotics operations.
Sandoval said he cannot provide any information until an
investigation has been conducted.
The military source who spoke to IPS said that what should
be verified "above all are the flights from the base in the 20 days prior
to the bombing, who was on them, the routes they took, and what they were
investigating. This data should be complemented by other inquiries and
information."
On Mar. 13, Ecuadorean Foreign Minister María Isabel
Salvador said she had had "a conversation with (U.S.) Ambassador Linda
Jewell who ensured us that the planes (at the base) were not involved in any
way" in the bombing of the FARC camp.
But the military source said that "the technology
used, first to locate the target, in other words the camp, and later to attack
it, was from the United States."
Sandoval declared that "equipment that the Latin
American armed forces do not have" was used in the Mar. 1 bombing.
"They dropped around five 'smart bombs'," the
kind used by the United States in the First Gulf War (1991), "with
impressive precision and a margin of error of just one metre, at night, from
planes travelling at high speeds," said the minister.
The military source said that "an attack with smart
bombs requires pilots who have experience in such operations, which means U.S.
pilots. That’s why I think they did the job and later told the Colombians ‘now
go in and find the bodies’, which is when Colombian helicopters and troops
showed up" at the site of the raid.
According to the official version of events that the
Colombian government gave an Organisation of American States (OAS) fact-finding
commission that visited both countries, 10 "conventional" bombs were
dropped from five Brazilian-made Super Tucano aircraft and three U.S.-made A-37
planes.
The A-37s dropped bombs guided by GPS (Global Positioning
System) and the five Super Tucanos have the technological means to launch bombs
at targets with a five-metre margin of error, said the OAS delegation’s report.
But according to the sources who spoke to IPS, the U.S.
role in the incident could have been even greater.
The military officer said the bombing raid in Ecuadorean
air space was actually led by "U.S. pilots, possibly from DynCorp," a
U.S.-based private military contractor that has contracts under Plan Colombia.
The aircraft took off from the Tres Esquinas air base in
the southern Colombian department of Caquetá, said the source.
"The planes used to fumigate coca crops or to attack
the guerrillas are piloted by serving members of the U.S. military or (former)
military men at the service of companies like DynCorp," said the officer.
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said on Mar. 15 that his
government would not allow "any foreign soldier, whether regular or
irregular, to affect the soil of our fatherland. That is why there will be no
more foreign bases after 2009."
U.S. usage rights for Manta expire on Nov. 12, 2009.
A committee in the Constituent Assembly that is rewriting
the Ecuadorean constitution approved the chapter on territorial sovereignty on
Mar. 17.
One of the articles states that "Ecuador is a
territory of peace. The establishment of foreign military bases, or foreign
installations for military purposes, is not permitted. National military bases
cannot be leased to foreign security forces."
In its refusal to renew the air base lease, Ecuador can
argue "many causes: direct or indirect participation (by U.S. forces from
Manta) in the bombing; negligence for failure to detect the FARC camp with
their technology, first of all, and the attack, in second place; and, in case
they did detect the camp and the raid, for failing to inform authorities in the
partner country, Ecuador," said a diplomatic source who spoke with IPS on
condition of anonymity.
Another reason that could be set forth is the direct
support that the U.S. Southern Command, under which the U.S. armed forces at
the Manta air base operate, has provided the Colombian military.
Admiral James Stavridis, the commander of the Southern
Command, told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on Mar. 6 that he was
monitoring the movement of Ecuadorean and Venezuelan troops to the Colombian
border.
Stavridis said that with continuous U.S. support, Colombia
has won "hard-fought successes" in the armed conflict. He added that
"this key strategic ally" was making irreversible progress towards
peace and against "terrorism."
He also told the Senate Committee that the FARC had been
reduced from 17,500 guerrillas in 2002 to around 9,000 today.
In July 2001, retired colonel Fausto Cobo, former director
of the Ecuadorean army’s Escuela de Guerra (war collage), had told IPS that
"Manta, for the purposes of Plan Colombia," is a "U.S. aircraft
carrier, on land."
By April 2001, when work began on the expansion of the
Manta air strip, an average of 100 troops were taking part in up to three
missions a day in F-3 reconnaissance planes.
A diplomatic source from the United States told Britain’s
Financial Times at the time that by October the number would go up by 200, and
by 200 more within the following few months.
After the expansion of the air strip, bigger, more
sophisticated aircraft began to be used for reconnaissance missions.
Manta is one of the four "forward operating
locations" (FOLs), along with Curaçao, Aruba and El Salvador, that make up
the U.S. network of counter-narcotics bases in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In August 2006, the Expreso de Guayaquil newspaper reported
that Colombian pilots were operating alongside Ecuadorean pilots on flights out
of the Manta air base.
The commander of an Airborne Warning and Control System
(AWACS) squadron based out of Manta, Rich Boyd, told the Guayaquil newspaper
that one of the AWACS aircraft was operated by a Colombian air force officer.
But Boyd said that each country's sensitive and
confidential information is protected, because the Colombian officer exits the
cockpit when the plane is in Ecuadorean air space, and the Ecuadorean pilot
leaves when the plane overflies Colombia.
According to Boyd, three of the U.S. military’s 27 AWACS
were at the Manta base. Each one has a price tag of one billion dollars --
nearly double the entire 2005 budget of the Ecuadorean air force.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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