US quietly strikes deal to send military to Ecuador amid drug cartel explosion
Anna Giaritelli
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EXCLUSIVE — The Biden administration has quietly entered into agreements with Ecuador that will allow the United States to send in military forces, both on land and off the coast of the South American country, which has been heavily affected by drug cartels operating in the region.
Select members of Congress were informed during a private briefing on Capitol Hill with Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso on Wednesday. Lasso was in Washington to meet with State Department officials and sign two deals, according to Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), who was present at the meeting and spoke with the Washington Examiner on Thursday.
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“They were announcing and signing an agreement with the United States,” said Crenshaw, leader of the Congressional Task Force to Combat Mexican Drug Cartels.
The State Department has not publicized the agreements in any of the more than 30 press releases issued since Wednesday, but a State spokesperson confirmed to the Washington Examiner on Friday that it had signed status of forces agreements and maritime law enforcement agreements. Senior representatives from the Department of Homeland Security’s military branch, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Defense Department attended the signing.
The maritime agreement allows U.S. military vessels to be present in the waters off the northwestern coast of South America, which Colombian drug cartels use to move cocaine. The ability to move military vessels into the area will “strengthen cooperative law enforcement activities and build mutual capacity to prevent and combat illicit transnational maritime activity,” according to State.
The second agreement was a less common one, according to Adam Isacson, who heads defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America and has worked on Latin American issues since 1994.
Status of forces agreements outline the terms by which members of a foreign military, in this case the Defense Department, can operate or are expected to conduct themselves while in another country.
“That doesn’t mean we’re doing it, but it means we can and it means that they’re making a very clear signal to us that they want more us involved,” Crenshaw said.
The State and Defense Departments did not answer follow-up questions about the duties of troops on deployments to Ecuador and other agreements signed with Latin American countries.
The Coast Guard, a military branch that is the only one housed under the DHS, has had its Cutter ships deployed across Atlanta, Pacific, and Caribbean regions for years to interdict drug smuggling loads in international waters.
“There’s just a river of cocaine [coming] up past the Galapagos Islands,” said Isacson. “I think they’re reestablishing more of a base at Manta base. We had a forward-operating base there in the 1990s.”
The U.S. withdrew all military from the base in Manta, Ecuador, in 2009.
On Sept. 20, Coast Guard Cutter Confidence returned to its home port in Florida following a two-month counternarcotics deployment to the Caribbean and offloaded 12,100 pounds of cocaine valued at $160 million seized in cooperation with partners agencies. Seventeen suspected narco smugglers were arrested and referred to the Justice Department for prosecution.
The Coast Guard works with U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Air and Marine Operations planes that surveil from the skies for unusual boating activity, which the Cutters then respond to in the water. Cutters return multiple times per month with drug loads typically valued between $50 million and $200 million each.
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Although the U.S. has entered into numerous status of forces agreements with North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries in Europe, agreements in the Western Hemisphere are far less common.
The U.S. signed agreements with Costa Rica in 1983, Nicaragua in 1998, and El Salvador in 2007, according to a Government Accountability Office analysis published in 2012. More recent documents were not available online.