Quelle Surprise: Ecuador’s US-Born President, Daniel Noboa, Plans to Scrap Constitutional Ban on Foreign Military Bases

During his first ten months in power, Noboa has done everything he can to place Ecuador even more firmly under Washington’s thumb. 

Early into his mandate, Daniel Noboa almost torpedoed Ecuador’s relations with Russia by offering to deliver unused Russian weaponry to the US in exchange for US-made weaponry — in total contravention of the weapons’ export license. The Russian weapons would be sent to Ukraine for its defence, though this was strenuously denied by Noboa, who insisted the weapons were nothing more than worthless scrap. However, when Russia retaliated by threatening to boycott Ecuadorian bananas, the country’s third most important export product and the Noboa family’s main line of business, the Noboa government quickly backtracked.

Born and raised in the US, Noboa is the son of Ecuador’s richest man, Alvaro Uribe. Like his disgraced predecessor, Guillermo Lasso, Noboa Jr. has followed the traditional three-step neoliberal shuffle to a tee: deregulation, liberalisation and privatisation, all in the service of corporations and monopolies — including, of course, Exportadora Bananera Noboa, one of Ecuador’s biggest corporate tax avoiders and evaders. Like Lasso, Noboa is fully on board with the economic program the IMF has prescribed for Ecuador since 2019, with excruciating consequences for most Ecuadorians (more on that letter).

Turning Back the Clock

Now, Noboa is proposing to turn back the clock by amending Ecuador’s constitution to allow the presence of foreign military bases on Ecuadorian soil for the first time in 16 years. His government argues that Ecuador needs foreign military help to combat the transnational crime gangs that are using the country as a major transit route for drugs smuggled from Colombia to Europe and the US. In a video recorded at the former US base in Manta that was uploaded onto X, Noboa said:

“We will present a project of partial reform to the Constitution before the National Assembly that substantially modifies Article 5 of the Constitution that prohibits the establishment of foreign military bases and facilities for military purposes. In a transnational conflict, we need national and international responses. We are lifting the country…which they turned into the cradle of drug trafficking, which they handed out to the mafias with a false notion of sovereignty. Time has shown us that the old decisions only weakened our country.”

If Ecuador’s National Assembly approves the proposed amendment, it would then have to be ratified by the country’s Supreme Court as well as the Ecuadorian people in a referendum.

Noboa declared an “internal war” on the “narco-terrorist” gangs in January, but gang-related violence continues to plague many of the country’s cities, including Manta and Guayaquil. Ecuador currently boasts the highest number of homicides per capita in Latin America, with a rate of 47.2 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, eight times higher than it was in 2016.

Noboa’s proposed rewriting of the constitution is controversial given that Ecuador is one of few countries in the world that has successfully closed down US military bases on its soil, forcing all US soldiers to withdraw. As you can see in the map below, of the roughly 800 military bases the US operated around the world in 2020, none were in Ecuador.

Suffice to say, it is unusual for a country to eject all US bases from its territory, and when it does happen, it is usually the result of violent insurrection from the local populace, as seen recently in Chad and Niger. However, in the case of Ecuador, the removal of US forces was the outcome of a purely democratic process. From our October 6, 2023 post, “First Peru, Now Ecuador: US Southern Command Escalates Its “War on Drugs” in South America“:

In 2009, when the US Air Force’s 10-year lease on the Manta base on Ecuador’s Pacific coast came up for renewal, Rafael Correa’s government held a referendum on the issue. The people overwhelmingly voted for the base to be closed.

According to an article in the Washington Examiner, the US withdrew all of its forces from Ecuador. In reality, they were evicted. From Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus:

The last personnel left the base on 18 September, and the facilities used for a decade by the American military were all returned to Ecuador.

At a ceremony marking the American withdrawal, Foreign Minister Fander Falconí made the following strong statement: “The withdrawal of the American military is a victory for sovereignty and peace. Never again foreign bases on Ecuadorian territory, never again a sale of the flag.”

Meanwhile, a relieved Defense Minister Javier Ponce commented: “I am glad that President Correa has fulfilled his election pledge and preserved the constitution.”

On the same day in the capital Quito, the citizens’ group Anti-Bases Coalition Ecuador held a concert of celebration. In exuberant Latin style about 200 people celebrated the American military withdrawal with singing and salsa dancing at an amphitheater. Messages of congratulation were read out from anti-base movements across the globe, starting with Japan, and each was greeted by loud applause.

At the closing ceremony, Martha Youth, a spokeswoman for the US Embassy in Quito, announced that together with other Forward Operating Locations in Central and South America, a total of 700 tons of drugs with a value of 35.1 billion USD had been seized. “We’ve done good work in cooperation with the Ecuadorian authorities”, she said.

However, Pablo Lucio Paredes, head of CONADE (Comisión Nacional de Control Antidopaje del Ecuador) begged to differ.

“Our country has received no benefits from American operations out of the Manta base these ten years. From the outset, the base’s real purpose was linked to the American geopolitical strategy to involve our country in the civil war in neighboring Colombia.”

A Three-Year Process

Now, Ecuador’s eviction of US forces is being undone as part of a gradual, piecemeal process that began five or six years ago. First, the government of Lenin Moreno signed a military cooperation agreement with the United States for more than USD 140 million.

Then, Guillermo Lasso (2021-3) requested US help in creating a “Plan Ecuador” to combat the rising lawlessness in the country. The plan was to be modelled on Plan Colombia, the disastrous drug-eradication program that established at least seven US military bases on Colombian soil, burnt through $15 billion of US “aid” funds, worsened the violence in the country and bathed more than a million hectares of farmland in a rich brew of toxic chemicals, including Monsanto’s glyphosate weed killer — all while overseeing a sharp upsurge in coca production.

In his last days in office, Lasso held a closed-door meeting with senior officials of the US Coast Guard and Department of Defence in Washington. The outcome of that meeting was two status agreements, one that would allow the deployment of US naval forces along Ecuador’s coastline while the other will permit the disembarking of US land forces on Ecuador’ soil, albeit only at the request of Ecuador’s government.

The deal was drawn up and signed as quietly as possible. According to the Washington Examiner, the only legacy media outlet that deigned to cover the story, “the State Department [did not publicize] the agreements in any of the more than 30 press releases issued since Wednesday, [the day the agreements were signed,] but a State spokesperson confirmed… that it had signed status of forces agreements and maritime law enforcement agreements.”

What made these hush-hush agreements particularly egregious is the fact that by the time they were signed Lasso had virtually no democratic legitimacy left in his home country. Months earlier he had announced his intention to retire from political life following a raft of corruption, tax evasion and money laundering allegations that almost led to his impeachment. Those allegations included his purported ties to the Albanian mafia, which had helped transform Ecuador into a vital stepping stone in the cocaine routes between Colombia and Europe.

In other words, the US had just signed an agreement to wage war on the drug cartels with a government that was reportedly in league with at least one of those cartels and whose frontman, Lasso, relocated to the US the moment his time in office was up. Despite the allegations hanging over his head, Lasso — like the former, ahem, “interim president” of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó — is currently giving lectures at the Florida International University. Meanwhile, two of the journalists who exposed Lasso’s alleged ties with Ecuador’s criminal underworld have had to seek asylum in Canada after repeated death threats.

Ecuador’s “Polycrisis”

Meanwhile, back at home Ecuador is facing a multi-faceted crisis. After the Lenin Moreno government applied for an IMF bailout in 2019, the country’s first in 16 years, just months after Moreno had handed Julian Assange over to the British authorities, the economy has been on a constant drip of unpayable debt and “IMF support”. One of Noboa’s first economic policies was to hike VAT, that most regressive of taxes, from 12% to 15%, while declaring a tax amnesty for delinquent tax payers, including the Noboa family business, Ecuador’s biggest tax delinquent.

After years of crushing austerity, Ecuador is once again back in recession. But the economic malaise is just one of many crises Ecuador is facing, many of them feeding off one another, with the security crisis front and centre, writes Francesco Martone for Transnational Institute:

For some years now, Ecuador has been experiencing a manifest situation of insecurity resulting from the arrival or emergence of up to 22 drug trafficking gangs (Colombian, or affiliated with the Mexican cartels of Jalisco – New Generation and Sinaloa, aided by Albanian gangs operating on the country’s coast, which also suggests connections with the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta)… The homicide rate is one of the highest in Latin America. Regions such as Esmeraldas – with a majority Afro population, always marginalized and impoverished (sons and daughters of the ‘coloniality of power’ as the late, great Aníbal Qijàno would say) or Guayas — are fertile or strategically relevant ground for cocaine routes. In part because of the great availability of cheap “labor”… — suburban boys abandoned to their fate, victims of a historical destiny that marginalizes them, who for a handful of dollars pick up a gun and pull the trigger… — but also because of the vital port of Guayaquil, a territory that must be controlled for the export of drugs to the US and Europe, often inside containers of bananas, as happened in a recent large seizure in the port of Gioia Tauro in Calabria, Italy.

There have been rumours tying the Noboa Corporation to these consignments of bananas, as well as that Lasso’s minister of agriculture, Bernardo Juan Manzano Díaz, a former employee of a Grupo Noboa subsidiary, helped facilitate the whole dirty business by removing checks of banana consignments at the ports, but so far I have been unable to confirm their veracity. Back to Martone’s article:

The penetration of drug gangs in Ecuador paradoxically accelerates as the peace process in neighbouring Colombia accelerates, as the border areas “controlled” by the FARC are abandoned and left prey to new paramilitary formations or coca-producing gangs. Ecuador is nestled between two Cocaine producing countries, Colombia and Peru, with porous borders, small and large ports from which to ship goods, a social fabric torn apart by years and years of neoliberal policies, an economy focused almost exclusively on an extractivist model that impoverishes broad layers of the population…, a society wracked by inequality, especially in urban areas, an informal labor market, rampant corruption in the state apparatus. Plus, a dollarized economy that also facilitates money laundering thanks to widespread illegal gold mining. What better combination for drug traffickers looking for somewhere to process and ship their goods? According to some analysts, in particular Pablo Dávalos, there is a strong correlation between the application of the IMF’s neoliberal “shock doctrine”, and its social, political and economic consequences, and the spread of organized crime — a correlation that requires a broad analysis of the causes and concomitances of what can be considered a “polycrisis” that plagues the small Andean country, certainly unaccustomed to situations such as those experienced in the past in Colombia or currently in Mexico.

Further compounding matters is the fact that Ecuador is suffering its worst drought in 61 years as well as huge forest fires. For a country heavily dependent on hydroelectric power, which accounts for up to three-quarters of the electricity supply, according to Sputnik, the result has been weeks of rolling blackouts, some lasting as long as 11 hours. There has also been water rationing in parts of the Quito. This is the last thing an already shrinking economy needs.

“Each eight-hour power outage generates losses of approximately 96 million dollars on a national scale,” explained Ecuador’s Business Committee in a statement, adding that different sectors had reported an increase in insecurity and paralysis of activities. The executive director of the Ecuadorian Business Committee, Gabriela Uquillas, emphasized that “without electricity there is no production, employment or movement in the economy, and without this, the wheel  paralyzed and we enter a very complex stage.”

As the situation has deteriorated, support for the government has fallen, with many blaming it for lack of preparation and investment in spare capacity, as well as poor communication.

“Without electricity, without water, without employment, without justice and without security, Ecuador is trapped in a multidimensional crisis,” said Leonidas Iza, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador. “The energy crisis is a direct consequence of the lack of competent governance. There is no planning in any sector of the State, which has left the small productive sector on the verge of collapse.”

The executive president of the Chamber of Industries and Production (CIP), María Paz Jervis,  was no less critical, blasting “the lack of information and contradictions of the national government in this energy crisis that the country is going through.”

It is against this rather grim backdrop that Ecuador appears poised to reopen its doors to US military bases — and possibly bases belonging to other foreign powers. Like Milei’s Argentina, as the economy screams louder and louder, Noboa’s Ecuador cosies up closer and closer to the US, its NATO allies and Israel, while the IMF nods along approvingly at another economic wasteland it has helped to create.

As People’s Digest reports, many voices have already been raised against Noboa’s decision to bring back US bases.

Some say that the decision, supposedly made to combat drug trafficking, actually conceals a total submission of the Noboa government to US geopolitical interests.

Correista Andrés Arauz, former presidential candidate, wrote on X:

“The base that the US wants is not in Manta, it is in San Cristobal, Galapagos. They are already there, but now they need to deploy all kinds of weapons of war: planes, ships, and nuclear submarines. But it is not to fight drug trafficking or to help us fight organized crime. We all know that if the US wanted to fight drug trafficking it would do it by reducing consumption, resolving internal complicity with drug dealers, regulating arms manufacturers, and confronting corruption in US ports and customs (or where do they think the drugs come in?). They need that base for World War III against China, as part of their strategy to control the Pacific. The US already had its military base in Baltra, Galapagos during World War II, for precisely the same reasons.”

Through painful personal experience, many of Ecuador’s neighbours know full well what new US military bases in the region augers.

“Admitting foreign military bases in the territories of countries of our America represents a threat to the peace and stability of the entire region, undermining the agreements of peaceful coexistence between states,” said the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) led by former Venezuelan foreign minister Jorge Arreaza. In a statement, ALBA denounced how the “fight against drug trafficking and transnational organized crime” was being used as “a pretext to open the way for interference in the internal affairs of states.”