The immediate step taken by Colonel Lucio Gutierrez, after betraying Colonel Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela who financed his political campaign against the richest man in Ecuador, Alvaro Novoa, owner of the largest banana exporter in the world, was to ally with US President George Bush, to create the FTAA Free Trade Alliance of the Americas, which the US president intended to create to stop the expansion of the so-called 21st Century Socialism, which had begun to win elections in Argentina, Brazil, and In Venezuela. It also made Ecuador a party to Plan Colombia, against the Colombian guerrillas, especially against the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which had turned kidnapping, extortion and drug trafficking into a way of obtaining income by losing economic support from Cuba and Russia, after the end of the USSR, in 1992.
In Plan Colombia, the United States established 7 military bases in Colombia, which it calls outposts, and established one in Manta, the furthest inland dog from the Pacific on the South American coast, from where it controlled all air and naval traffic in the South Pacific and at the western entrance to the Panama Canal.
In addition to the Manta Base, he brought troops with equipment, weapons, and transportation that periodically patrolled the Northern Border, in Esmeraldas, so it was common to see the Americans in their HUMMER or military 4x4 in San Lorenzo and the border with Colombia in the provinces of Esmeraldas and Carchi. In Colombia, that border was controlled by the Farc, which was waging a war against the AUC, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a paramilitary group, which was also financed by drug trafficking but which had been used by the CIA since the days of Pablo Escobar. , to lead a war without god or law against the FARC, where they could kill whoever got in their way, without waiting for justice or anything, they were the law.
Ecotrackers began its work in those years in the Cayapas-Mataje Reserve on the Tolita Island, where Antonio Alarcón was the director, he was the person who, with the volunteers, tried to create a site museum, with the archaeological remains of the culture of La Tolita, whose ceramics were everywhere and was even part of the streets of the town where they used it as the base of the road.
The ball was one of the most important cultures of the Ecuadorian Coast, which lived for 1000 years from 500 BC. until 500 AD, when it mysteriously disappeared, like other aboriginal cultures like Bahía and Jama Coaque disappeared. located further south
This appears to have been brought about by climate change, which for almost 100 years produced long, terrible periods of drought or devastating floods.
The Tolíta Culture was a mangrove culture, mangroves are a vegetation that grows in tropical places where seawater mixes with freshwater, it is a refuge for more than 1200 species, especially the brown, or black, shell. which is one of the main foods of the inhabitants of the nearby places, in addition to blue crabs or pangoras that can transmit a disease similar to tuberculosis, produced by a parasite called paragonimus wetermani, and which is difficult to differentiate in the area of the tuberculosis. because since the arrival of the Spanish conquerors. tuberculosis spread and killed many inhabitants of the Ecuadorian coast, which made it necessary to create a hospital only for tuberculosis, called LEA, hospital of the Ecuadorian Anti-tuberculosis League.
The indigenous people of La Tolita knew platinum, which was identified as a more valuable metal than the paw and even gold by the scientists of the French Geodesic Mission, who also identified rubber here, which was already used by the Mayas to make balls.
Like the Mayas, the indigenous people of the La Tolita culture built pyramids, but they were not made of stone but of baked earth, much smaller than the Mayan pyramids, possibly the indigenous people of La Tolita emigrated to Central America due to climatic catastrophes.
In this area some indigenous cultures that emerged after the climatic catastrophe of 500 AD. such as the Caribs and Arawacos, who spread along the coast and the Colombian Andes to the Caribbean islands, and quite possibly some ethnic groups that migrated from Ecuador to Central America, became part of the Mayan Empire, which dominated territories.
Some of the navigators from what is now Ecuador, who traveled in their floating houses on balsa logs, a wood that is only produced on the Ecuadorian coast and Amazon, were found by Pizarro on his journey to conquer the Incas.
The mangroves and forests of the Cayapas Mataje Reserve were for centuries the refuge of the blacks who escaped from the Spanish conquistadors, who even created the first free territory in America that went from Puerto Buenaventura in what is now Colombia but was part of the Royal Audience of Quito, to Bahia, where the Spanish were unable to govern and even appointed the first and only black governor in their colonies.
Until today, the raft was one of the country's main export products to Germany along with tagua, or vegetable ivory, a seed with which Hitler's Nazi army made buttons, and rubber. that made us suppliers of Germany until before the Second World War,
Being exporters of rubber from this area for the Nazi army, was the cause for the United States to arm Peru and with it the army of that country, invade Ecuador, in order to stop the supply of rubber to Germany and converted Peru in the most important supplier of rubber to the North American army, on the Pacific coast, for which they seized half of Ecuador's Amazonian territory from Ecuador and appropriated Galapagos from 1941 to 1946, in which President Velasco Ibarra miraculously managed to take them out, until the current president Guillermo Lasso in 2022 works them again.
Today this Cayapas Mataje reserve, where Ecotrackera worked, is a war zone in the War on Drugs, which Ecuador has been waging since 2017, when from the government of Lenin Moreno and again we became part of the so-called Plan Colombia.
From 2008 to 2016, we were not, in the government of President Rafael Correa, we left the PLAN COLOMBIA, at that time this place became one of the tourist attractions of the Province of Esmeraldas, for having the highest mangroves in the world and the most important archaeological remains on the north coast of Ecuador.
Antonio Alarcón, an Afro-Esmeraldean, a local guide for our volunteers, created with them his site museum, which disappeared when leaving La Tolita.
This protected area now has cocaine laboratories, illegal armed groups, mini-submarine shipyards, which not only reach the United States with cocaine, but also Spain going down the rivers from Ecuador or Colombia to the Amazon and from there to Europe, and This happens despite the fact that Ecuador once again had US troops and advice to combat drug trafficking since 2017.
In the year 2022, President Guillermo Lazzo declared the War on Drug Trafficking, a war that he and the United States, his main ally, are losing.
Yesterday these drug traffickers who are hiding in the Cayapas Mataje Reserve, had the luxury of attacking the fishing port of Esmeraldas located in a restricted military zone, where the police, navy and army have barracks, they were able to kill 15 people in the noses of the military and escape unscathed from their attack in the morning hours, to a place where there were thousands of fishermen and merchants doing their work.
