In his short tenure, he became known for his firm stance on human rights, which led to clashes with other Latin American governments and poor relations with Ronald Reagan's United States administration.
[3] In December 1978, during the nine-month interval between the first and second rounds of the election, an alleged plot to assassinate him, supposedly by eight Americans (who were later charged with archeologic relics trafficking) was reportedly foiled by the military government.
[5][6] He won the second round of elections against Sixto Durán Ballén, an architect and experienced politician who was the co-founder of the conservative Social Christian Party and former Mayor of Quito.
Roldós assumed office on 10 August 1979 in a ceremony attended by several world dignitaries, among them American Secretary of State Cyrus Vance (with First Lady Rosalynn Carter accompanying) and Spanish Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez.
On 15 April 1980, he established a committee of notables to search for a solution for the power struggle in the National Congress, presided over by his former mentor Assad Bucaram.
His stance on human-rights led him to clash with fellow Latin American leaders: in one instance at a summit in Colombia, El Salvador's José Napoleón Duarte (the US-backed president who came to power with the coup that set off the Salvadoran Civil War) mocked Roldós for being young and inexperienced.
His foreign policy initiatives also attracted the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and with the Frente Democrático in El Salvador, which opposed the military regime in that country.
On Sunday, 24 May 1981, a Beechcraft Super King Air carrying the president and his entourage to a military ceremony in honor of the fallen in the short war with Peru crashed into Huairapungo Hill, near the town of Guachanamá, in the Celica Canton of Loja Province.
Killed along with the president were First Lady Martha Bucaram, the Minister of Defense Marco Subía Martinez and his wife, two aide-de-camps, a flight attendant, and both pilots.
It found contradictions and inconsistencies in the JIA report, but could not reach definitive conclusions especially since the aircraft that was purchased by the Air Force to operate as a VIP transport lacked black box equipment.
A second parliamentary inquiry, led by socialist MP Victor Granda, was formed in 1990 to review the findings of the Arosemena commission and the military investigations.
The investigation reportedly found that the two additional pages of the acquisition expedient, the ones with the optional equipment list, were not rubricated (initialed and/or highlighted in red) by any officer; so the commission asked the Air Force to demand a certification from Beechcraft on whether it had provided a black box.
[12] In this line, Granda has criticized and speculated in later decades that: Maybe there was a record of the voices in the last stage of the presidential flight and [it is suspicious] how they removed all the debris from the accident, without any judicial process, without any security protocol, based on the provisions of the military command at that time, which was fundamentally influenced by Admiral [Raúl] Sorroza, who has always been accused of [having] something to do with the death of President Roldós, so obviously it does give rise to the suspicion that evidently that was a fundamental factor to know what happened in the last minutes of the presidential flight.
Consequently, and according to Richelieu Levoyer; who happened to be Commander-in-Chief of the Ecuadorian Army at the time of the crash, Argentinians and Chileans involved themselves in the conspiracy to end Roldós’ regime, as they saw it sympathetic to left-wing causes and governments.
In April 2015, he announced to the National Assembly that, based on an alleged CIA document declassified in 2014, Ecuador had joined Operation Condor in mid-January 1978.
According this document, participation would have occurred through the intelligence services of the Armed Forces; for this purpose, it is alleged (and also reported in the documentary) that “an Argentine general would have visited Quito and installed, in the Ministry of Defense, a telecommunications system (named “Condortel”).
[1] In May 2016, on the 35th anniversary of the crash, Attorney General Chiriboga announced the discovery of several documents, audiovisual and material evidence that was used in the first official inquiry, in an Ecuadorian Air Force depot.
[20] Thus, he challenged that the Ministry of Defence was not providing anything new, but documents that have already been analyzed, leading him to “doubt that this issue is used as a fundamentally political element.”[21] Despite a downturn in his popularity during the last months of his administration, due to the post-war economic measures, Roldos’ death immortalized the last words of his famous speech delivered on the day of his death; at Atahualpa Stadium in front of a crowd of thousands, in which he called for national unity just before departing in his fatidic last journey to Loja, where he was meant to attend another ceremony for the fallen soldiers during the war with Peru: We have worked 21 months under a constitutional government when in countries like ours, having a democratic stability means conquering it daily.Ecuadorians, we were honest.
Jaime Roldós's brother-in-law, Abdalá Bucaram, founded the populist Ecuadorian Roldosist Party and was elected president of Ecuador.