Donald Trump’s Drug War in Ecuador
On March 3, as the joint Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran dominated yet another American news cycle, the U.S. launched a joint military operation with Ecuador on “Designated Terrorist Organizations,” as the Trump administration is now classifying drug cartels and related organizations. This happened as Ecuador has suffered a surge of cocaine trafficking and a precipitous spike in homicides over the past year.
It’s too early to tell whether the new FBI office in Quito or the airstrikes on “training grounds” will have a significant effect on the cartels or the homicides in Ecuador. According to Trump’s acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, Joseph Humire, the attacks are “setting the pace for regional, deterrence-focused operations against cartel infrastructure throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.”
But on the ground in Ecuador, the new tide of U.S. involvement seems to be doing more harm than good—above all by reinforcing the increasingly authoritarian rule of President Daniel Noboa.
The background here is a yearslong battle the Ecuadorian government has fought against drug traffickers. “[Noboa] is weaponizing the fight against the narcos, which he sees as his primary political platform and the one that got him elected, and the one that he’s got to deliver on, in order to crack down on any form of dissent, opposition, criticism,” Guillaume Long, Ecuador’s former minister of foreign affairs under the prior left-wing president Rafael Correa, told the Prospect. Most recently, that has materialized in Noboa suspending the country’s largest opposition party, Citizen Revolution (known by its Spanish-language acronym RC and headed by Correa). The ban, enacted over allegations of irregular campaign financing in the 2023 election, is supposed to last nine months, which could seriously hinder opposition candidates from participating in local elections in 2027.
On the ground in Ecuador, the new tide of U.S. involvement seems to be doing more harm than good.
Noboa has successfully consolidated power at the national level, but has less support on the local level, Sebastian Hurtado, founder and president of PRóFITAS, a leading political risk consultancy based in Quito, told the Prospect.
“I think President Noboa is aware that he doesn’t have majority support now—I think he’s lost his strong support that he was elected with,” Hurtado said. “He has his strong base of support, around 30, 35 percent support. And that’s not enough to win a majority-vote election, but that’s good enough to win local elections.”
To that end, the government has started targeting his opponents—not only independent Indigenous leaders and groups who led large protests against last year’s decrease in fuel subsidies, but also Mayor Aquiles Alvarez of Guayaquil, the country’s major port city. Alvarez, a prominent member of RC and seen as a potential challenger to Noboa, was arrested February 10 on charges of money laundering and tax evasion. Though Hurtado acknowledged there could be some truth to those allegations, Alvarez is far from the only politician engaging in illicit activity. “The government, obviously, is leveraging those accusations to pressure authorities” to arrest Alvarez, who has long been one of Noboa’s most vocal opponents. Police also raided the home of Cristian Zamora, the mayor of Cuenca, on charges that supporters say are politically motivated.
While the actions against Noboa’s opponents are deeply concerning, it is ordinary people who suffer the most under his harsh tactics. Beyond the March 3 airstrikes, which seem to have destroyed a civilian farm and not a cartel training ground, people in many provinces live under a state of exception, limiting their ability to move and congregate freely, and even allowing for warrantless searches, Glaeldys González Calanche, the International Crisis Group’s Southern Andes analyst, said.
In other words, the intention seems to be to use the drug trade as a pretext to impose a political crackdown. Indeed, Noboa’s mano dura approach seems to be making the problem worse. “What people actually see on the ground is the security situation being worse, insecurity being more rampant, and criminal groups extending their reach and their influence and power with impunity, and different types of illegal and illicit economies continuing to grow,” González Calanche said. “You still have historically high levels of violence [along the Pacific coast] despite crackdowns, despite the states of exception, despite the curfews, and despite this very militarized approach and so that has really shown its limits so far.”
The United States’ involvement may bring some additional intelligence capacity and manpower to Ecuador’s war on drugs, but it will also bring increased violence and insecurity for some of Ecuador’s most vulnerable people. Already, there are reports of torture and enforced disappearances related to Noboa’s war on drugs.
Ordinary people are “basically trapped between criminal groups harassing them and committing all these types of crimes against them, and recruitment and extortions and all of that,” González Calanche said. “And from the other side, the official side, the security forces, and if they view them as part of criminal groups—they’re really trapped, sandwiched between these two sides.”
Even if the Ecuadorian government were to totally destroy the cartels, the eventual result, as has been seen over and over across Latin America, would be for existing cartels to fracture (or new ones to form) and fight the government and each other to secure control over the immense potential drug trafficking profits.
Alas, under the Trump administration, the extreme militarized crackdown on drugs is likely to continue—and spread further in the region. The Shield of the Americas, President Donald Trump’s new mechanism for cooperation across the Americas, is focused almost exclusively on using force against suspected drug traffickers.
At the inaugural meeting on March 7, Trump didn’t mince words about what that meant. “The heart of our agreement is a commitment to using lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks,” the president said. That also likely means an increase in extrajudicial killings that began with Operation Southern Spear, the administration’s bombing campaign on boats transiting the Caribbean and parts of the Pacific.
“I do think that Ecuador in particular is something we have to keep an eye on,” González Calanche said. “And considering Ecuador being the experiment—the playground—of the U.S. in this approach to try to consolidate their military operations and this sort of intervention, I do think that that will also give us an example of what it can turn out to be.” The results of that experiment are likely to be grisly.
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