As more details are released, the more last week’s events in Ecuador are looking like an organized attempt to ouster Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa. We begin this morning with the AP, which says at least 46 police officers were arrested Wednesday for participating in last week’s police rebellion against President Correa last Thursday. [A lawyer for some of the officers says 57 individuals are being held. Quito’s El Comercio, meanwhile, reports 260 officers have been “processed” for insubordination]. The most high profile of those arrests was retired army Maj. Fidel Araujo. Araujo, say reports, is an ally of Lucio Gutierrez’s Patriotic Society. He has been formally accused of instigating rebellion, and, according to AFP, on Wednesday a judge ordered Araujo be detained “preventatively” for 90 days.
Ecuador’s Interior Minister also cited audio recordings as evidence in making Wednesday arrests. As reported yesterday, those tapes include some officials ordering their subordinates to “kill Correa.” CNN has more on those recordings, released by the Andes news outlet this week.
Meanwhile, yesterday’s reporting on pay raises to sectors of the military following the coup suggests that military support for President Correa may not have been as unwavering as once appeared. IPS confirms those suspicions today reporting that it took a great deal of convincing on the part of the Correa government to persuade the air force and navy into finally backing the president last Thursday. IPS:
“A high-level government source who asked to remain anonymous told IPS that ‘while the army showed loyalty to Correa from the very start, things were more complicated in the other two branches, and it was necessary to negotiate.’”
The Ecuadorean Defense Minister, Javier Ponce, tells the news agency he spent all of Thursday negotiating with the navy and air force due to “problems of misinformation” (related to the new public services law) which spread through the two branches of the armed forces. Regarding Tuesday’s sectoral pay raises, Ponce, like other officials before him, rejects the notion that they represent a “quid pro quo” offered to members of the military who supported the president. Such raises have been under consideration since August, he maintained. But an army colonel, who wished to remain anonymous, does tell IPS that:
“It was obviously one of the measures demanded in Thursday's negotiations with the military brass. (The authorities) had offered the salary increases several times, but they were taking too long to implement them, and there was discontent.”
Regarding the occupation of Quito airport by the air force following the police uprising last Thursday, President Correa now says that incident was not related to the coup-objectives of some members of the police. “That was a peaceful, apolitical demonstration,” Correa told foreign correspondents Wednesday.
Nevertheless, Correa insisted Wednesday that the threat against his government has not ended. Those words follow an interview given by Vice President Lenin Moreno to Argentina’s Clarín, in which the VP admitted for the first time that he was approached last Thursday by police officials who asked if he would accept the presidency if Correa were to be toppled. [Lenin Moreno says he quickly rejected that proposal]. In addition, OAS Sec. General José Miguel Insulza, visiting Rafael Correa yesterday, now seems thoroughly convinced that there was a coup attempt last week. In an official statement, Insulza praised the Ecuadorean people for “rejecting en masse the coup d’etat.” And, from Washington, US President Barack Obama also telephoned Correa Wednesday, indicating the United States support for “Correa and Ecuador’s democratic institutions.”
Moving to other stories:
· In Mexico, the AP reports that President Felipe Calderon has sent Congress his proposal for dissolving the country’s municipal police forces. Under the president’s new plan, security in each of Mexico’s 31 states would be rebuilt under a unified state force, controlled by respective state governors. Calderon’s goal: “to reduce corruption by eliminating hundreds of small police departments whose officers are poorly educated and badly paid” – as well as notoriously corrupt. But according to LA Times the approval process could be a long and arduous one. The plan “has the support of the nation's governors and the main opposition party, making congressional passage likely,” says the paper. But it would also require “amending the Mexican Constitution” – a process that would need to be approved by at least 17 of the country’s 31 state legislatures. Already Mexico’s mayors have come out against the idea of a “unified command,” arguing that the idea ignores “successful efforts to professionalize and equip police in some cities.” [Mayors would also lose significant parts of their budgets]. Other experts, the Times reports, have argued that “concentrating police authority at the state level could make it easier for criminal organizations to control entire regions by buying off or intimidating state commanders.”
· On new US-Mexico cooperation related to drug violence, the AP says a “gun-tracing program touted as a key deterrent to weapons-smuggling” may at last begin being implemented by the US and Mexico. The problem? It has only taken three years to get the program up and running. An ATF official said Wednesday that the delays have been due to the fact that, in the AP’s words, “not enough Mexican investigators had been trained on or had access to the electronic database designed to trace illegally seized weapons to origins in the U.S.” A new memo of understanding signed Wednesday between the US and Mexico seeks to increase training in the coming months. According to the Washington Post’s report on problems with current weapons tracing cooperation, “Mexican prosecutors have not made a single major arms trafficking case.” The Post continues:
“In the past four years, Mexico has submitted information about more than 74,000 guns seized south of the border that the government suspects were smuggled from the United States. But much of the data is so incomplete as to be useless and has not helped authorities bust the gunrunners who supply the Mexican mafias with their vast armories.”
· In Haiti Wednesday, former President Bill Clinton demanded that the US finally begin the flow of aid to the quake-ravaged country. Thus far, says Clinton, international donors have delivered only $732 million of a promised $5.3 billion in funds for 2010-11 (in addition to debt relief). [Disbursements by foreign donors have, however, increased from 18 to 30 percent in recent weeks]. As the AP notes, “most notably absent is the United States, which has yet to deliver any of its promised $1.15 billion.” Without naming names, Clinton singled out Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn who has put a hold on a congressional aid authorization bill because of his objection to “a $5 million provision to create the office of a senior Haiti coordinator of U.S. policy.” According to the Miami Herald, the United States did provide $120 million to a World Bank-managed Haiti trust fund this week. Those monies are expected to go towards “education, rubble removal and housing” in Haiti, as well as to “help rebuild the state university hospital in Port-au-Prince.”
· And with an opinion on upcoming Haitian elections, Robert Naiman at the Huffington Post writes on a congressional letter being circulated by congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) “urging Secretary Clinton to make a clear statement that elections must include ‘all eligible political parties’ and ‘access to voting for all Haitians, including those displaced by the earthquake.’”
· Final results from Lima’s mayoral race are still not in – and it could be weeks before they are. With 73.8% of votes totaled, the left-leaning candidate Susana Villarán maintains a 1% edge over her opponent, Lourdes Flores. But some 26.2% of total votes are now being scrutinized by electoral officials for irregularities, reports the AFP. A bit more at the Economist.
· EFE reports on Mauricio Funes’s trip to Havana this week – a visit which, according to the Salvadoran president, sought to repair “the historic sin” of defining “foreign policy from the standpoint of ideological lines and not on the basis of the interests of the nation.”
· From three human rights groups – the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS), Conectas Derechos Humanos and Corporación Humanas – news that Argentine jurist Juan Méndez has been named the UN’s new Special Rapporteur on Torture. Méndez is currently president emeritus of the International Center for Transitional Justice and visiting professor at American University’s Washington College of Law.
· Three conservative opinions on Latin America from this week. José Cardenas in FP on Ecuador; John Bolton takes another stab at Latin American affairs, writing on the drug wars; and Roger Noriega in FP on Chavez and nuclear issues.
· And finally, Luis Hernandez Navarro, the opinion editor at Mexico’s La Jornada, with a balanced “big-picture” appraisal of the landscape of current Latin American politics – particularly the achievements and shortcomings of the Latin American left over the last decade, in the Guardian.
No comments:
Post a Comment