On September 30th, Ecuador’s national police allied with military factions to launch a coordinated rebellion across the country in what is believed to have been an attempted coup d’état. Stone-faced officers outfitted in urban camouflage blocked major highways, invaded the Parliament building and major airports and seized control of the nation’s state-run TV station, culminating in the tear gassing of the country’s president, Rafael Correa.

News coming out of Ecuador follows familiar and sloppy patterns of previous Latin American crisis narratives. Two competing sides have emerged to construct their own narratives about the situation. Rogue police forces claim to have been protesting the President’s budget cuts to the armed forces while Correa himself claims the uprising was ultimately an attempt on his life. A leaked audio recording of police transmissions, however, lends more clout to the former story. On the recording, multiple officers are heard calling for Correa’s head if he did not reverse the cuts. Images of him being pummeled by a barrage of fists while escaping an ill-received meeting at police headquarters only support his coup allegation. “If you want to kill the president,” shouted the tomato-faced President minutes before the attack, “here he is!”

In our cynical age, it is difficult to perceive Correa’s call as anything but a self-indulgent attempt at emulating the fatal defiance of romanticized Latin American martyrs like Che Guevara and Salvador Allende. Perhaps this is partially true, but one must contextualize the event among broader changes in Ecuadorian and Latin American governance. Correa claims the budget cuts are part of a broader attempt at bolstering national welfare, and the subsequent insurrection of an armed wing (the traditional face of conservative regimes in South America) saturates the failed coup with the uneasy connotations of left/ right struggle that defined the entire continent in the latter half of the 20th century. Complicating matters, Correa, who rode populist waves of support into office, is a vocal leader of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s international socialist organization ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas).

Nevertheless, the rebellion was hardly indicative of the conventional Marxist narrative that pits the organized proletariat against the ham-fisted bourgeoisie. The policies that incited the uprising are rather byproducts of growing defiance toward US influence in Latin America. It is for this reason that our own President Barack Obama should take the clash as an opportunity to rethink political strategy in the region, and how best to deal with the rising clout of ALBA.

Correa has joined Chavez and Bolivia’s President Evo Morales in defying demands for debt repayment by the US-led International Monetary Fund and his decision in 2008 to default on the country’s debt to the IMF chilled diplomatic relations with North America even further. In the past, Ecuador would have found itself floundering in its own self-righteous rhetoric without the support of the world’s biggest creditors. Today, however, as the United States and Europe scramble to bolster their economies in the face of massive domestic debts, Ecuador and other ALBA members are looking to themselves and other non-Western powers, in particular China, to counter the former hegemony of the Washington Consensus. In the wake of Correa’s decision to oust the US military from its airbase in Manta, it was revealed that bilateral trade volume between Ecuador and China surged to 400 times larger than what it was in the 1980’s and in late 2009 the red dragon announced its firm commitment to increase investment in the ninth poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

For the last ten years, the US has perceived new tensions with Latin America as a nuisance; a thorn in Uncle Sam’s foot. The wound threatens to become gangrenous now. Preoccupied with wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has allowed its past mistakes in the region to haunt current relations. Now the door has been cracked open even further for a strong South-South alliance in the twenty-first century. Perhaps such an alliance is unavoidable, but the US should not wait passively and allow its relations with Latin America to deteriorate even further.

The coup attempt in Ecuador should serve as yet another notice to the Obama administration that the international balance of power is shifting quickly. Ecuador and growing number of other Latin American countries have demonstrated their commitment to resisting anything that smells of old Western imperialism. The US must nurture its ties with these nations by demonstrating, above all, a firm break with past policies.