The United States is Losing the Battle

“A police officer guards a manifestation in Manta that protests against the American base located there. The contract terminates next year. The Mayor Jorge Zambrano arrived at the town in his black Ford Explorer hoping to encounter a manifestation for support of the American military detachment that operates the flights of narcotraffic vigilance that leave from this port city”, narrates the Miami Herald in a report published yesterday.

The story indicates that Mayor Zambrano left an hour later, protected by a wall of anti mutiny shields and a cloud of mace that the police used against the protesters who sabotaged the presentation in March.

In eighteen months the agreement shall end the so called Forward Operating Location in Manta, the operation has few supporters in Ecuador and each time those who believe the agreement might have an extension are fewer.

The President Rafael Correa has promised not to renew the agreement that ends in November of 2009 and the assemblymen, who find themselves drafting a new constitution, have proposed prohibition of the base or any other type of foreign military presence in the country.

The Miami daily records that if the base were to be closed in Manta, the United States would be left without an airport for the airplanes radar AWAC E3 and the reconnaissance P3 that fly above the Pacific in search of narcotics traffic. “Also it would signify a further decrease in the relations with the U.S. and Ecuador, which have rapidly deteriorated”, signaled the reporter from the Herald.

The United States considers that Manta base, “with its well cared for gardens and its approximately 150 pilots and crewmen”, part of a multinational force that helps block the entrance of $4,200 million in narcotics last year.

“Reclined in his seat in a semi dark room, the Chief of Forward Operation Location in Manta, the Lieutenant Coronel Robert Leonard admits that the U.S. is losing the battle of public relations”, reviews the Miami Daily.

“There are many erroneous concepts about my work here and what really takes place”, he said. “And while more increasingly disassociate themselves from Manta, these wrong ideas increase”.

Referring himself to the announcement that there would be an audit of the base, Leonard assured that what they are going to encounter are a handful of disarmed airplanes dedicated exclusively to searching for narcotics traffickers by ocean and air.

Survey

56% of Ecuadorians believe that it is “false” that the government of Correa supports FARC, according to a survey released yesterday by the firm Santiago Perez Investigations and Studies.

According to the poll taken all over the country on April 26 of 830 people, 24% of those consulted prefer not to opine about the supposed support of FARC, meanwhile 20% believe that “yes this support is true”. In addition, 43% sustain that “it is a lie” that members of the Army give information to the CIA, 33% “believe that it is true” and 23% did not respond.