From left: Ecuador's President Rafael Correa, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Raul Castro.
HAVANA - According to the State-controlled Cuban website Periodico 26, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa told reporters last Tuesday that Ecuador will continue to boost cooperation with Cuba, stating, "I have to admit that this has been a one-way cooperation only, which entails a big debt for Ecuador to the Cuban people."
Correa, a far-left follower of Fidel Castro and a staunch ally of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, has moved Ecuador toward the “21st Century Socialism” model touted by Chavez, and has turned Ecuador’s foreign policy steadily away from cooperation with the United States.
Shortly after he was inaugurated in January of 2007, Correa forced the U.S. to leave the Manta Forward Operating Location (FOL), a critical air base used for monitoring the region for drug trafficking. Many former allies of Correa, including his brother, have accused the Ecuadorian president of collaborating with the Colombian narcoterrorist group known as the FARC.
Ecuador’s relations with U.S. ally Colombia have been strained since a FARC camp was bombed just inside Ecuador’s border with Colombia in 2008. In the computers and hard drives that were recovered after the raid, evidence was recovered that showed that Correa’s presidential campaign had received several hundred thousand dollars from the FARC during a critical time during the presidential race.
Correa denied any knowledge of the payment, but a video that was recovered later showed a FARC commander acknowledging the payment during a eulogy for a fallen FARC comrade. The video, found by police on the computer of a FARC terrorist, showed Jorge Briceno, the FARC's second in command at the time, reading the deathbed manifesto of the terrorist group’s founder, Pedro Antonio Marin, whose nom de guerre was Manuel Marulanda. Marulanda died March 26, 2008. The deathbed manifesto contained a confession that Colombian troops had seized electronic documents that was certain to compromise the FARC and their foreign friends, some of which Marulanda named as Rafael Correa and Hugo Chavez.
Correa’s increasing cooperation with the Castro regime, which has long provided training and refuge for members of the FARC and other international terrorist groups, provides further evidence that Correa has firmly planted his flag with the hemisphere’s anti-democratic elements.
A delegation of Ecuadorian congressmen, Enrique Herrería, Betty Amores, Paco Moncayo, Cesar Montufar and Leonardo Viteri, are scheduled to visit with members of the U.S. Congress to brief them on the deteriorating situation in their country this week. The congressmen will also hold a conference that is open to the public on Friday morning entitled “The State of Democracy in Ecuador.”
