Normally, when a Latin American government passes legislation that contravenes its national constitution, shrieks of outrage inevitably erupt from Western governments. Not this time.
Last week, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa government issued a decree that not only violates article five of the national constitution, which prohibits the establishment of foreign bases on Ecuadorian soil, but makes a complete mockery of the basic concept of environmental conservation. The decree in question effectively hands over the Galapagos islands, one of the world’s most important marine reserves, to the US military as a base — with not the slightest whiff of protest from Western governments or media!
On December 10, the Governing Council of the Special Regime of the Galápagos (CGREG) approved the Comprehensive Security Project in the Island Region
and the Instructions for the Application of Cooperation Agreements between Ecuador and the United States,
two resolutions that seek to address shared security challenges
in the province of Galapagos. With a few strokes of a pen, the US military cooperation treaties with Ecuador signed on February 15, 2024, came into force for the island archipelago.
As such, the US will now be able to install military personnel, weapons and other equipment on the island chain, which has been recognised as a UNESCO Natural Heritage Site since 1978 — in a country whose constitution expressly prohibits the establishment of foreign military bases.
Of greatest concern to the islands’ residents is the resolution’s admission that implementing the project will require adapting or building additional facilities in local ports or airports
. US war ships and submarines will also be able to dock at the islands’ ports. In fact, according to Radio Pichincha, Ecuadorian government officials are already on their way “to receive the first ships and crews from the US, scheduled to arrive in the coming days.”
Ostensible and Real Goals
The ostensible purpose of all this military activity is to combat drug trafficking, illegal fishing and other illicit maritime activities in the region. These are, I believe, primarily pretexts for public consumption. The real goal, as I endeavour to explain later, is to combat China’s rising economic influence in Latin America as well as project and protect US power in the southern Pacific. This is not the first time the US has used the Galapagos islands in this way.
Thanks to the agreements signed earlier this year by Washington and Quito, US warships, aircraft and crews will be exempt from the Galapagos’ entry fees and taxes. US military personnel and subcontractors will also be exempt from prosecution in Ecuador and will avail of other “privileges, exemptions and immunities” equivalent to those enjoyed by diplomatic personnel, including freedom of movement throughout Ecuadorian territory, unhindered by “inspections, licenses, other restrictions, customs fees, taxes, or any other charges applied.”
Unsurprisingly, news of the US’ military occupation of the Galapagos islands has, so far as I can tell, been met with a wall of silence in the European and North American media, including by publications that tend to paint themselves as environmentally committed. But it is attracting some attention in the Latin American press. On Saturday (Dec 14), a scathing editorial in Mexico’s left-wing daily La Jornada warned that Ecuador’s US-born President Daniel Noboa is “demolishing Ecuadorian sovereignty” by handing control of the island chain to the US:
Through the Comprehensive Security Project in the Insular Region and the instructions for the application of cooperation agreements between Ecuador and the United States, the far-right president completed the demolition of Ecuadorian sovereignty initiated by Lenín Moreno (2017-2021) and continued by Guillermo Lasso (2021-2023)…
Lasso, a former senior banker and disgraced politician with alleged ties to the Albanian mafia, is now living it up in Florida while giving lectures at the Florida International University’s Adam Smith Centre for Economic Freedom — just like Juan Guaidó! In his last months in office, Lasso signed three agreements with Washington allowing the US to maintain military personnel on Ecuadorian territory with total freedom of movement and full legal immunity. According to La Jornada, these agreements established a de facto colonial regime in Ecuador.
That regime now extends roughly 1,000 kilometres west to the Galapagos, which Unesco describes as a “living museum and showcase of evolution” that inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Environmentalists now fear that the arrival of US troops, ships and planes could upend the fragile balance of the Galapagos’ ecosystem, whose volcanic islands and rich seas are home to thousands of plant and animal species that can be found nowhere else on Earth.
Evicting US Troops, Democratically
The Noboa government’s decision to grant the US de facto control of the Galapagos is controversial not just because of the islands’ protected status but also because of Ecuador’s unique recent history. In 2009, when the lease on the US base at Manta came up for renewal, the Rafael Correa government held a referendum on whether to maintain or close the base. An overwhelming majority voted in favour of the latter, and within months all US military personnel had left the country. From Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus:
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.
Besides evicting US military personnel from Ecuador, the Correa government also inserted an article (#5) into the country’s 2008 constitution stipulating that Ecuador is a country of peace, and expressly prohibiting the establishment of foreign military bases or foreign facilities for military purposes.
Since Correa’s replacement with his hand-picked successor (and Julian Assange betrayer), Lenin Moreno, in 2017, three successive governments — those of Moreno, Guillermo Lasso and now Noboa — have tried to weaken this law, always with a view to giving away the Galapagos. In 2019, Moreno’s Minister of Defence, Oswaldo Jarrín even likened the archipelago to an “aircraft carrier” in an attempt to justify the government’s decision to allow the US Air Force not only to use the airport on the island of San Cristobál but also to expand its facilities:
I have mentioned that the Galapagos Islands are for Ecuador like our aircraft carrier, it is our natural aircraft carrier, because it ensures permanence, resupply, interception facilities and is 1,000 kilometres from our coasts.
The minister of defence’s comments caused such an uproar in Ecuador that he was summoned to give testimony to a congressional hearing on the scope of cooperation with the US. Jarrin told the hearing that there will not be a permanent US presence on the islands.
“It will be an airplane, once a month, no more than three days, for emergency situations or refuelling, especially at night,” Jarrin said. “There will not be a permanent detachment, there will not be a base.”
Changing the Law
Five years later, it is clear that wasn’t true. In September, Daniel Noboa proposed turning back the clock by amending Ecuador’s constitution to once again allow the presence of foreign military bases on Ecuadorian soil. His government contends that Ecuador needs foreign (as in, US) military assistance 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.”
As we noted at the time, 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. Earlier this month, a commission of Ecuador’s National Assembly Thursday began the process of analysing a draft partial reform of the Constitution proposed by President Daniel Noboa to allow the establishment of foreign military bases in the country.
But there is still a long way to go before the amendment is passed, if it ever is. There are no guarantees that the National Assembly, Supreme Court and the general populace as a whole will support the Noboa government’s latest gift to the US foreign policy and military establishment — for seemingly nothing in return.
This is a government whose approval rating has sunk from over 80% in March to under 40% today. It has failed spectacularly to bring the country’s rampant lawlessness under control despite granting itself a wide suite of emergency powers. It has also overseen months of power outages of up to 14 hours a day that have cost the country an estimated $7.5 billion — a lot of money for a country that is still heavily in hock to the IMF.
With general elections scheduled to take place between February 9 and April 13, the chances of Noboa getting the amendment over the line by then are pretty slim. Yet that hasn’t stopped his government from pre-emptively opening the door to US military operations and bases in the Galapagos.
Preparing for War With China
It is also clear that this has little, if anything, to do with combating the drugs trade. Ultimately, the real goal is to gain or preserve geo-strategic dominance in key, resource-rich regions of Latin America — particularly at a time when, as the FT recently admitted, Washington has already lost the “battle” for economic dominance in the region to China. As the Correista Andrés Arauz, a former presidential candidate, writes, the US’ interest in the Galapagos is ultimately about maintaining control over the Pacific and preparing for war against China:
“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.”
Today, the US is busily expanding its web of military bases across Latin America and the Caribbean while using the War on Drugs as a means of leverage against governments as well as a pretext for increasing militarisation of the region. It speaks volumes that while China is building the largest deepwater port on the western coast of South America, in Chancay, Peru, the US is looking to build a naval base just over 1,000 kilometres away, in one of the world’s most valuable marine reserves.
In the past year, Washington has signed a memorandum of understanding with Argentina’s Javier Milei government that allows the US Army Corps of Engineers to conduct “maintenance duties” along the Paraná-Paraguay river, including large parts of the river Plata basin, upon which roughly 80% of all Argentine exports travel. It has also established a joint naval base in Ushuaia, on the southern tip of Tierra de Fuego, that will allow the US and Argentina to control this key entry point to Antarctica.
As with Ecuador, it is hard to discern how the country or people of Argentina stands to benefit from giving up so much of its sovereignty. In return for what? As the Mexican geopolitical analyst Jesús López Almejo notes in a recent podcast (in Spanish), these governments are not so much selling out their countries as they are giving them away.
Meanwhile, the US has increased its sales of weapons to Guyana as tensions between the oil-rich, former British colony and neighbouring Venezuela remain high. As readers may recall, just over a year ago Venezuelans voted in a referendum to annex Essequibo (or Guayana Esequiba), a mineral-rich region that has been administered by Guyana, of which it constitutes more than two-thirds of its territory, since 1899. In February, the U.S. deputy national security advisor, Jon Finer, said, apparently with a straight face: “we do not think that it is appropriate for countries to make threats or to contemplate publicly the use of force against another country.”
Venezuela’s embattled president, Nicolás Maduro, is scheduled to be sworn in on January 10 — just 10 days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. However, as doubts linger over the outcome of the July 28 general election, there is a clear risk that simmering tensions in and around Venezuela could boil over in the months to come, especially with a little prodding from the US, which has long coveted Venezuela’s mineral riches. Venezuelan opposition figures are already calling for Maduro to become the next Assad. Whether that happens will depend largely on whether Maduro is able to maintain the support and favour of Venezuela’s armed forces.
A few hundred miles off the Venezuelan coast, the government of Trinidad and Tobago has signed five agreements with the US Department of Defence (DoD) in the past few days, including the renewal and amendment of a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that “facilitates interoperability” between the two countries’ armed forces. According to a report by the local newspaper Newsday, two of the agreements allow the US DoD to deploy forces to Trinidad and Tobago in the event of a “conflict” in Venezuela — allegations that the government of Trinidad and Tobago vehemently denies.
Meanwhile, further north, as members of the Trump team talk of a “soft invasion” of Mexico, largely involving covert operations against cartel leaders, the Claudia Sheinbaum government can look forward to dealing with Donald Trump’s pick for US ambassador: retired Col. Ronald D. Johnson, a former CIA officer and former member of the Army special forces whose missions included combat in the dirty wars of El Salvador in the 1980s. He was also the senior representative for the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA at US Southern Command — in other words, a man who presumably knows a thing or two about regime change operations.