Learning The Lessons of History: ECUADOR 1960 to 1963

[Panaconda]

ECUADOR 1960 to 1963
A Textbook of Dirty Tricks
from the book
Killing Hope
by William Blum


The tiny nation of Ecuador in the early 1960s was, as it remains today, a classic of
banana-republic underdevelopment; virtually at the bottom of the economic heap in South
America; a society in which one percent of the population received an income comparable to
United States upper-class standards, while two-thirds of the people had an average family
income of about ten dollars per month -- people simply outside the money economy, with little
social integration or participation in the national life; a tale told many times in Latin America.
In September 1960, a new government headed by José María Velasco Ibarra came to power.
Velasco had won a decisive electoral victory, running on a vaguely liberal, populist,
something-for- everyone platform. He was no Fidel Castro, he was not even a socialist, but he
earned the wrath of the US State Department and the CIA by his unyielding opposition to the two
stated priorities of American policy in Ecuador: breaking relations with Cuba, and clamping down
hard on activists of the Communist Party and those to their left.

...

Almost all political organizations of significance, from the far left to the far right, were
infiltrated, often at the highest levels. Amongst other reasons, the left was infiltrated to channel young radicals away from support to Cuba and from anti-Americanism; the right, to instigate and co-ordinate activities along the lines of CIA priorities. If, at a point in time, there was no
organization that appeared well-suited to serve a particular need, then one would be created.
Or a new group of "concerned citizens" would appear, fronted with noted personalities, which
might place a series of notices in leading newspapers denouncing the penetration of the
government by the extreme left and demanding a break with Cuba. Or one of the noted
personalities would deliver a speech prepared by the CIA, and then a newspaper editor, or a
well-known columnist, would praise it, both gentlemen being on the CIA payroll.

...

In virtually every department of the Ecuadorean government could be found men occupying
positions, high and low, who collaborated with the CIA for money and/or their own particular
motivation. At one point, the Agency could count amongst this number the men who were second
and third in power in the country.

...

CIA-supported activities were carried out without the knowledge of the American ambassador.
When the Cuban Embassy publicly charged the Agency with involvement in various anti-Cuban
activities, the American ambassador issued a statement that "had everyone in the station
smiling". Stated the ambassador: "The only agents in Ecuador who are paid by the United States
are the technicians invited by the Ecuadorean government to contribute to raising the living
standards of the Ecuadorean people."

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Ecuador_uned_WBlum.html

[Swede]

1. Guatemala - 1951-1954

The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état was a covert operation organized by the United States Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the democratically-elected President of Guatemala. Arbenz's government put forth a number of new policies, such as seizing and expropriating unused, unfarmed land that private corporations set aside long ago and giving the land to peasants. The U.S. intelligence community deemed such plans communist in nature. This led CIA director Allen Dulles to fear that Guatemala would become a "Soviet beachhead in the western hemisphere".<1> Dulles' concern reverberated within the CIA and the Eisenhower administration, in the context of the anti-communist fears of the McCarthyist era. Arbenz instigated sweeping land reform acts that antagonized the U.S.-based multinational United Fruit Company, which had large stakes in the old order of Guatemala and lobbied various levels of U.S. to take action against Arbenz.<2> Both Dulles and his brother were shareholders of United Fruit Company.

The operation, known by the code name Operation PBSUCCESS, lasted from late 1953 to 1954. The CIA armed and trained an ad-hoc "Liberation Army" of about 400 fighters under the command of a then-exiled Guatemalan army officer, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, and used them in conjunction with a complex and largely experimental diplomatic, economic, and propaganda campaign. They even established a Voice of Liberation radio station, actually located across the border in Honduras, which relayed programming originating in Miami, and pretended to be the spontaneous voice of patriots opposed to the elected government. The operation effectively ended the experimental period of representative democracy in Guatemala known as the "Ten Years of Spring", which ended with Arbenz's official resignation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'%C3%A9tat

[TBF]

2. Honduras early 80's

During the early 1980s, the United States established a continuing military presence in Honduras with the purpose of supporting the Contra guerillas fighting the Nicaraguan government and also developed an air strip and a modern port in Honduras. Though spared the bloody civil wars wracking its neighbors, the Honduran army quietly waged a campaign against Marxist-Leninist militias such as Cinchoneros Popular Liberation Movement, notorious for kidnappings and bombings,<15> and many non-militants. The operation included a CIA-backed campaign of extrajudicial killings by government-backed units, most notably Battalion 316.<16>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honduras