US dismantling Ecuador base for move to Colombia

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Irish Sun

US dismantling Ecuador base for move to Colombia
Irish Sun
Saturday 18th July, 2009
(IANS)

Quito/The US military has begun to dismantle its anti-drug-and-terrorism operations and its base in Manta, Ecuador, as its aircraft flew their last missions on Friday, the US embassy said.

The equipment and planes appear headed to Colombia, which is negotiating with the US to take them in after Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa refused to extend the contract that ends in September.

The US has maintained the base since 1999 as a central observation point to battle narco-trafficking.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe on Thursday defended negotiations that would allow the US use of three military bases in Colombia in the fight against drug trafficking and terrorism.

The proposed deal has sparked controversy in Colombia, although the government stressed this week that it did not imply the installation of US military bases on its soil or that Colombia would be used by Washington as a platform for potential attacks in the region.


Read more: http://story.irishsun.com/index.php/ct/9/cid/2411cd3571b4f088/id/520380/cs/1/

[dipsydoodle]

1. A future change of govenment in Colombia

may get them kicked out of there too.

[Lasher]

4. But they'll just be moved somewhere else.

They won't bring the soldiers home from any foreign military base even when a government throws them out.

[Judi Lynn]

8. They're running out of places which will take them. All they've got left in S. America is Peru. n/t

[jasi2006]

2. How do we get to have our military stationed in other countries

and other countries don't have their military stationed here? The world is insane.

[subsuelo]

3. When God Created the United States

He sayeth: "Let there be U.S. military bases all over the world"

[harun]

5. I don't like that our military is in so many countries. Taxpayers

did not sign up for this nonsense.

[IndianaGreen]

6. Our military are pawns in the service of Wall Street

Capitalism depends on exploiting other nations and peoples, and it will use military force to impose its will.

[harmonicon]

11. very simply put - couldn't have said it better myself

[Judi Lynn]

9. That's the point the President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa made. He said he'll reconsider a US base

in Ecuador when it's possible for him to station Ecuadoreans at a base in Miami.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com.nyud.net:8090/3376/3583944356_800a08ab30.jpg

Correa and Honduras' Zelaya.

[Alamuti Lotus]

18. Now that's not a bad idea

There's a lot of terrorist and other criminal activity in Miami that somebody should be closely monitoring.

[AlphaCentauri]

14. Because we are smart, latin americans may not

they are not civilized humans, we are.

:sarcasm:

[bemildred]

7. +1

Or -1 depending on how you look at it.

[Judi Lynn]

10. True! They'll be missing an intruder in Ecuador. n/t

[harmonicon]

12. When are we going to stop fucking up Columbia's shit?

The idea that the Uribe government is legitimate is a joke. Dealing with him is no different than another country dealing with FARC. We should get our damn hands and dollars out of that country so they can actually sort out a government that is good for its people.

[rabs]

13. Correa planning to put the base to good use for Ecuador

by converting it to a connecting international airport.

The connections would be for air traffic from Asian nations and passengers would connect to the rest of South and Central America from Manta International. Correa has said that Singapore Airlines has expressed interest in operating the airport.

Manta is on the Pacific, so the Pentagon also is losing port access there.

Re the bases relocating to Colombia; there is a big fuss about it in Bogota. Congress and others are demanding explanations for the unilateral decision by Uribe and the military to allow the gringo bases on Colombian territory for the next 10 years, with automatic extensions for the same period. The deal still is being hatched in secret, with no referendum or any other consultation with the Colombian Congress or people.

Btw, the deal would give U.S. troops and civilians complete immunity from Colombian laws, one of the points that has many Colombians angry.

[bvar22]

15. More good news from South America!

The Populist Reforms (Bloodless revolutions) sweeping across South America give me hope for the World. The Colombians will soon topple the Right Wing Colonial government.
The Mexican Oligarchs barely managed to steal the last election.
I don't think they will be able to steal the next one.


VIVA Democracy!
I hope we get some here soon.

[Grinchie]

16. Last mission=Dump excess Monsanto Roundup

On a side note, anyone ever hear of the Nature for Debt program? Apparently, it looks like a cover for funneling millions of dollars to south american countries under the guise of protecting the Rain Forests.

[Judi Lynn]

17. First time to hear about it. Going to need to find out more.

Here's the first thing I've read from any search, and I'm not too sure what's going on, if there are two different programs, one with reversed terms of the other, or what:

The Donella Meadows Archive
Voice of a Global Citizen
Trading Debt for Nature Instead of Nature for Debt

It is a tragedy, but not an accident, that the world's most threatened tropical forests are in some of the world's poorest and most indebted countries. The very poverty of those countries destroys the forests. Governments, to pay at least the interest on their debts, encourage logging companies to take timber. Forests are turned into pasture for beef exports. Along the logging roads and into the overgrazed pastures spread settlers, desperate for land, any land from which they might scratch a living. The forests don't stand a chance.

The World Wildlife Fund says that at the present rate of loss the tropical forests may be gone in thirty years and with them at least 40 percent of earth's species of life.

The fact that tropical forests are priceless biological treasures does not thrill impoverished people or debt-burdened governments. Biologist Edward O. Wilson recently announced that he found 43 species of ants (as many as there are in all of Great Britain) on a single tree in Peru. But exotic ants don't provide jobs or pay off the billions of dollars owed to foreign banks. So the forests go down. An inexorable economic logic sacrifices nature for debt.

It was Thomas Lovejoy of the World Wildlife Fund who first saw a way to turn that logic around. In a 1984 New York Times editorial he proposed swapping debt for nature. Now several such swaps are underway.

To understand how a debt-for-nature swap works, you have to begin by understanding that Third World debt is bought and sold on the world market much like wheat or oil.

Say a bank loans a country a million dollars in exchange for a note promising repayment over a certain period at a certain rate of interest. The country starts missing interest payments or asks to stretch out the due date. There is an increased risk that the loan won't be repaid. Rather than run that risk, the bank may decide to sell the note for certain cash, though that cash will be less than a million dollars, sometimes very much less. A million dollars of Costa Rican debt goes these days for about $170,000. If you want to hold a million dollars worth of Sudanese debt, you can get it for about $5000, which is, of course, roughly what it's worth.

Lovejoy's idea was that conservation organizations could obtain some of this devalued debt, by purchase or donation, and trade it for tropical forest protection.

For example, last year the World Wildlife Fund bought a $1 million Ecuadorian IOU, due to be paid off in eight years. The price to WWF was $354,000 (which it raised partly from a private philanthropist and partly from its own program money for Ecuador). WWF arranged with the government of Ecuador to exchange that note for a bond worth a million dollars in Ecuadorian sucres.

The sucre bond was given to Fundacion Natura, an Ecuadorian conservation organization, which will use the interest and eventually the principal for national parks -- not to acquire parks, because many exist in Ecuador, but to train and pay park staff, guard perimeters, build research stations, set up nature education programs.

Last year Conservation International bought $650,000 worth of Bolivian debt for $100,000. They exchanged it for an agreement by the Bolivian government to protect 4 million acres of forest and grassland adjoining the existing 334,000 acre Beni Biosphere Reserve in the Amazonian basin.

World Wildlife Fund has just announced the largest debt-for-nature deal yet, worth $3 million. The equivalent in Costa Rican colones will go to the Cost Rican National Parks Foundation. It will endow the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve and complete the purchase of land for Guanacaste National Park. To put that deal in perspective, it mobilizes in one stroke more money than WWF has been able to raise for Costa Rica over the past 25 years.

Third World governments willing to exchange debt for nature are not only ecological good guys, they are getting a good deal. They exchange foreign-currency obligations, which they must pay through export earnings, for domestic obligations to their own people, for some of their own priorities. Monteverde is not only a diverse and beautiful cloud forest, it is also the watershed above Costa Rica's largest hydroelectric plant. Restoration of Guanacaste is employing many local workers and also bringing in a stream of international researchers eager to study one of the last remaining patches of American tropical dry forest.

More:
http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn221debtfornatureed

[Wednesdays]

19. K&R

:kick: