Ecuador’s outgoing banker/President Guillermo Lasso, signed two agreements during his visit to Washington, D.C. last week, allowing U.S. military assets to step up sea patrols along Ecuador’s coast and operate inside Ecuador. Drug cartel terror inside the country is cited as justification for the decision. Lasso’s Foreign Minister Gustavo Manrique announced Oct. 3, that U.S. military forces will be able to once again operate on Ecuadorian territory, as soon as the Constitutional Court gives its approval.
The Ecuadorian Constitution prohibits foreign bases or military facilities on national territory, a provision adopted to prevent a repeat of the 1999-2009 cession of an air base to the U.S. military at Manta, also done under cover of carrying out “regional anti-drug” deployments. The U.S. military base at Manta was imposed on Ecuador when its economy was in freefall, quickly followed by the loss of any monetary sovereignty with the adoption of the U.S. dollar as the national currency.
To get around that “detail,” Manrique insisted that the U.S. troops will not be permanently based in Ecuador, but “will go in for short periods of time, carry out operations and leave,” and Ecuadorian naval officers will be aboard American military ships operating in Ecuadoran waters “so that sovereignty is not lost.”
The U.S. Southern Command has been quietly applying excruciating pressure on any country it can, to open the door to a permanent U.S. military base or “forward operating location.” Aid in fighting drugs and illegal fishing and mining is often cited, but SouthCom is quite public that its priority goal is to drive “strategic competitors” Russia and China out of the region.
That the Ecuadorian agreement is intended to set a precedent for U.S. military deployments throughout the region, was made clear by the role of Texas’s Rep. Dan Crenshaw in the whole affair. Crenshaw organized a roundtable discussion on Capitol Hill Sept. 27 between President Lasso and the Congressional Task Force To Combat Mexican Drug Cartels which Crenshaw chairs. According to the Ecuadoran President’s press office, Lasso both briefed the task force on the just-signed agreements, and attacked the closing of the U.S. base at Manta for having been taken in a mistaken “ideological vision appealing to sovereignty.”
Crenshaw immediately broke the story that Ecuador was welcoming in the U.S. military to the Washington Examiner. Crenshaw has long sought to send the U.S. military into Mexico, in the name of “fighting drugs"—with or without Mexican government authorization. In January 2023, he and 20 fellow-Republicans (most from Texas), introduced legislation that would go further, authorizing the U.S. President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those foreign nations, foreign organizations, or foreign personas affiliated with foreign organizations that the President determines” are responsible “for trafficking responsible for trafficking fentanyl or a fentanyl-related substance into the United States"—with the added gigantic loophole—"or carrying out other related activities that cause regional destabilization in the Western Hemisphere.”
