By Carlos Fazio on April 1, 2025
Candidate Luisa González has wide support from the indigenous sector
Due to its geostrategic importance, Ecuador has become an enclave of the United States’ (US) militaristic policy in South America. For this reason, the run-off election on Sunday, April 13th between the current Ecuadorian president, Daniel Noboa, and the opposition candidate Luisa González, takes on a particular dimension for the Trump administration. After the technical draw in the February primary elections, Noboa, who met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago this past weekend, could lose his re-election to the Social Democratic representative, who has now received the support of the indigenous and peasant sector led by Leónidas Iza, who obtained 5 percent of the votes in the first round. But due to geopolitical and factual factors that form part of the power structure behind the government of Noboa – including Israeli Zionism and the US embassy – the Ecuadorian institutional framework could be distorted and generate fraud.
The presidential election in Ecuador will be the first in South America after Trump’s arrival at the White House. It represents the first litmus test for the “anti-leftist crusade” of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who as a Republican senator was directly involved with the covert operations of the Pentagon’s Southern Command and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Andean-Caribbean area, in connection with sectors of the far right in Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba and Ecuador.
In a situation similar to the one Ecuador is facing today: the run-off election on April 11, 2021, between the then candidate of Correísmo, Andrés Arauz, and the banker Guillermo Lasso, in an operational alliance with Colombian military intelligence, the Southern Command and the CIA dusted off Operation Charlie-Odin Shot, which a year earlier, in the run-up to the election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the US, had been modified with the governments of Cuba and Venezuela as its main targets.
Dated October 5, 2020, the plan, which sought to shield the government of Iván Duque in Colombia from the rise of popular mobilizations, devised to use the location of Andrés Felipe Vanegas Londoño, alias Uriel, third commander of the western war front of the National Liberation Army (ELN), to generate a positive political-media impact on the State Department. The document recommended using the channel of the then Colombian ambassador in Washington and representative JD Vélez, with Rubio and Republican legislators of Cuban origin in Florida, with the aim of resuming unfinished agreements and advancing the Charlie-Odin Shot action.
The plan emphasized the relationship between the Cuban embassy in Bogotá and members of the ELN, and sought to establish an opinion matrix that would indicate that the “violent demonstrations” were coordinated by the Colombian Movement of Solidarity with Cuba and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). The strategy anticipated the use of files planted in Vanegas Londoño’s computers, which would be sent to the Colombian prosecutor’s office and Interpol, to directly link the Colombians who supported the solidarity houses with Cuba. Twenty days later, Uriel was killed in Chocó as part of Operation Odin.
The curious thing about the case is that, after Arauz had won the first round of the presidential elections in Ecuador on February 7, 2021, with 32. 72 percent of the vote, ahead of Guillermo Lasso (19.74) and Yaku Pérez (19.38), five days later the Attorney General of Colombia, Francisco Barbosa, arrived in Quito to hand over to his Ecuadorian counterpart, Diana Salazar, information “found” on the computers of the head of the ELN, which allegedly indicated that the guerrillas had financed Arauz’s campaign.
As the US website The Grayzone highlighted at the time, after Arauz’s victory in the first round, the State Department, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the right-wing government of Colombia were trying to prevent his victory in the runoff. The curious thing about the plot, too, is that Rubio was part of the destabilization of the elections in Ecuador, and that Cuba and Venezuela continued to be strategic objectives and targets of the Pentagon and the CIA.
In the end, the banker Lasso won, and he continued the process of handing over Ecuadorian sovereignty to the US that had been started by the turncoat Lenín Moreno under the wing of the former head of the Southern Command, General Laura Richardson. Since then, including the subsequent government of Daniel Noboa – born in Miami, Florida, member of a wealthy Ecuadorian family that owns one of the country’s main emporiums valued at 1. 2 billion dollars and educated at the universities of New York, Harvard and George Washington, the US has managed to get its P-3 Orion naval surveillance planes to operate from the Simón Bolívar air bases and the San Cristóbal Island airport, in the Galápagos Islands archipelago, under the much-used excuse of fighting drug trafficking. General Oswaldo Jarrín, former Ecuadorian Minister of Defense, said at the time that “Galapagos is a natural aircraft carrier,” in a tacit recognition of Ecuador’s insertion into the Pentagon’s strategic military projection in the Pacific Ocean.
The militarization of the Galapagos and the eventual reopening of the Manta Base to the special forces of the Southern Command – which according to CNN was part of the package of surrendering offers from Noboa to the Trump administration this weekend, which was endorsed by the spokesman for the National Security Council, James Hewitt – are components of the US geopolitical dispute with China, whose president, Xi Jinping, inaugurated the smart mega-port and logistics center of Chancay (the first in South America) in November 2024, with potential rail links to Brazil, and which will be a target of Trump’s trade war roadmap along with the Panama Canal.
So, we will have to see if between now and April 13, the date of the runoff election in Ecuador, the war diplomacy of Marco Rubio, in collusion with the Pentagon, the CIA and Israeli Zionism, does not display its panoply of dirty tricks to prevent the victory of the candidate of the Citizen Revolution/Pachakutik/Conaie alliance, Luisa González, over Trump’s protégé, Daniel Noboa.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English