THE NATIONAL HERO

THE NATIONAL HERO

NN was born in 1933 in Santa Rosa, El Oro Province, a town near the Ecuadorian-Peruvian border on the Pacific coast.

In those years, the province had become the country's main gold exporter, hence its name. An English company was the primary exporter, while the Anglo-Dutch company Shell had discovered oil on the Santa Elena Peninsula, across the Gulf of Guayaquil in what was then Guayas Province, neighboring El Oro Province.

In 1941, when NN was a child, the Peruvian invasion of his province and Ecuador took place. This invasion had been planned and financed by the United States, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was interested in neutralizing Ecuador, which had become the main supplier of rubber, quinine, pyrethrum, an insecticide, scopolamine (or truth drug), tagua, and balsa wood to Hitler's Germany.

The American president was interested in Peru's rubber, its main export through the Pacific. However, most of the rubber came from the Amazon rainforests of Ecuador and Colombia. Therefore, he planned, financed, and equipped Peru for the invasion of Ecuador through a Nazi-style blitzkrieg, which lasted only a week. This war allowed Peru to seize Ecuador's Amazonian territory, equivalent to almost half the country, and the United States to seize the Galápagos Islands, from where it could protect the Panama Canal from the Japanese, who had attacked Hawaii a few months earlier.

But in 1946, President Velasco Ibarra rejected the Rio de Janeiro Treaty, signed on January 29, 1942, because it contained geographical flaws and because it had been imposed by force, while Peru occupied Ecuadorian territory, which contradicted the OAS Charter. Thus, a cold war was created between Ecuador and Peru.

NN was 8 years old when he witnessed the defeat of the Ecuadorian army. This impacted him deeply, and despite being small in stature, seemingly a fragile boy, he managed to enter the Eloy Alfaro Military College. His parents, who were not wealthy, financed his entry into the military academy, where army officers were trained. He graduated as the best student, which allowed him to study at the School of the Americas in Panama, where the United States trained some of the worst dictators in Latin America, but he was different. Upon returning with the rank of colonel, General Rodríguez Lara had staged a coup against Velasco Ibarra, who had won the elections in Ecuador five times, but only managed to complete his four-year term once.

In 1972, he was appointed director of CREA, the Southern Rehabilitation Center, to address the problem of underdevelopment in which the southern provinces and the Amazon region of Ecuador lived. As director of the Austro region, he planned and led Ecuador's second agrarian reform in the Amazon and the south of the country. This occurred during a time when Ecuador had become an oil exporter, and the military government had five times more oil revenue after nationalizing the industry and the state assuming part of the exploration and exploitation, along with the Texaco company, which built the Trans-Andean Pipeline and handled all oil exports from the Port of Balao. A large portion of the oil revenue was used to finance rural medicine, social security for peasants, rural education, and a vast road network. This network facilitated the mobilization of indigenous people from the Sierra, the poorest in the country, to colonize the Amazon. This was done to create what were known as "living borders," as the region's sparse population facilitated the Peruvian invasion. Furthermore, military personnel were sent to study at the best military academies in the world, creating what would later be called Ecuador's Enlightened Militarism.

In 1992, after being the most decorated officer in the army, he became Minister of Defense under President Sixto Durán Ballén, and faced Peru in the Cenepa War.

To defeat the Peruvian army, he secretly purchased Russian weapons from Nicaragua and moved them under the cover of night to the war zone, along with the IWIAS, an army of Amazonian indigenous people.

Later, he served as Minister of Defense in the government of Jamil Mahuad and, with tears in his eyes, signed the ratification of the Rio de Janeiro Treaty and the Itamaraty Treaty, despite the military victory. At the end of 1999, Mahuad declared a bank holiday and dollarized the currency, also allowing the bankers who had plundered the country to flee. However, the general arrested one of them, who had financed Mahuad's campaign, and subsequently dismissed him.

After retiring, he was part of a foundation for the protection of nature, indigenous cultures, and health, especially in the protected and heritage areas of Ecuador.