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Colombia's Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos is the Donald Rumsfeld of Colombia--an arrogant, cold-eyed SOB--who no doubt wants to head a military dictatorship and not bother with all this charade of civilian authority in Colombia. I think this is why Hugo Chavez in neighboring Venezuela has gone out of his way to try to stay friends with Uribe, despite Uribe's various acts of treachery against Chavez--because Santos would be worse. Santos wants war, clearly. That's what all that $6 BILLION in Bushwhack military aid to Colombia is about--Colombia is their "lily pad" for launching war on Venezuela, and regaining global corporate predator control of Venezuela's oil--and also Ecuador's oil--on the southern Colombian border.
The U.S./Colombian bombing of Ecuador last year, to take out the temporary FARC camp of hostage negotiator (and peace advocate) Raul Reyes and their incursion over the border to shoot any survivors in the back (as the 25 people who were killed ran around in their underwear and pyjamas, trying to escape execution), was a test-out of systems of surveillance and attack, and propaganda/psyops, for a larger Bushwhack-planned oil war. It was this attack on Ecuador from which the infamous "miracle laptop" (later laptopS) emerged, with phonied up "emails" implicating Chavez and Correa as "terrorist lovers." And it was a useful exercise in testing the Ecuadoran and Venezuelan military responses (they mobilized battalions on their borders), the strength of South America's political response (it was very strong), and various U.S./Colombian military systems. The attack on Ecuador was commanded from the U.S. embassy "war room" in Bogota.
This was circa March 2008. It was preceded by Hugo Chavez's and many other leaders' efforts to get the FARC to release hostages and to broker a peace settlement in Colombia's 40+ year civil war. Uribe in fact asked Chavez to negotiate with the FARC--very possibly a trap set up by Rumsfeld.* The Colombian military bombed the location of the first two hostages that Chavez eventually got released, as they were in route to their freedom, driving them back into the jungle on a 20 mile hike. (The hostages' press conference on this was completely ignored by our corpo/fascist press.) Chavez got a total of six hostages released, and then quit--because the Colombian military was obstructing him and endangering the hostages. Reyes then moved his hostage release camp to Ecuador (just over the border). He was about to release Ingrid Betancourt, in Ecuador, when the U.S./Colombia struck, with ten U.S. "smart bombs" and then the border raid, killing everybody in the camp, including visiting Mexican students and an Ecuadoran citizen.
This is the incident for which Ecuador has indicted Colombia's defense minister. Neither Santos nor Uribe consulted with President Correa about this attack on Ecuadoran territory. When they did tell him about it, after the fact, they lied, and said it was a "hot pursuit" situation (it was not). I have the impression that both Chavez and Correa believe that Uribe may not have been involved in this and other plots (including a Colombian military-hatched plot to assassinate Chavez), or was powerless to stop them. In any case, it is quite interesting that Ecuador did not indict Uribe as well as Santos. Uribe was president at the time of the bombing/raid on Ecuador, but apparently it was Santos' doing. (I've been trying to judge Uribe's level of complicity in Rumsfeldian war games for some time--and this news--that Ecuador is only indicting Santos--is helpful.) Uribe is not a 'good guy' by any means. He is beholden to rightwing death squads and major drug lords for his political power in Colombia. He is very, very corrupt. But, as we have seen in Honduras, the military is much too powerful in Colombia, and likely puts up with a semblance of civilian government merely to con U.S. Senators into a "free trade" deal (or rather to give corrupt U.S. Senators political cover to support it). Once the "free trade" deal is accomplished, we will see a military dictatorship in Colombia, in my opinion, and very possibly Oil War II: South America--if Rumsfeld and his cohorts can either manipulate Obama into it, or succeed in Diebolding him out of office in 2012 and installing another fascist dictatorship here.
This is a bold move by Ecuador, and very pointed. With Santos running Colombia, Ecuador will not be safe. No South American democracy with big oil reserves will be safe. Santos is in league with the fascists in Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia, where there are plans to have the oil provinces secede from the national governments (as was tried in Bolivia, this last September--openly funded and supported out of the U.S./Bushwhack embassy), for which both Colombian and U.S. military support would be needed. As I said, the bombing of the FARC camp was a systems test, and Bolivia may also have been such a test. Bolivia was roiled by a rich white separatist rebellion against the national government of Evo Morales (the first indigenous president of Bolivia, a largely indigenous country), and the Bushwhacks may have thought it was 'easy pickins.' They found out otherwise. For one thing, the leadership of Latin America united against them and acted swiftly to back up Morales. Although Bolivia has resources they want to steal (gas, lithium and some oil), it was not really a good strategic choice for a rightwing coup and installation of a puppet government. Honduras, however, has far more strategic value, vis a vis Venezuela's oil, and also "war on drugs" profiteering. It is also a "free trade" zone (rampant impoverishment of the poor majority)--one of the few remaining "free trade" bastions in a region (Latin America) that is swiftly moving toward economic independence and leftist democracy. Bolivia had rejected "free trade," the "war on drugs" and the entire toxic package of U.S./Bushwhack policies. The Bushwhacks may have been deluded that they could overturn all that, or were merely testing the system for planning purposes. I really don't know. But Honduras is both more vulnerable and more important as to dominating a Latin American region (Caribbean/Central America) and trying to reverse the leftist democratic trend there. There now leftist governments to the north, south and west of Honduras, on its borders, in addition to the many leftist governments in South America, but Honduras has a long coast on the Caribbean and access to the Pacific. (Bolivia is landlocked.)
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*(The weekend of the first hostages' release Rumsfeld published an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled "The Smart Way to Defeat Tyrants Like Chavez." In the first paragraph, he states that Chavez's help on the FARC hostages was "not welcome in Colombia"--even though it had been just a few days before. Uribe had publicly requested Chavez's help--then rescinded the request days before the first hostages were to be released to Chavez. In other words, the request for Chavez's help was never intended to result in a successful effort by Chavez to get hostages released--but was likely designed to hand Chavez a diplomatic disaster, with dead hostages. Chavez persisted--at the behest of leaders like the president of France--and got six hostages released, before he quit. Circa Feb. '08. That is when the U.S./Colombia slaughtered FARC's hostage negotiator and 24 other people in Ecuador (March '08).)
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