Anti-Bush Minister Killed Near US Base

It has started. Again. The wave of leftist governments spreading across Latin America got a cold, creepy wakeup call last night when the new, socialist, Minister of Defense of Ecuador, the first female to hold that position, was killed in a helicopter crash a few miles from the only major US Airbase in South America.

QUITO (Reuters) – Ecuador’s first female defense minister was killed in a mid-air collision of two helicopters Wednesday after only nine days in office, government and military officials said.

The accident in the Andean nation further rattled the leftist government of President Rafael Correa, who has clashed with Congress over his executive powers and prompted street protests since taking office along with his ministers on Jan 15.

Defense Minister Guadalupe Larriva, a 50-year-old former teacher and senior official of a socialist political party supporting Correa, died in the crash in a Pacific coastal province east of Quito, Correa told reporters.

from Reuters

Larriva took office only nine days ago, named by the newly elected President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa. In interests of full disclosure, Correa is an economist and a personal friend of our wife Norma Yvonne, from when they studied and worked together in the School of Economics of the Catholic University in Guayaquil.

Sweeping into office on a platform of reform and a break from the Bush policies for the hemisphere. Correa took the bold move of naming a woman who had never served in the military as Secretary of Defense.

Political observers (like the Dowbrigade) had wondered how the Ecusdorian military, long a bastion of Macho right-wing closet conservatives with links to the CIA, were going to take orders from a female socialist.

Now we know.

This modus operendi is not new. A quarter of a century ago, the Ecuadorians elected Jaime, Roldos a young Socialist college professor as President. A year later, he was killed in a very similar small plane accident. According to Wikipedia:

"Many Ecuadorians claimed that Rold