The National Hero

NN was born in the Province of El Oro, in Santa Rosa, on the border with Peru. At the age of 5, he and his family experienced the Peruvian invasion.

This invasion was financed, organized, and equipped by the government of US President Delano Roosevelt. The goal was for Peru, the largest supplier of rubber to the United States, to seize Ecuador's rubber forests. Peru was in urgent need of rubber, as it was the main supplier to England and the USSR, which were defending themselves from the Nazi army.

The Peruvians began the invasion by attacking Huaquillas and Santa Rosa. They simultaneously blockaded the ports of Guayaquil and Machala. Meanwhile, another part of their army invaded through the Andean province of Loja and a third through the Amazonian forests of Morona Santiago.

The Peruvian army had the most modern American weapons, created to defend itself after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands, including machine guns, vehicles, airplanes, and ships.

Ecuador only possessed a few machine guns, rifles used since, purchased by Eloy Alfaro to confront a Peruvian invasion, successfully repelled in 1910, when the border between the two countries was the Amazon River.

Ecuador lacked a professional army and had been living in chaos since the death of Eloy Alfaro. This chaos began with the government of Baquerizo Moreno, a banker from Guayaquil whose defense minister was former President Leonida Plaza, Alfaro's main general. When he became president, he immediately betrayed him and the liberal revolution, becoming the largest landowner in the Sierra Norte and appropriating enormous estates that belonged to his wealthy wife and the curia. Above all, he defeated Alfaro in a civil war, imprisoning and sponsoring his assassination, as well as that of his brothers and generals, who were dragged away by an angry mob and burned in El Ejido Park in the capital.

This barbarity aroused the ire of the Blacks of Esmeralda, led by General Vargas Torres, the main financier of the Liberal Revolution and the first to reach Cuenca with his Black troops. He was defeated and shot along with those known as the "gangster blacks."

The uprising of the Blacks of Esmeralda against the government was led by a white landowner named Carlos Concha, who waged a guerrilla war that successfully confronted not only the Ecuadorian army, but also the Chilean navy. After the war with Peru, Chile and Ecuador had signed a mutual protection agreement to confront Peru. Both armies were even trained by the Prussian army.

Since Hitler came to power, he made Ecuador the main supplier of rubber to Germany, as well as tagua, balsa wood, oils, and soaps, and especially scopolamine, which is obtained from a plant called "e" that has psychedelic properties. The Nazis used it as a truth drug. It suppressed the will, and the captured prisoners confessed everything without using torture. Furthermore, Ecuador supplied them with pyrethrum to manufacture pyrethroids, the most important insecticides used against fleas and mosquitoes during World War I. These insecticides killed more soldiers in the trenches than bullets.

Blocking supplies to the Nazi army and creating military bases in the Galapagos to protect the Panama Canal from German submarines and the Japanese navy became a priority. Therefore, after the Rio de Janeiro Treaty signed on January 29, 1942,

The United States established its military base on Baltra Island, where up to 10,000 marines were stationed. This was until 1946, when Quito President Velasco Ibarra disavowed the treaty because the existence of the Cenepa River had not been identified. This river lies between the Santiago and Napo rivers, leaving a vast area undelimited.

In 1995, during the administration of Sixto Duran Ballen, NN, he was appointed Minister of Defense after having studied with the Americans at the School of the Americas in Panama, where the most important dictators of Latin America were also trained.

With a brilliant military career, he faced the Peruvian invasion called the Cenepa War in 1995.

Since the United States and other countries blocked the purchase of weapons, planes, and ships from Ecuador, he secretly purchased them from the Nicaraguan government, where the Sandinistas had lost the elections and the new government wanted to get rid of the Russian weapons.

He secretly transported these Russian weapons at night to the conflict zone and surprised the Peruvian military, which used the invasion of Ecuador to win the elections there again.

The Cenepa War was Ecuador's first military victory against Peru, but it was again a diplomatic defeat that brought tears to the eyes of the general when it came to signing the Treaty of ITAMARATI