Friday, October 01, 2010

Ecuador News Bulletin: Attempted Coup Defeated, President Rafael Correa Released, Addresses Nation on Television

President Rafael Correa in Address on the Defeated Reactionary Police Coup

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV6CCeCYFWI&feature=player_embedded
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South American leaders condemn attempted coup, kidnapping in Ecuador

By the CNN Wire Staff

South American presidents sending foreign ministers to Ecuador
Police actions were a "perfectly coordinated conspiracy," Ecuador's
president says Correa is rescued by the Ecuadorian army in a shootout
Schools to remain closed until a new mandate overturns decision

(CNN) -- A group of South American leaders Friday condemned an
"attempted coup" in Ecuador and praised troops for rescuing the
country's president in a shootout with police.

In a statement issued after an emergency meeting in Argentina, the
group of presidents and top officials pledged to send their foreign
ministers to Ecuador later Friday to show support for President Rafael
Correa, whom police allegedly kidnapped Thursday in an attempt to
force him to revoke a new law.

Hours after the rescue, Correa repeated his claim that compensation
issues were merely a pretext for police to kidnap him and try to
overthrow his government.

"It was an attempt and a perfectly coordinated conspiracy," he said
late Thursday.

Two people died in clashes between police and the military after
hundreds of troops arrived at a hospital outside the country's capital
to rescue Correa on Thursday night, Ecuador's Red Cross reported. At
least 88 people were injured in unrest throughout the country.

The violent standoff between police and troops lasted for nearly an
hour, said Freddy Paredes, a reporter for CNN affiliate Teleamazonas
who watched the shootout from a hospital room.

Correa, wearing a military helmet and a gas mask, escaped in a
wheelchair as gunfire rang out, he said.

"The police are very fearful, because the president has announced that
there will be no forgiveness nor forgetting for the police that were
insubordinate," Paredes said

Correa said late Thursday that those responsible would be held accountable.

"It has been a very sad day. I send a warm embrace to those who were
injured. I pray to God that nobody dies. Because of what happened, we
now need to purge our National Police," he said.

The disturbances occurred as Correa threatened to dissolve the
National Assembly over a dispute about several laws, including public
service and education.

Violence erupted early Thursday when police officers took to the
streets, claiming a new law would take away their bonuses and reduce
their compensation.

Government officials tried to quell the rebellion, insisting that the
security forces had been misinformed and warning that the nation's
democracy was in danger.

When the president tried to negotiate with them, the protest turned
violent. A tear gas grenade was thrown, and Correa was led away,
holding a gas mask to his face.

Correa, who is recovering from knee surgery, said angry police tried
to suffocate him.

"They made me bend my knee to the point that I could not walk," he
said Thursday night.

He stressed that a law passed Wednesday by the National Assembly did not cut compensation bonuses of police, as some had asserted, and he accused his political opponents of misinforming and manipulating the public about the legislation.

Thursday night, he said that police -- "not one of them" -- had read the law.

"When they demanded that I revoke the law to let me out, I told them,
'Don't waste time with me. I leave as president of a dignified nation,
or I leave as a cadaver," he said, his voice hoarse from shouting into
a microphone.

"Of course, the law will not be revoked," he added, stabbing his
finger into the air.

Speaking to a jubilant crowd outside the presidential palace, Correa
said former president Lucio Gutierrez and other political opponents
were behind the day's unrest -- which he repeatedly called an
attempted coup.

But in an interview earlier Thursday with CNN en Espanol, Gutierrez
sharply denied that claim.

Angry police said Thursday that they were overworked and underpaid.

"We work 14 hours a day," a uniformed officer said on Ecuador TV. "We are the ones who never protest."

Both of the men killed in Thursday night's clashes were police
officers, the Red Cross said.

Correa thanked his supporters -- in particular his bodyguards -- for
standing behind him and said the rebel police effort to oust him had
failed.

"Nobody has supported the police as much as this government, nobody has increased their salaries as much," he said. "After all we've done for the police, they did this!"

Correa said the actions of the police left him "profoundly sad, like
there was a knife in my back."

The government declared a one-week state of emergency Thursday
afternoon and put the military in charge of security. The military
said it will support the president and the nation's democratic
institutions.

The Union of South American Nations convened an emergency meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to discuss the situation. Presidents of many South American nations -- including Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Colombia's Juan Manuel Santos -- were in attendance.

After the meeting, Chavez accused the U.S of being behind the unrest in Ecuador.

"The Yankee extreme right is trying right now, through arms and
violence, to retake control of the continent," Chavez said.

Earlier Thursday U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a
statement expressing support for Correa.

"The United States deplores violence and lawlessness, and we express our full support for President Rafael Correa, and the institutions of democratic government in that country," she said.

In Ecuador, schools were closed and children were sent home around
noon Thursday. The schools will remain closed Friday until a new
mandate overturns the decision.

"We can guarantee the citizens that order and security are slowly
being re-established," a military official, Commandant Jorge Gross,
said on television at 6:30 p.m. (7:30 p.m. ET).

By dusk, officials reported that the situation appeared to be stabilizing.

Correa was elected president in 2006 and took office in 2007. The
socialist president earned a doctorate in economics from the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001.

CNN's Catherine E. Shoichet and Rafael Romo in Atlanta, Georgia, and journalist Martha Sandoval in Quito, Ecuador, contributed to this
report.

Find this article at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/10/01/ecuador.unrest


1 October 2010 Last updated at 05:22 ET

'No pardon' for Ecuador rebels, says President Correa

Ecuador's President Rafael Correa has said there will be "no pardon or
forgiveness" for those involved in a police rebellion against him.

Mr Correa had to be rescued by the army from a hospital in the
capital, Quito, after he was trapped there for several hours by
disaffected police.

The president was being treated after inhaling tear gas fired by
police who were protesting at austerity measures.

Two people died and dozens were injured in the unrest, officials said.

The president and his supporters said the police revolt over a new law
cutting benefits for public servants amounted to an attempted coup.

A state of emergency has been declared.

Mr Correa said there were be "a deep cleansing of the national
police", and that he would "not forgive nor forget" what had happened.

The commander of Ecuador's police force has since resigned, a police
spokesman said on Friday.

South American heads of state held an emergency meeting in Argentina and called for those behind the revolt to be tried and punished.

The sight of two key state institutions, the national police force and
the military, exchanging gunfire will be one which worries many
ordinary Ecuadorians, and reminds them of the past.

Ecuador's history is peppered with violent street uprisings which
often ended with the removal of the head of state. In this instance,
there was to be no such outcome, but it was a sign of how polarised
life in Ecuador has become in recent years, with Mr Correa dividing
opinion across the country.

The initial reason for the protests -austerity measures - was almost
lost among the high drama of the presidential siege. But that, and
other issues such as an impending decision on whether to dissolve
parliament and call an early general election, are facing Mr Correa
when he recovers from what was, without doubt, his toughest day since taking office.

Mr Correa, a 47-year-old US-trained economist, was elected in 2006 and won a second term in 2009 - despite a decision to default on $3.2bn of global bonds which caused widespread fiscal problems for the government.

'Kill the president'

Mr Correa had to be rescued after the hospital he had been taken to
was surrounded by rebel policemen.

Mr Correa was smuggled out of the hospital under cover of darkness as a gun battle raged between troops and the rebels.

He said he had told his captors he would "come out as the president of
a worthy country or... as a corpse".

Speaking to his supporters outside the presidential palace later, Mr
Correa said he hoped the events of the day would serve "as an example to those who want to bring a change and stop the citizens' revolution without going through the polls".

"I give so much thanks to those heroes who accompanied me through this hard journey," the Reuters news agency reported him saying.

"Despite the danger, being surrounded, ministers and politicians came,
to die if necessary. With that bravery, with that loyalty, nothing can
defeat us."

The drama began on Thursday morning when members of the armed forces and police angry at the austerity measures occupied several barracks and set up road blocks across the country. Police also took control of Quito's international airport for several hours.

In an emotional speech to soldiers from Quito's main barracks,
President Correa tore at his shirt and said: "If you want to kill the
president, here he is. Kill him, if you want to. Kill him if you are
brave enough."

Moments later he was forced to flee the barracks wearing a gas mask
when tear gas was fired by the protesters, and he was taken to
hospital.

Mr Correa has blamed the Patriotic Society Party (PSP), led by Lucio
Gutierrez, for fomenting the unrest. In a television interview, Mr
Gutierrez said the accusation was "totally false".

On Wednesday, one minister had said the president was considering
disbanding Congress because members of his Country Alliance had
threatened to block proposals to shrink the bureaucracy.

Ecuador's two-year-old constitution allows the president to declare an
impasse and rule by decree until new elections. However, such a move
would have to be approved by the Constitutional Court.

The BBC's Will Grant, in Venezuela, says Mr Correa could still choose
to rule by decree in an effort to stay in control in the immediate
future.

Are you in Ecuador? Have you witnessed any protests? Tell us your experiences.


Coup Attempt in Ecuador Is a Result of Sec. Clinton's Cowardice in Honduras

Posted by Al Giordano - September 30, 2010 at 5:49 pm

By Al Giordano

Oh, crap. Another year, another coup in Latin America. And while
today's attempt by police forces in Ecuador went so far as to fire
tear gas at elected president Rafael Correa, the military brass in the
South American country have sided with the democratic order - its top
general is on TV right now strongly backing the elected government -
and this one isn't likely to go as well for the anti-democracy forces
as last year's did in Honduras.

First, because the Ecuadorean people are far more advanced in social
and community organization than their counterparts in Honduras were
last year. Second, because the events last year in Honduras caused
other center-left governments in the hemisphere to prepare for what
everybody saw would be more coup attempts against them in more
countries.

Additionally, we can expect in the coming hours that the police
leaders responsible for todays events - you don't need to understand
Spanish to get a pretty good idea of what went down this morning by
watching the above video - will be rounded up and brought to justice,
as would happen in any other country, including the United States.

But, kind reader, do you know why this is even happening? Because the same unholy alliance of Latin American oligarchs who can't stomach the rising wave of democracy in their countries - from the ex-Cubans of Miami to the ex-Venezuelans and others who have joined them in recent years - along with international crime organizations seeking new refuges and members of extreme rightist groups in the United States and elsewhere, saw their scheme work in 2009 in Honduras and took note of how quickly, after US President Barack Obama denounced the Honduras coup, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began playing both sides of it.

It was this newspaper, through reporter Bill Conroy's investigations,
that broke the story last August that the State Department-controlled
Millennium Challenge Corporation had poured extraordinary amounts of money into Honduras in the months leading up to the June 29, 2009 coup d'etat. And in story after story, we demonstrated with documented fact how Clinton's Millennium Challenge Corporation went so far as to violate the ban on US aid to the Honduran coup regime. Clinton's later endorsement of farcical presidential elections and her over-reaching attempts to pretend nothing had happened in Honduras are precisely the signals that were received by today's coup plotters in Ecuador when they made a run at toppling the democratic government there.

At present, thankfully, the coup in Ecuador seems more likely to fail
than to succeed. And there will be hell to pay for those behind it.
But it didn't have to get that far. That only happened because, last
year, the US Secretary of State pulled off a kind of "silent coup" in
US foreign policy while her commander in chief was buried with the
urgent domestic tasks stemming off economic collapse and, as everyone knows, small nations get little attention almost always anyway.

This time, the White House would do well to put a much shorter leash
on its Secretary of State, because her horrendous and unforgivable
anti-democratic behavior regarding the Honduras coup only fueled, and continues to fuel, understandable speculation that if the United
States doesn't walk its talk about opposing coups d'etat, then it must
have been an active participant in plotting it. The mishandling of the
Honduras situation last year did lasting damage to President Obama's
stated hopes to turn the page in US relations with its closest
neighbors after decades of abuse and neglect. A single misstep by
Secretary Clinton today and in the future regarding the events in
Ecuador, like those she repeatedly made regarding Honduras, now that the hemispheric coup plotters have moved from Central America to
larger South America, will further erode the cause of democracy in the
entire hemisphere. I don't trust her. Nobody south of the border does.
And nor should you, Mr. President.

Update: Narco News has translated today's Statement from the Office of President Rafael Correa.

Update II: If it holds, this will be the first time in the history of
the hemisphere that the Armed Forces of a country stood up against a
coup d'etat from the first moment. Now, that would be democracy at
work.

Update III: The situation in Ecuador today is further complicated by
the disillusion that the very social forces that elected President
Correa have with his actions in office. The CONAIE (Federation of
Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) is the leading national
indigenous movement with strong alliances with labor and other social
forces) held a press conference today to say that it is neither with
the police forces nor with President Correa. The CONAIE and its
hundreds of thousands of participants is not only responsible for
Correa's election, but its mobilizations caused the rapid-fire
resignations of previous presidents of Ecuador in this century.

The situation thus also shines a light on the growing rift in the
hemisphere between the statist left and the indigenous left and
related autonomy and labor movements. The CONAIE is basically saying to Correa, "you want our support, then enact the agenda you were elected on."

Whether one sees this as a dangerous game of brinkmanship or something that actually strengthens Correa's hand by placing him in the middle zone ideologically, it is worth seeing this at face value and beware of getting led astray by some of the usual suspect conspiracy theorists of the statist left who are predictably out there barking that the CONAIE is somehow an agent of imperialism, dropping rumors of US AID funding but never seeming to exhibit the hard evidence. Sigh. What Johnny-One-Notes!

They wouldn't know nuance if it slapped them in the face. For them, you either line up lock-step with THE STATE (if it is "their" state) or you're a running dog of capitalism. That kind of Stalinist purge mentality should have died with the previous century.

The CONAIE's grievances happen to be very legitimate. Of course, they do not justify a coup d'etat, but the CONAIE is not participating in
or supporting the coup d'etat. It is saying to Correa; we'll have your
back, when you have ours. This, like the Armed Forces support for
Correa, is also a historical first in the region. And the plot thickens...

Update IV: A boilerplate statement from the US State Department:

We are closely following events in Ecuador. The United States deplores violence and lawlessness and we express our full support for President Rafael Correa, and the institutions of democratic government in that country.

We urge all Ecuadorians to come together and to work within the
framework of Ecuador’s democratic institutions to reach a rapid and
peaceful restoration of order.

Now let's see if they walk that talk...

Update V: 9:30 p.m. Quito: Ecuadorean military troops have just
rescued President Correa from the police hospital where he was
sequestered all day. Looks like it was a pretty violent battle, but
multiple media on the scene are reporting that the president is safe
and the Armed Forces stuck with the democratic order.

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