Ecuador In Chaos: Possible Coup Following Controversial Police Benefits Changes

Ecuador is in chaos after the Ecuadorian President and Congress adopted new benefits rules for police officers. Funky stuff going down in Ecuador. Ecuadorian President Correa issued a state of emergency and claimed that there was a coup attempt. This all started because police are pissed that the President tried to reduce their benefits and rioted. Some threw tear gas, and the President was overcome by the fumes and taken to a hospital. The country was then thrown in to chaos as the police demonstrated:

President Rafael Correa was taken to a hospital after being overcome by tear gas thrown by rebellious officers, local media reported. 

Correa later declared a state of emergency and said he was considering dissolving a deadlocked Congress. “It’s a coup attempt," he said in an interview with Radio Publica de Ecuador.

The rebellious officers fired tear gas and burned tires after taking over barracks in the capital Quito, Guayaquil and other cities. They also set up roadblocks that cut off highway access to the capital.

Schools shut down in Quito and many businesses closed due to the absence of police protection.
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The striking police were angered by a law passed by Congress on Wednesday that would end the practice of giving members of Ecuador's military and police medals and bonuses with each promotion. It would also extend from five to seven years the usual period required for before a subsequent promotion.

Police barricaded the airport and roads and chaos has ensued throughout the country. Soldiers had to storm the hospital where President Correa was being treated for exposure to tear gas following yesterday's police riots. Two police officers were killed in the fighting.

Ecuador was under a state of siege Friday, with the military in charge of public order, after soldiers rescued President Rafael Correa from a hospital where he'd been surrounded by police who also roughed him up and tear-gassed him.

Correa and his ministers called Thursday's revolt — in which insurgents also paralyzed the nation with airport shutdowns and highway blockades — an attempt to overthrow him and not just a simple insurrection over a new law that would cut benefits for public servants.

Two policemen were killed when Ecuador's army stormed the hospital, the Red Cross said.

The President has addressed the Ecuadorian people by excoriating the actions of the police:



He's vowing to go after those responsible for the rioting. The Guardian details the circumstances of Correa's hospitalization and rescue:

The rescue was the climax to a dramatic day in which a police revolt over austerity measures spiralled out of control, leaving airports and motorways blocked, borders sealed, the president assaulted and businesses looted.

The Ecuadorean police chief, Freddy Martinez, resigned this afternoon after failing to stop the rebellion, a spokesman for the force told Reuters.

The protests were triggered by a law passed by Congress on Wednesday that would end the practice of giving medals and bonuses with each promotion, part of Correa's effort to save costs and slim bureaucracy.

Ecuador is one of South America's most volatile countries, with a tradition of protests, but nobody expected to see scores of uniformed men overrunning the main airport of the capital, Quito, forcing its closure and the declaration of a state of emergency.

It was just the beginning. Hundreds of rank and file soldiers and police took over barracks in Quito, Guayaquil and other cities. They also set up roadblocks of burning tyres and occupied Congress, shouting "respect our rights!" and "long civil war!".

Smoke wafted over Quito and sporadic looting left several banks and supermarkets ransacked. A state TV channel showed police trying to enter its studio. The channel said the police shattered windows and tried to cut the power supply.

Correa, a 47-year-old economist with a firebrand style, went to a regimental barracks to try to negotiate with protesters but was surrounded, punched, doused with hot water and almost blinded with teargas.

FARC's Collapsing?

Hot Air notes that one of the leaders of the terrorist group FARC has surrendered to Colombian officials and urged the remaining FARC members to surrender. That's not good news for [T]hugo Chavez and Venezuela, whose largesse found its way into FARC's coffers and computers.

The commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia’s Force 47 told reporters in Bogota Monday — a day after surrendering — that “the solution is not through war. There must be dialogue.”

Nelly Avila Moreno, 45, whose nom de guerre was Karina, said she and her longtime male companion made the decision jointly to abandon the FARC group, based in the jungle, at 5 a.m. Sunday.

She said pressure from Colombian soldiers had been key to their decision, and she called on her fellow rebels to follow her example.

“I invite them to change the sensibility that is among the guerrillas,” she said, seated by her companion, who said nothing during the news conference.

Colombia has not only taken the fight to FARC, but has taken the fight from FARC - killing, capturing, and forcing the surrender of terrorist group leaders has a way of doing that. Even more importantly, the capture of intel, such as those computer files, provides even more intel to be used to capture still more terrorist cells and shut down FARC operations. Each success breeds even more success.

No wonder Chavez is braying loudly that the computers don't show anything and is trying to make hay over the claim that a US aircraft entered Venezuelan airspace without permission. He's trying to take the heat off his regime.

Meanwhile, the LA Times reports that Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) wants to hold hearings on the computer files. The LAT curiously claims that the computer files have not been independently confirmed. That's curious given that Interpol has certified the more than 37,000 records as being authentic.

Last week, Interpol -- the world's top police agency -- issued a report certifying the authenticity of 37,872 computer files from Colombia's FARC guerrillas containing hundreds of references to Venezuela's and Ecuador's active support for the armed rebel group. Chávez and Correa reacted as they always do, with insults and accusations against the United States. As he did a few months ago when a Venezuelan delegation was caught trying to smuggle $800,000 in cash into Argentina for his political allies there, Chávez claimed the Interpol investigation into the three laptops and two external drives seized by Colombia's armed forces in a March 1 raid into a FARC camp in Ecuador was "a circus." He called Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble a "mafioso" and a "vagabond."

Why would the LAT make that claim or are they simply playing semantics over confirmation and authenticity, unless they were shilling for Chavez?

Pulling Strings

Venezuelan strongman [T]hugo Chavez continues to beat the drums of war with his neighbors and his latest actions to support the terrorist group FARC, which operates in neighboring Colombia, threatens to break into a wider war. Chavez is sending troops to the border in support of FARC, which would be a very strong sign that Chavez is clearly lining up with terrorist groups and seeking to destabilize his neighbors for his own benefit.

Colombia had gone after FARC troops that went into Ecuador, which happens to be led by a Chavez sympathizer. Chavez is trying to claim that he's simply protecting the international order and preventing further harm against a sovereign nation, all the while Colombia gets screwed for trying to protect itself against ongoing narco-terrorism by FARC.

The crisis erupted after Colombia bombed and sent troops inside Ecuador in a weekend raid that killed a Colombian rebel leader in his jungle camp in a major blow to Latin America's oldest guerrilla insurgency.

Governments from France to Brazil sought to defuse the crisis in the Andes, where Washington ally Colombian President Alvaro Uribe faces left-wing leaders fiercely opposed to U.S. free-market proposals for the region.

Traffic was normal in San Antonio at the main border crossing point between Venezuela and Colombia and while Venezuela and Ecuador said they had reinforced their borders, there was no immediate sign of any mobilization.

Venezuela state TV offered blanket coverage of the crisis but it showed no images of tanks, planes or troops moving and no other media reported military movements in the border area.

Colombia said it would not send extra troops to its frontiers with Venezuela and Ecuador.

Bogota justified its operation on Monday by saying international law allows such actions against "terrorists" and accused Ecuador of permitting the Marxist FARC rebels to take refuge in its territory.

"We have never been a country for ventures either in politics or in military matters," Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos told a U.N. human rights commission in Geneva. "We have always been respectful of the principal of non-interference."

But Ecuador, a close ally of the larger, richer Venezuela, said Colombia deliberately violated its sovereignty and urged Latin American governments to pressure Bogota so that it does not repeat its "aggression."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who is struggling to fix chronic food shortages in the OPEC nation, sent tanks to the border and threatened to counterattack with Russian-made jets should Colombia unleash a similar raid in Venezuela.

Chavez, who urged governments to side against Colombia, also closed his embassy in Bogota and fellow leftist Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa expelled Colombia's ambassador from Quito. Chavez and Correa both called conservative Uribe a liar.

With Chavez warning war could break out, there was immediate impact on the economies of the three Andean nations which share active trade ties.

UPDATE:
Colombia, for its part, has filed a complaint with the UN against those nations harboring FARC, especially Ecuador. Colombia also claims to have uncovered documents in a raid against a FARC camp in Ecuador that shows there to be ties between FARC and the Ecuadorian government.

Colombia, after bombing a rebel camp in Ecuador last weekend, filed a complaint with the United Nations asking neighboring countries to stop harboring terrorist organizations.

Documents found by Colombian troops at the destroyed camp show ties between the rebels and the government of Ecuador's President Rafael Correa, Colombian police Chief Oscar Naranjo said late last night.

The links, if proven, would violate a UN Security Council resolution which calls on countries to ``deny refuge to those that finance, plan or commit acts of terrorism,'' and to prevent such elements from ``using their respective territories for that end,'' Colombia's Vice President Francisco Santos told UN members at a meeting in Geneva.

``On our continent there are those who intentionally violate this obligatory mandate,'' Santos said, without naming any countries.

The documents that outlined the ties belonged to Raul Reyes, reputedly the second in command of Colombia's biggest guerrilla group, who was killed March 1 in by the Colombian attack in Ecuadorean territory, Naranjo said.

UPDATE:
It gets better than that. Columbia is claiming that Chavez sent $300 million to the FARC terrorists.

Colombia’s police chief, Gen. Oscar Naranjo, said documents recovered from a slain rebel leader’s computer indicate Chavez recently sent $300 million to Colombian guerrillas. He said another document indicates the rebels sent money to Chavez when he was a jailed coup leader more than a decade ago.

Naranjo said the files were recovered from a laptop owned by the rebel known as Raul Reyes, who was killed Saturday in a Colombian commando raid on a camp just across the border in Ecuador.

“A note recovered from Raul Reyes speaks of how grateful Chavez was for the 100 million pesos (about $150,000 at the time) that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, delivered to Chavez when he was in prison,” Naranjo told a news conference in Bogota.