Death of Ecuadorian President

Brian Schrier
05/03/2010
942 words
Essay Two

  Death of Ecuadorian President; was it Assassination by A Disgruntled American Government, or Pilot Error?

Ecuadorian president Jamie Roldos Aguilera a strong opponent of big oil companies and their tactics, and   a champion of human rights, was tragically killed in a plane crash while trying to reorganize the hydrocarbon sector which the U.S. saw as a threat to their interests. President Roldos and eight other passengers including Roldo’s wife, Defense Minister Marco Subia Martinez and his wife, as well as two military officers and three other passengers slammed into the side of Huairapungo Mountain in the Loja Providence.of Ecuador on May 24th, 1981. Was the fact that Roldos had entered into a pact with neighboring Columbia and Peru, and President Ronald Reagan felt that this was a tilt toward the Soviet Union the cause of his untimely demise? Or was this just a horrible accident that was caused by pilot error? There has been wide spread speculation that this crash was not caused by pilot error and cargo overloading as reported in the JIA report. After months of pressure from the victim’s families and political groups allied with the president, the parliamentary commission has found numerous contradictions and inconsistencies in the JIA report, but has not been able to reach any definitive conclusions. Zurich Police conducted their own investigation as well, and has concluded that the planes engines were shut off shortly before the accident. Surprisingly, the expert opinion that contradicted the Air Force Report was not further investigated by the Ecuadorian government.
Per John Perkins’s book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Perkin’s states “I had no doubt that Roldos’s death had not been an accident. It had all the markings of a CIA-orchestrated assassination.” Perkins also goes on to say that the assassination had been executed so blatantly in order to send a message. That message was that the jackals...