Moments after delivering his Battle of Pichincha address in Loja in 1981, President Jaime Rolds die

[Judi Lynn]

Moments after delivering his Battle of Pichincha address in Loja in 1981, President Jaime Roldós died in a plane crash.
Did the CIA assassinate him?
May 23, 2021 | 15 comments



León Roldós (left) was appointed vice president a few days after his brother, Jaime Roldós, died in a
1981 plane crash. Osvaldo Hurtado Larrea (center) carries Jaime Roldós’ coffin.

By Sylvan Hardy

Those who knew him remember his May 24, 1981 speech commemorating the Battle of Pichincha and Ecuador’s independence from Spain as being one of President Jaime Roldós’ most passionate. He said Ecuador should not become involved in “inconsequential entanglements”, a reference to pressure by the U.S. to oppose leftist insurgencies in Latin America. Instead, he said the country must pick its battles wisely, as it did in 1822, and should pursue a “humanist” agenda to improve the lives of its citizens.

Within a hour of the speech, Roldós and his wife Martha Bucaram were dead as their airplane exploded in mid-air, crashing into Huairapungo Mountain, 15 kilometers from Loja.

Did the U.S. government play a role in the tragedy? Was his death an assassination aimed eliminating Latin American governments not in lockstep with the U.S. Cold War strategy of fighting communism? More than seven years after Ecuador’s former attorney general Galo Chiriboga opened an investigation to determine the cause of the explosion that killed Roldós, there is no definitive answer.



Jaime Roldos and his wife Martha shortly before they boarded the presidential aircraft on
May 24, 1881, in Loja.

A CIA document released in 2014 reveals that Ecuador, like other South American countries, was part in the U.S.-backed Operation Condor plan from the 1970s to the mid-1980s. The U.S. State Department document said the plan was intended to maintain Latin America as the “backyard for the U.S.”

The document states that Ecuador, then under a military dictatorship, became part of Operation Condor in 1978, joining the dictatorships of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in endorsing state-sponsored terror to control what was perceived to be the threat of communism and to “eliminate subversive sectors of society.”

More:
https://cuencahighlife.com/ecuador-investigates-the-death-of-president-jaime-roldos-attorney-general-says-that-it-could-be-tied-to-the-cias-operation-condor/

[Judi Lynn]

1. Worthwhile information not commonly published from the same article:

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The three-page CIA document stipulates that Ecuador’s intelligence services, along with its army, navy and air force, agreed to gather and share information with other states, monitor telecommunications and engage in psychological warfare as part of the plan. It also outlines Ecuador’s relationship with Argentine and Chilean officials who installed telecommunications systems in the country and offered scholarships and training to the Ecuadorian military. The activities were continued by the Ecuadorian military after Roldós was elected without his knowledge.

“The CIA financed an entire network of people to work in their interests,” said Cuenca journalist Francisco Herrera Arauz, who recently co-authored the book The CIA Against Latin America, Special Case of Ecuador, which examines CIA interventions during the period. “They wanted to destroy communism, and affect the position of sovereignty of Ecuador to break its relations with Cuba. This was not good in the eyes of the CIA and caused us a lot of damage. It is the period in which the left experienced the greatest repression.”

The countries involved with Operation Condor agreed to share information, and work to eliminate leftist groups within their borders, as well as persecute those seeking refuge abroad,” according to Arauz. Operation Condor knew no borders, as U.S.-funded death squads and extra-judicial killings were common throughout the region, he said.

A former member of the revolutionary guerrilla group Alfaro Vive ¡Carajo!, Mireya Cardenas, described the work Operation Condor: “In our case, the CIA destroyed a building one night in Cuenca. And they assassinated our friends. There were infiltrators also, who were paid over a period of two years, three years, they were paid with dollars, when the Ecuadorian currency was the sucre.”

Former CIA agent Philip Agee confirmed that he delivered money for bomb-making in Cuenca. The bombs, set off in public areas such as Parque Calderon, were intended to scare the public, he said. “We would blame them on left-wing political groups and fed this false information to the media.”