Ecuador’s ultra-neoliberal President Daniel Noboa announced Sept. 16 that he has submitted a bill to the National Assembly to amend Article 5 of the 2008 Constitution so as to allow the establishment of foreign bases and/or permanent deployment of foreign troops on Ecuadorian territory. That article currently reads: “Ecuador is a territory of peace. The establishment of foreign military bases or foreign facilities for military purposes should not be allowed. It is forbidden to transfer national military bases to foreign armed or security forces.” Noboa’s bill proposes to strip out all of its provisions, and leave only the shell, “Ecuador is a territory of peace.” The fight against drugs is the pretext to allow foreign military bases.
Lest anybody miss the intention, Noboa posted a video of himself announcing this decision from the military base at Manta, which the U.S. has long-sought to re-occupy. (The U.S. occupied it, rent free, from 1999 to 2009, when the Correa government refused to renew its 10-year lease to the U.S. military.) Passage of the Constitutional amendment is not a given, but the U.S. is hell-bent on this going through, so there will be a big fight.
Now look at the U.S.’s first-ever deployment of a HIMARS unit into the Southern Command theater of operations during its Aug. 27-Sept. 5 “Southern Fenix 2024” exercises with the Chilean and Argentine militaries. The focus of these exercises was “enhancing interoperability for multi-domain operations” between the U.S. and the two South American militaries involved. As of this writing, the Southern Command website still features as its lead story a promotional video showing the U.S. maneuvering the HIMARS around the Atacama desert in northern Chile, wowing officers and soldiers from its “partner” countries.
Why would HIMARS ever be necessary in Chile? For what war? Why is the U.S. so insistent on getting U.S. troops and an over-the-horizon radar re-installed in Ecuador?
Are these deployments a preparation for a future operation to take out the soon-to-be inaugurated Chancay deepwater port in Peru which China is helping build? Ecuador is Peru’s neighbor in the north; Chile is Peru’s neighbor to the south. The Southern Command has declared that the Chancay port, which will transform the entire South American economy, is a casus belli, with SouthComm officers and scribblers insistently repeating that the Chancay port will become a point of conflict in the coming global war with China, which they assume as a given.
