In 1942, Ecuador signed the Rio de Janeiro Treaty, which took away Ecuador's access to the Amazon River, but a poorly defined area between the Santiago and Cenepa rivers was the argument used by President Velasco Ibarra to ignore this treaty and remove the Americans from the Galapagos, which, thanks to the conflict, turned Iquitos into the main supplier of rubber to the United States, before it entered into World War II, rubber that was essential for its trucks, jeeps, and other equipment.
The problem was that Ecuador had been a rubber supplier to Germany since the 1930s, but that rubber came from Esmeraldas, while Iquitos and Peru were the main rubber supplier to the United States, after the failure of Ford's plantations in Brazil, affected by a plague.
In addition, Peru was a supplier of fish and guano to the United States, while Ecuador was also a supplier of tagua, balsa, scopolamine, pyrethrum oils, and soaps to Germany, in Hitler's time.
The biggest problem for Peru's rubber supply to the United States was that the rubber trees were north of the Amazon River, which was part of Ecuador, and Leticia, which was part of Colombia, which had colder, faster-flowing rivers and wetlands.
However, the United States was also interested in occupying Ecuador's Galapagos to protect the Panama Canal, its main investment in Latin America. To take control of the tributaries of the Amazon River, which flow into the Great River and the Galapagos, he armed, trained, and led the invasion operations of Ecuador by Peru, using an old conflict between the two countries, existing since 1824, when the Battle of Turquí was fought, which set the limits between Gran Colombia and Peru, but at the time Ecuador separated from Gran Colombia and emerged as a new country, there was no boundary treaty between Peru and Ecuador, which was used by Peru to invade Ecuador in 1860 and blockade Guayaquil to create an independent state on the Ecuadorian coast, which produced that in Ecuador, Guayaquil. Quito, Cuenca and Loja declared themselves independent, and Guayaquil, in addition to being independent, declared itself an ally of Peru, but Gabriel García Moreno, the president of Quito, managed to defeat the armies of Guayaquil led by President Franco, of the Pacific State as the state of Guayaquil was called, which extended to Piura and the other states, that of Cuenca, presided over by a certain Carrión and that of Loja, which extended to Chachapoyas and Moyobamba in Peru, presided over by another president Carrión, which then included the north of Peru.
Peru again claimed new borders with Ecuador, through a new invasion in 1910, but was again defeated by General Eloy Alfaro, then president of this country.
Finally, he managed to get the territories of Maynas and Quijos, in the part closest to the Amazon, to be his through the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, signed in a meeting called by the United States, to all the countries of the continent, so that they would support him to participate in the Second World War, which simultaneously allowed him to occupy the Galapagos, and turn Peru into his main supplier of rubber, and prevented Ecuador from being a supplier to Germany.
Without a doubt, Ecuador's worst mistake throughout its history was to separate from Gran Colombia, and become an independent country, because since then, in addition to losing most of its territory, it became an ungovernable country, which has had 120 rulers from 1830 to 2023, some only for hours, it has had 46 constitutions, numerous civil wars, and a population in permanent confrontation through the so-called regionalism, class struggle, the most corrupt justice system in the world, and the interventionism of the United States, through transnationals, military coups, and servile presidents.
In Cenepa, Ecuador was able to write a new military victory over Peru, the first in the Amazon, but in the end it was a diplomatic defeat since it did not achieve the objective of this war, which was for Peru, to take away Ecuador's territorial exit to the Amazon, and for Ecuador to convert the territory between the Cenepa River and the Santiago River, which is now the Pacaya Samiria National Park of Peru, into Ecuadorian territory, allowing it a sovereign exit to the Amazon River, as proclaimed by President Jaime Roldós, in a previous war with Peru in 1980 called the Paquisha conflict.
Until today, Ecuador's main problem is that, with honorable exceptions, it has been a country governed by cowards, like President Arroyo de Río, who signed the Rio de Janeiro Treaty, liars like Jamil Mahuad, who signed the Itamaraty Treaty, and traitors like Lenín Moreno, Guillermo Lasso and Daniel Noboa, who once again handed Ecuador and especially the Galapagos over to the Americans, through the war on drug trafficking, violating the 2008 constitution that prohibits foreign military bases in Ecuador, or through popular consultations, which became a plaything in the hands of presidents of dubious reputation, the media, and advertisers. The great benefit of the Itamaraty Treaty is that Ecuador and Peru can trade and transit more fluidly, which is destroying the stupid patriotism in both countries that tries to make people believe that Ecuadorians and Peruvians are more different than equal, which is a lie.
They should never have been enemy countries, but rather they have lived an artificial separation, equal to the separation that other Latin American countries live, because that was the mechanism to destroy the Spanish Empire, by the rich Creoles of our countries, the United States and England, which allowed them to turn our countries into countries owned by families, military personnel or dictatorships, in the backyard of the United States, as a supplier and debtor of England, and turned us into poor countries, in eternal internal and border conflicts, which have weakened, impoverished, and angered them.
Now that Latin Americans are the enemies of the United States, In the immigration war and the elections in that country, the wars and differences between our countries are being forgotten, but the bad governments overwhelm us and show us how stupid we Latin Americans have been for centuries, despite having cultures and civilizations older than the United States, more diversity and cultural and genetic information, more wealth in all aspects.
