Jaime Roldós Aguilera

Jaime Roldós Aguilera (November 5, 1940 - May 24, 1981) was President of Ecuador from 10 August 1979 to 24 May 1981.

Born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Aguilera was a reformer, and was threatened more than once by personal enemies. Roldós and his wife founded the People, Change and Democracy Party or "Partido Pueblo, Cambio y Democracia" in Spanish. He was President during a brief military encounter with Peru in 1981. He died in an airplane crash later in 1981 when his Air Force plane (variously identified as either a Beechcraft King Air or an Avro turboprop) crashed in heavy rain near the Peruvian border. All eight other passengers and crew died as well.

Popular support by Ecuadorians claimed that Roldós' death was actually an assassination carried out by the United States CIA since he had refused international proposals for oil exploitation*, and the signing of a humanitarian protocol between Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, which was seen by US President Reagan as a lean toward Soviet implementation. In Ecuador's amazonic jungles near Loja, natives also confirmed they saw a fireball in the air falling down, which is how they found the so called "crash site". American author John Perkins alleges in his book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" that Roldós was assassinated by a bomb located in a tape recorder in order to serve American interests in Ecuadorian oil prospects (Perkins originally claimed Roldós died in a helicopter crash; this has since been corrected). Roldós died just months before Panamanian head-of-state Omar Torrijos (a socialist) also died in a plane crash, under similar mysterious circumstances. Other Ecuadorians believed that Roldós had been killed by the Peruvian government, since the country was at war with them.

The Ecuadorian Roldosist Party is named after him. Roldós was succeeded as President by Osvaldo Hurtado.

* In 2002 it was told that the U.S. had snuck out uranium from the oil during the 1980s.

References

Perkins, John. "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man." San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2004. See pages 156-157 regarding Roldós's alleged assassination.

External links

* [http://www.presidencia.gov.ec/modulos.asp?id=28/ Official Website of the Ecuadorian Government about the country President's History]