09 November 2009
Loss of Ecuador Base Leaves Gap in Counternarcotics Surveillance
Washington — On September 18, U.S. armed forces, customs and Coast Guard officials ended the 10-year U.S. Forward Operating Location (FOL) at the Eloy Alfaro air base in Manta, Ecuador, with U.S. officials praising a successful regional effort to stem the flow of illegal narcotics, but also expressing concern that their departure leaves a major surveillance gap in the eastern Pacific Ocean region that drug traffickers now can take advantage of.
The State Department’s deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, Christopher McMullen, told America.gov that the program was a major success, undertaking more than 5,500 anti-drug missions and seizing 1,700 metric tons of cocaine with a street value of more than $35 billion.
Surveillance missions, particularly in the area surrounding the Galapagos Islands, have been a critical factor in efforts to prevent narcotics from being shipped northward. “That’s where a lot of the drug ‘mother ships’ would hover,” McMullen said. “They still do … and then they would just use go-fast boats [to transport drugs] from Colombia and Ecuador and other points.”
At the same time, McMullen said, the American presence in Ecuador was “a relatively small U.S. footprint,” and the FOL had been “a good neighbor” to residents near Manta, providing jobs, community services, health clinics and other humanitarian activities.
“The polling of the communities around Manta consistently showed high support for the FOL,” he said.
According to a September fact sheet released by the U.S. Embassy in Quito, the 40 firefighters stationed at the air base responded to more than 800 emergencies at the airport and the city of Manta, as well as training more than 250 Ecuadorian firefighters.
Concurrent with their mission to seize illegal drugs, the American personnel ran 200 donation events to benefit the local community each year, and donated “an average of 4,000 hours of work and distributed 150,000 items including clothes, school material and personal hygiene items” to local charity organizations, the fact sheet said, adding that the total U.S. annual contribution to the local economy was approximately $8.3 million.
The United States invested nearly $71 million in the air base and built new facilities for it. When the American personnel left, they transferred the facilities as well as $1.4 million worth of equipment to the Ecuadorean government and local charities.
SIGNIFICANT GAP IN COUNTERNARCOTICS CAPABILITIES
The FOL was discontinued after the Ecuadorean government decided earlier in 2009 not to renew the 10-year American lease for use of the air base. “It was a national sovereignty issue,” McMullen said. The country’s president, Rafael Correa, “did not like the presence of the U.S. military” in his country. But the United States remains very interested in working with Ecuador to find a different format for bilateral cooperation on counternarcotics.
The end of the FOL “leaves a significant gap in our counternarcotics capability” in the eastern Pacific, McMullen said. “As long as it is open, we know that the drug traffickers like to work the seams between our ability to carry out surveillance, so the longer that stays open, the more of a problem it presents to other countries in the region that suffer from the plague of traffickers.”
The recent agreement by which U.S. personnel would have access to seven Colombian bases for counternarcotics operations “will not fill the gap [and] it was never intended to,” he said. (See “Agreement on Colombian Bases Does Not Increase U.S. Presence.”)
He explained that the discussions with the Colombian government that led to the agreement began well before the United States was aware that it would have to leave the Manta facility. From the outset, the agreement with Colombia was designed to control drug cultivation and trafficking inside the country. With this goal in mind, McMullen said, the United States will be using bases located in the interior of Colombia, which are very distant from the maritime areas that had been covered by the Manta FOL.
Instead, U.S. officials have been offering ideas to the Ecuadorean government, such as having U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials and the Coast Guard conduct the surveillance operations, thereby having U.S. law enforcement agencies involved instead of the military.
“I think they’re trying to manage the problem as best they can,” McMullen said. But Ecuador’s security and law enforcement services do not currently have the capability to undertake long-distance surveillance missions. “It’s an expensive and sophisticated operation that many countries just can’t afford to do themselves,” he said, and it is unlikely that Ecuador will be able to fill this gap on its own.
At the same time, the United States wants to be part of the process, even at a minimal level. “We are the largest consumer of cocaine, and there is a moral and practical obligation for us to be part of this,” McMullen said. “Ultimately we want our role to be a specific value-added and technical capability that they may not possess.”
U.S. and Ecuadorean officials plan to continue the bilateral dialogue launched in November 2008 in Washington on November 9 and 10, and McMullen said security and counternarcotics cooperation remains “one of the pillars” of the discussion.
“Both sides can be proud” of what their 10 years of cooperation at Manta achieved, he said. “[We] hope that we can continue that in a possibly different format.”
