The president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, announced on Wednesday that his country would be welcoming members of the United States Air Force for a temporary joint operation intended to fight drug trafficking and narco-terrorism.
The American Embassy in Quito confirmed the arrival of U.S. forces to the port city of Manta, where the Ecuadorian military maintains air force units in facilities where U.S. forces were formerly stationed — prior to the country banning permanent foreign military bases.
The news arrives shortly after Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief Kristi Noem visited the Manta air force base alongside Noboa in November and follows months of Noboa publicly asking President Donald Trump for reinforcements to help the country fight its increasingly powerful drug trafficking gangs. Trump has prioritized Latin America in his foreign policy during his second term in office, approving “Operation Southern Spear,” a military mission in the Caribbean Sea intended to destroy and otherwise neutralize drug-shipping vessels operating illegally in the area. A presence in Manta would expand these operations into the Pacific Ocean, located strategically on the coast across from the country’s Galápagos Islands.
Noboa offered few details on Wednesday regarding the operation, stating only that it would help limit the scope of illicit drug trafficking.
“With the backing of the United States, we activated a temporary operation alongside the Ecuadorian Air Force in Manta, as part of a bilateral, long-term security strategy,” the president announced. “This operation will allow the identification and disarticulation of drug trafficking routes and to subdue those who believed they could take over the country.”
In a separate statement, the American embassy in Ecuador confirmed the operation, also referring to it as “temporary.”
“This joint, short-term effort is part of a long-term bilateral security strategy,” the embassy said, echoing Noboa’s language, “in line with the agreements currently active conforming to Ecuadorian law.”
“The operation will improve the Ecuadorian armed forces’ capacity to combat narco-terrorists, including the strengthening of information gathering and capacity to fight drug trafficking,” the statement added, “and is designed to protect the United States and Ecuador before our shared threats.”
The U.S. military was actively present in Manta, Ecuador until 2009, when then-president Rafael Correa, an ardently anti-American socialist, banned cooperation with America. Correa was later accused of widespread corruption costing Ecuador billions of dollars in oil revenues through shady deals with China. He is currently a fugitive, avoiding a warrant for his arrest by living in Belgium.
Noboa, 38, was re-elected with a solid 11-percent lead in April on a platform vowing to end organized criminal violence in the country. Upon taking over following a special election in 2023, Noboa faced an outburst of gang violence that threatened to destabilize the country. His presidential campaign repeatedly made use of his positive relationship with President Donald Trump — notable given Noboa’s first presidential campaign framing him as a center-left outsider focused on climate change — and he personally advocated for more American involvement in the country.
Noboa visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida shortly before the April elections, reportedly asking the president for more joint cooperation in fighting drug trafficking. During that visit, Noboa told reporters that he also approved of Trump’s efforts in the Atlantic Ocean to contain the nefarious effects of drug traffickers allied with the socialist regime in Venezuela.
“He asked me what I thought of what he had done with Venezuela and I told him that I thought it was good,” Noboa said at the time, prior to the launching of Operation Southern Spear, “because it cannot be that the United States has an anti-dictatorship, anti-terrorism stance and at the same time an American company is buying oil from Venezuela. It was my opinion.”
“We would like to cooperate with U.S. forces, and I think there are many ways to do that,” Noboa said after his re-election, “especially in tracking illegal operations moving out of Ecuador. But the control of the operations will be in the hands of our military and our police.”
In November, the Ecuadorian president welcomed DHS Secretary Noem and gave her a tour of the Manta air force facility, among other joint events.
“The visit by the Secretary of Homeland Security aims to consolidate technical cooperation mechanisms between the security institutions of both countries and strengthen capabilities in the fight against transnational organized crime,” the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry said at the time.
“Let’s remember that this is [Noem’s] second visit. We are here to discuss security cooperation issues,” Ecuadorian Defense Minister Gian Carlo Loffredo said during her time in the country. “We are visiting this location [Manta] precisely to remember the close cooperation and assistance that the United States and Ecuador maintained in the fight against drug trafficking.”
The United States cannot restore its position in Manta to what it was before 1999 as it remains illegal for Ecuador to allow permanent foreign military bases in the country. Noboa staged a referendum to legalize such bases, but the referendum failed in November.
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