School Of Americas Graduate In Ecuador Coup
October 7th, 2010
It seems that a graduate of the School of the Americas has been involved in the coup attempt in Ecuador. Just as the leader of the coup in Honduras was a graduate. The USA seems to be continuing in its regime change policy. Another area where the Obama administration is a chip off the old imperialist block.
This is from Presente!
"SOA Graduate Involved in Coup Attempt in Ecuador
Written by Lisa Sullivan
A School of the Americas graduate has been charged for last Thursday's unsuccessful coup attempt in Ecuador. Colonel Manuel E. Rivadeneira Tello, a graduate of the SOA's combat arms training course, is one of three police officials being investigated for negligence, rebellion and attempted assassination of the president.
Rivadeneira was the commander of the barracks where President Correa was attacked by protesting police. The injured Correa was taken to a police hospital were he held hostage by police who threatened to kill him if he escaped. After 12 hours, 500 elite forces stormed the hospital and organized a fiery rescue. By the end of the day 4 people lay dead and over 200 wounded.
This is the second coup attempt led by SOA graduates in a little over a year. The June 2009 in Honduras led by SOA graduates General Vasquez Velasquez and General Prince Suazo was successful in overthrowing President Manuel Zelaya. At the time, President Correa expressed concern that this opened the possibility of future coups in the continent acknowledging that he might be a possible target..
The defense of Ecuador's democracy was achieved by its citizens, who poured into the streets in defense of their popular president. Their voices were joined by an international chorus of support for Correa, including the OAS, UNASUR and Secretary of State Clinton. Ecuadorians, however, were not convinced that the U.S. was an innocent bystander. A poll indicated that over 50% of Ecuadorians felt that the U.S. had some involvement in the coup based, perhaps, on experience in their country where evidence has pointed to past U.S. involvement in coups and presidential deaths.
Both presidents of Honduras and Ecuador had recently challenged the use of their military bases by the U.S. military. President Correa ended a lease to the US to use it's Manta base in 2009, and President Zelaya had indicated his support for turning the Palmerola base used by the US into a civilian airport shortly before he was deposed. Likewise, both countries were members of ALBA (the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas) when the coups were attempted. A third ALBA country, Venezuela, was the target of the third Latin American coup of the past decade, in 2002, also led by SOA graduates.
RT TV News Segment about the Coup with Jihan Hafiz
The failed attempt to overthrow the democratically elected President of Ecuador Rafael Correa has ignited new claims that the US is still in the business of putting in and taking out Latin American Presidents.
From Venezuela to Haiti to Honduras, coups involving the United States might not seem like anything new to some, but could the emergence of leftist governments actually challenge the dominance the U.S. had enjoyed in the region?"
For more info
http://www.soaw.org/presente/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=328&Itemid=74
The School of the Americas is the military institution where Latin American military are trained in counter insurgency and other tactics that are generally detrimental to humans.
This is from Wikipedia article about the School of the Americas or The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, as it is now called.
"The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC or WHINSEC), formerly the School of the Americas (SOA; Spanish: Escuela de las Américas) is a United States Department of Defense facility at Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia in the United States.
Between 1946 and 2001, the SOA trained more than 61,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. A number of them became notorious for human rights violations, including generals Leopoldo Galtieri, Efraín Ríos Montt and Manuel Noriega, dictators such as Bolivia's Hugo Banzer, some of Augusto Pinochet's officers[1][2], members of the Atlacatl Battalion of El Salvador who carried out the El Mozote massacre of 1981, and the founders of Los Zetas, a drug cartel formerly affiliated with the Gulf Cartel.[3][4] Critics of the school argue that the education encouraged such internationally recognized human rights violating practices and that the WHINSEC is merely a new name for the exact same practices. This is denied by the SOA/WHINSEC and its supporters, who claim they now emphasize democracy and human rights."
For more info.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_for_Security_Cooperation
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