Ecuador’s Leader Purges Military and Moves to Expel American Base

Chafing at ties between American intelligence agencies and Ecuadorean military officials, President Rafael Correa is purging the armed forces of top commanders and pressing ahead with plans to cast out more than 100 members of the American military from an air base here in this coastal city.

 

Mr. Correa — who this month dismissed his defense minister, army chief of intelligence and commanders of the army, air force and joint chiefs — said that Ecuador's intelligence systems were "totally infiltrated and subjugated to the C.I.A." He accused senior military officials of sharing intelligence with Colombia, the Bush administration's top ally in Latin America.

The dismissals point to a willingness by Mr. Correa, an ally of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, to aggressively confront Ecuador's military, a bastion of political and economic power in this coup-prone country of 14 million people. Mr. Correa's moves mark a clear break with his predecessors, illustrating his wager that Ecuador's institutions may finally be resilient enough to carry out 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 here in Manta has been the most prominent American military outpost in South America and an important facet of the United States' drug-fighting efforts. Some 100 antinarcotics flights leave here each month to survey the Pacific in an elaborate cat-and-mouse game with drug traffickers bound for the United States.

But many Ecuadoreans have chafed at the American presence and the perceived challenge to the country's sovereignty, and Mr. Correa promised during his campaign in 2006 to close the outpost.

So far Ecuador's armed forces, arbiters in the ouster of three presidents in the last 11 years, have bent to the will of Mr. 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 the FARC.

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