The bloody fingerprints of the US and Israel are all over the security clampdown by Ecuador’s new president—posing awkward questions about the country’s spiral into violence
An unpleasant odour is emanating from Quito’s presidential palace as Ecuador’s neophyte president all but sub-contracts his security policy to a country tainted by accusations of genocide serving a superpower that provides cover for its murderous pursuits.
In the midst of violent disorder attributed to criminal gangs that are, if we are to believe the US and British press, a threat to global civilisation, Ecuador’s young leader Daniel Noboa has acceded without hesitation to pressure from Washington via Tel Aviv to replicate off-the-shelf security policies that imperil an already damaged democracy.
The 35-year-old president has announced that he intends to round up criminal gangs in what can only be described as concentration camps in a policy carbon copied from El Salvador—the Central American basket case whose current US-backed despot, with Israeli support, is cheerfully rolling back human rights gains of recent years.
Noboa’s strategy—announced in December shortly after he took office but accelerated by fast-moving developments on the ground—bear all the hallmarks of irresistible external pressure on the leader of a besieged right-wing elite desperate to cling on to power at any cost. Just six weeks after his inauguration, he had put tanks on the streets.
Mystery surrounds the two most destabilising events of recent months that have nudged Ecuador to this point—the assassination of a presidential candidate last August and the escape of a notorious gang leader this month—raising serious questions about dark forces manipulating the mayhem and madness gripping this South American country.
A slow coup now unfolding in Ecuador reflects the immense incentive the US has to keep Quito under its security umbrella, given Washington’s determination since 2017 to prevent supporters of its leftwing nemesis Rafael Correa regaining power.
But it also reflects the assiduous efforts of America’s amoral sub-contractor in Latin America, a globally isolated Israel willing to do its ally’s dirty work, to reformulate Ecuador as a loyal ally and lucrative market with the blessing of its main sponsor.
In short, US and Israeli fingerprints are all over Noboa’s presidency and policy.
America’s latest stooge
The strangely rapid ascent to the throne of Ecuador’s new president—who only gained his first political office in 2021—is, of course, not entirely unrelated to the fact that he is the son of the country’s richest man, and that his star shines brightly in the US.
His father, a controversial oligarch despised by the left for labour practices on his banana plantations, was a presidential candidate five times, locked in mortal combat with Correa. Despised by the US, the former leftwing president from 2007–17 is now in exile after being jailed in absentia on trumped up charges under his successor, the US puppet Lenín Moreno.
Young Daniel Noboa took office in November after defeating Luisa González, a candidate endorsed by Correa, and much is at stake—the new president will only govern for 17 months until 2025 to complete the term of his predecessor, Guillermo Lasso, a multimillionaire banker who sparked a political crisis and was forced to call snap elections.
Lasso was already showing all the signs of an authoritarian drift—using crime as a pretext for increasingly autocratic rule. The presidential campaign to succeed him was marked by unprecedented violence, including the assassination of an anti-corruption candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, in August.
Born in Florida, Daniel Noboa is seen by US observers as critical to forestalling the leftwing drift elsewhere in South America epitomised recently by victories against the right in Chile, Colombia and Brazil.
It is in matters of security, however, that he will be of most geopolitical value serving Washington’s interests. Last year’s elections took place against the background of a major new security agreement between Lasso and Joe Biden’s administration announced in October—kept mostly under wraps by the State Department—that for the first time since 2009 authorised US troops to operate on Ecuadorian soil. Desperate to keep Quito under its security umbrella, Biden had long turned a blind eye to the errors of this unpopular and incompetent Ecuadorian leader mired in allegations of corruption, and the agreement was Lasso’s grateful swansong.
As a result, Noboa’s victory was celebrated with relish by the usual cheerleaders—the Wall Street Journal called it “A Latin Win for US Security Interests” and, writing in Americas Quarterly, Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, said: “It is manifestly in the interests of the United States to help democratic Ecuador succeed …”
There is no doubt that it is manifestly in the interests of the US to help Noboa remain in office—the last thing Washington wants is for Ecuadorians to flirt once again with correísmo.
Violence and destabilisation
A concatenation of factors aligned to make Ecuador a locus of organised crime after 2016: the peace deal between Colombia’s government and the FARC, economic crisis compounded by a downturn due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and huge policy errors by Moreno.
Lasso’s focus was on neoliberal economic reforms and his response to rising violence in prisons was initially half-baked before Washington began pressing him to overturn the country’s extradition laws. He promptly arranged a referendum on allowing extradition to the US for organised crime—which he then promptly lost, exacerbating insecurity and digging his own political grave.
Lasso was the first to depict rising violence as a “war” between Ecuadorians and criminals and to brand crime gangs “terrorist” organisations—imported language that seemed suddenly out of place but that enabled him to hand the pro-US military huge sway in the fight against crime.
Political instability since his departure has exacerbated Ecuador’s security situation, but has also been a gift to right-wing politicians who, to a chorus of US chants about drug-trafficking, successfully pushed crime up the agenda. Ever since Lasso’s downfall, one name has been repeated like a mantra, and it is not Noboa—but Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president.
Then came two unprecedented events that changed everything.
There are few reliable leads as to who was responsible for the assassination of the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio during the election campaign in August 2023, which was immediately but with little evidence attributed to organised crime.
The real authors of this crime have slipped away into the melee. There are hints that police initially tried to frame a gang, Los Lobos, who admitted then subsequently denied being involved. The government then quickly pinned the crime on six Colombian “hit men” out on bail for other charges who were later rounded up on the basis of an arrest warrant that had, coincidentally, been issued just two hours before Villavicencio was shot. On 6 October, all six Colombians were murdered in prison in Guayaquil, followed by the killing of another suspect inside a Quito prison the next day—with little explanation since by the authorities. All six men in Guayaquil were hanged, and showed no signs of struggle. The killings occurred just a week before the second round of presidential elections won by Noboa.
The damage had been done. Public outrage at Villavicencio’s murder—the first of a presidential candidate in 45 years—was a turning point, a drama that shocked the country and pushed crime to the very top of the agenda. It was rapidly seized upon by the right—who hated Villavicencio for his investigations as an independent journalist into their corruption—as a pretext for offering fearful voters a security clampdown. Indeed, the then president Lasso used the killing to declare a state of emergency and deploy troops.
The threat of gangs to Ecuador’s national integrity was now on everyone’s lips—effectively catapulting Noboa into the presidency as a tough, fearless young can-do crime-buster. At the time of Villavicencio’s death 11 days before the first round of voting, the leftwing Luisa González, the candidate endorsed by former president Correa, was ahead in the polls. By the time of the 15 October runoff, she was behind, and was beaten by Noboa.
It is probable that gangsters did pull the trigger in the murder of Villavicencio and also then killed the prime suspects in jail. But that does not make them authors of the crime—merely pawns in a wider plot. Blaming gangs without evidence is the lazy explanation that has been swallowed whole by the compliant US media hysterically lining up behind their government’s endless, apocalyptic rhetoric about drug-trafficking and failed states in Latin America. It is all far too easy.
The reality is messier. The rule of law has been eroded in Ecuador ever since Correa left the presidency, and instability in the country now offers killers of all stripes a rich climate of impunity. Ecuador is awash with shady security operatives able to serve several masters at once while networking and playing off the many criminal gangs active in this region. In a highly unusual move just days before the Colombian suspects were murdered in jail—almost designed to throw investigators off the trail and put Washington on the side of the beleaguered Ecuadorian people—the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken offered a staggering $5m reward for information leading to the arrest of those behind Villavicencio’s killing, and a further $1m reward for information leading to the identification or location of any individual holding a key leadership position in the group responsible.
The second destabilising act that has enabled the young Noboa’s Bukele-style security clampdown and made more secure prisons an apparent priority was the escape earlier this month of a gang boss known as Fito, Adolfo Macías Villamar, from a prison in Guayaquil. When news of his flight emerged, unrest exploded at jails throughout the country and Noboa declared a two-month state of emergency, a curfew, and sent the army into jails. Days ofviolence culminated in an attack by masked men on a television channel’s live studio during a broadcast in an iconic and very public performance that, more than anything prior to that, sowed fear throughout Ecuador.In a textbook reproduction of US spin in the “war on terror/war on drugs”, Noboa responded by announcing that an “internal armed conflict” now existed in Ecuador and in addition to the state of emergency he would be mobilising the military to “neutralise … transnational organised crime, terrorist organisations and belligerent non-state actors”. Again, the US stepped in quickly as a willing partner, stating that it was “co-ordinating closely” with Noboa’s government and stood “ready to provide assistance”.
Yet mystery again surrounds all these events. No one is able to explain why masked gunmen attacked a TV station in the first place, conveniently broadcasting the public security threat in real time to the entire world, or whether this was related to Fito’s escape. The plot thickened on 17 January when the public prosecutor investigating the TV station attack was assassinated in a targeted hit in Guayaquil, sabotaging the probe. The killers clearly had inside information about his movements and wanted to sever any trail he was following.
Fito’s disappearance itself poses many questions—he reportedly absconded on a trip outside the jail to the doctor days before officials noticed he was gone. It would appear that he literally walked out. Ecuadorian authorities have provided little detail as public attention has moved on to wider violence. Nonetheless, Fito is an important character in this unfolding drama. The 44-year-old is an emblematic figure nationally, as leader of a powerful gang known as Los Choneros that extends throughout the prison system and is thought to be behind many of the riots in recent years. Moreover, before Villavicencio’s assassination in August, the late presidential candidate said he had been threatened by Fito, among others.
It is likely that we will never know who killed Villavicencio and that we will never hear from the fugitive Fito again—two events which can be linked in the public mind that have served to nudge Ecuador ever closer to a state of siege under Noboa.
His notoriety tailor-made but, more conveniently, his whereabouts now unknown, Fito has become the perfect silent fall guy for Ecuador’s ills.
US incentives
Washington has struck while the iron is hot. The US has a huge incentive to ensure Noboa remains in power—and criminal violence under the rubric of “drug-trafficking” is the discursive gift that keeps giving.
Indeed, it has been directly in Washington’s interest for Ecuador to descend to a tipping point of violent crime, which allows US interlocutors such as its outspoken and imperious embassy in the country to attribute all of Ecuador’s problems to the man they hate and fear more than any other, Correa.
By this mendacious narrative, it is Correa who has been largely responsible for the chaos by ending cooperation with the US Drug Enforcement Agency—a neocolonial police force with a history of meddling in other countries—kicking Pentagon and CIA operatives out of Ecuador, closing US military facilities, and blaming drug-consuming behemoths like America for their own addiction.
After all, Washington has never let the truth get in the way of a good story: in fact, Correa cut Ecuador’s murder rate to an historic low through smart policymaking that combined increased policing, poverty reduction, and opportunities for reformed gang members. Instead, and with tiresome predictability, US officials repeatedly employed allegations of drug-trafficking in Ecuador under Correa as a means of discrediting him.
Regardless of the facts, Washington has a priority: Ecuador’s security policy has been top of the agenda for some time, something the US embassy in the country states as a key aspect of relations. Above all, the US wants to rebuild its security infrastructure having seethed ever since Correa shut its military intelligence base in Manta in 2009 as a longstanding affront to Ecuador’s sovereignty. The narrative coming out of Washington now is that this was an own goal—by stripping Ecuador of valuable surveillance to identify drug-trafficking vessels.
The second incentive for backing Noboa to the hilt is migration. “Security cooperation” is also an effort by the US to stem the flow of migrants from Ecuador, which has soared since 2019 and could swell more in response to the current instability. Migration, of course, is the number one political issue in this year’s US elections, and Biden’s own survival depends on bringing it down.
Third, US business interests continue to smart at the opportunities lost since 2013 when Correa withdrew Ecuador from a trade pact with the US after Washington used it to blackmail the country over an asylum request by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.
But is arguably the attention that Ecuador has attracted from China since Correa began luring investment from Beijing that has injected most urgency into Washington’s efforts to regain control over Quito. In 2021, like a child having a hissy fit, Ecuador’s ambassador to Washington, Ivonne Baki, complained that the Biden administration was not paying enough attention to her country and did not understand the urgency of policy towards Latin America. That “urgency” was underlined last May when Ecuador and China signed a free trade agreement—to the visible frustration of the White House powerless to halt Beijing’s growing influence. Ecuador has now become something of an obsession on the Republican right, which wants to throw investment at it to counter Beijing’s influence. It is the only country on Latin America’s Pacific coast that does not have a comprehensive “free-trade” agreement with the US.
Given these factors, there is a strong possibility that much of the budget for Ecuador’s security policy under Noboa will now come from the US. Shortly after his victory, Quito announced its intention to seal a monumental “security assistance agreement” by which Washington will cough up $200m worth of equipment and support. Moreover, announcing the deal without giving details in December, Interior Minister Monica Palencia said it would support projects by the police and other security programmes which Noboa campaigned on. The young president promises to create a new intelligence unit, give his security forces state of the art tactical weaponry, reinforce security at ports and airports—and build several high-security prisons using Israeli technology based on a project in El Salvador.
Palencia said the government was also pursuing a donation of $120m from a “Canadian foundation”—without naming it or providing any further information. This would be a staggering amount for a government to receive without transparent accounting for its origins.
The role of Israel
It is to El Salvador that we must look to understand the nature of Israeli involvement in Ecuador’s new security policy at a time when it has never been a more important for Tel Aviv to consolidate alliances beyond its immediate circle of friends in Washington.
Israel’s military-industrial complex and government have forged a warm working relationship with President Bukele, an unsavoury character elected in 2019 responsible for what campaign groups say are alarming human rights abuses. In December, Amnesty International warned that Bukele’s focus on “highly repressive security and weakening of the rule of law have led the country into one of its worse crises since the end of the internal armed conflict” in 1992. It expressed particular concern about legal reforms under the state of emergency that enable automatic pretrial detention for crimes linked to gangs for an indefinite period without any discernible deadline for due process.
There are striking similarities between what has happened in El Salvador and what is happening in Ecuador.
In a wave of gang violence in March 2022 in which more than 80 people were killed in a single weekend, Bukele responded with a state of emergency and mass detentions, arresting from March 2022 to date a staggering 75,000 “gang members”—a campaign that has given the country the grim distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world. Understandably, this tough approach in a small country plagued by violent crime has been popular—a political reflex that has not gone unnoticed in Washington. Bukele’s showpiece has been the construction of the Técoluca supermax mega-prison able to house 40,000 prisoners and the largest in Latin America. Officially called the Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT), this was built in just seven months, opening at the start of last year.
What makes the jail distinctive is not so much bricks and mortar—it was built by mainstream Salvadoran and Mexican construction companies—but its design, which maximises the use of state-of-the-art surveillance and monitoring systems, an Israeli specialism. CECOT is an Orwellian nightmare of surveillance and control—a digital panopticon.
The mega-prison is also a masterpiece of state secrecy and lack of accountability. The construction of El Salvador’s prison is hidden behind a wall of secrecy as secure as the jail itself, with national security being used as a pretext for a wholesale lack of transparency that has left local observers trying to piece together questions about costs and participation. Sub-contractors in El Salvador seeking to reclaim unpaid fees have been hampered by the fact that their government refused to sign contracts with them for their work.
However, it is known from statements by Noboa about his own plans in Ecuador that Israelis played a key role in its design. El Salvador is a paradise for shady private and semi-state security firms—estimates put these as high as 500 in a country of just 6 million people—a proliferation largely due to ineffective police and security services and weak or non-existent regulation. But Bukele also happens to be the most pro-Israel leader in the region, whose administration has been rewarded for his loyalty. Despite hailing from a Palestinian family, El Salvador’s president has singularly failed to speak out about Israeli crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.
Israel had clearly identified Bukele as a potential ally in 2015, four years before his election as president, when he was described as a “partner for cooperation” by Tel Aviv’s ambassador to El Salvador. In 2018, he took a trip to Tel Aviv sponsored by the Israeli government. His election as president in 2019 was greeted enthusiastically by the Israeli press which warmly dubbed him “a friend of Israel”. Soon after taking office, he welcomed a $3m donation from the Jerusalem Foundation for Salvadoran military and police forces.
Israel has also been implicated in abuses attributed to Bukele’s regime. In 2020–21 an investigation by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and digital rights group Access Now found evidence of extensive hacking of phones infected with the Pegasus spyware of the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group used by journalists and civil society activists critical of Bukele. NSO’s research team is staffed mostly by former Israeli military personnel and, according to The New York Times, Israel’s government has treated NSO as a de facto arm of the state granting licenses for Pegasus to countries with which it aims to nurture stronger security ties. Although the Canadian researchers could not definitively link the hacking to Bukele’s administration, they said this was “very likely”—an assertion denied by El Salvador’s government.
None of this is surprising: since its formation, Israel has had a dirty history of support for the most brutal regimes and right-wing paramilitary organisation in Latin America. It has supplied, trained and advised half the countries of the region both with hardware but also security expertise, intelligence and counter-insurgency operations. It has been particularly active in its support for nasty dictators in small Central American countries. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, between 1975 and 1979 more than 80% of El Salvador’s military imports came from Israel.
Indeed, Israel might be regarded as the best kept secret in Latin America’s “dirty wars”, a good example of which was in its favourite country—El Salvador—during the 12-year civil war which killed at least 75,000 people and ended in 1992. Besides supplying the bloodthirsty government backed by the US in its murderous attacks against its own citizens, the Israelis helped train ANSESAL, the secret police that would form the framework of the death squads that killed tens of thousands of civilians.
By some accounts, the US has actively encouraged Israeli security activity in Latin America, and especially Central America, sub-contracting dirty work to its ally that enabled American officials to maintain plausible deniability. While it is self-evident that Israel provides arms and expertise to unsavoury regimes across the world in order to generate export revenue while sharpening its counter-insurgency skills in order to better oppress the Palestinians—another motive is the apparent bargain it has made with the US. Tel Aviv provides Washington with covert security support in exchange for the superpower’s uncritical backing in the Middle East. The mechanism of remuneration—and a valuable source of extra revenue for Israel over and above the official billions in military aid it receives from the US—is concealed in the form of American security aid to governments that is then used to pay for Israeli services.
It might even be said, with one eye on Gaza, that when it comes to genocide Israel has form in Latin America.
Journalist Gabriel Schivone noted that between the late 1970s to early 1980s, Israel assisted every facet of the murderous attack against the Guatemalan people by the former dictator and US pawn Efraín Ríos Montt, the first head of state to be found guilty of genocide in a domestic court in 2013. Schivone wrote just before this verdict: “Through the height of la violencia (“the violence”) or desencarnacíon (“loss of flesh, loss of being”), between the late 1970s to early 1980s, Israel assisted every facet of attack on the Guatemalan people. Largely taking over for the United States on the ground in Guatemala (with Washington retaining its role as paymaster, while also maintaining a crucial presence in the country), Israel had become the successive governments’ main provider of counterinsurgency training, light and heavy arsenals of weaponry, aircraft, state-of-the-art intelligence technology and infrastructure, and other vital assistance.”
The similarities between Bukele’s mass incarceration and Israel’s own mass detention of Palestinians are striking, as is the convergent use of language—Israel routinely refers to all detained Palestinians as “terrorists”, since 7 October has been conducting its own campaign of mass arrests, and in many cases is holding Palestinians without charges or a trial indefinitely under what it calls “administrative detention”, a practice devised under Israeli anti-terrorism laws that has its roots in British colonialism.
Ecuador and Israel
El Salvador provides the evidence that Israel is helping to shape Ecuador’s security policy.
During his campaign, Noboa made criminal violence in the country his top priority and within days of taking office announced that, in January as part of his largely amorphous security and penitentiary policy called Plan Phoenix, construction would begin on several maximum and super maximum security prisons modelled explicitly on those built by Bukele.
Noboa said the prison projects will be carried out by “the same people, the same companies” with which Bukele worked, without specifying how much they will cost or where they will be built.
The first two prisons would be in place within 200 days, according to the government’s schedule. Noboa then elaborated by explaining that Bukele did not invent the penitentiary system now in use in his country, and Ecuador’s supermax required Israeli cooperation. He said: “It is Israeli cooperation, in the design of max and supermax security prisons, as well as segmentation for minor crimes and contraventions.”
Surveillance in the jail, Noboa told the Expreso media outlet, would be entrusted to the usual suspects: “Let’s start with the most basic, then we bring in the Americans, the Israelites and the English, who each have the best systems and technologies for this.”
But it is not as if Ecuador’s ties with Israeli defence and security companies are novel—according to the Database of Israeli Military and Security Export (DIMSE), Ecuador became a substantial customer of Israel arms exports in the mid-1970s under its military regimes. DIMSE details a number of Israeli companies that supply Ecuador with defence and digital intelligence products, but the Ecuadorian military have remained particularly loyal to Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) as a supplier of missiles, drones, radars and cyber-security systems. In May 2022, President Lasso confirmed that he was seeking help from IAI in combating drug traffickers. DIMSE also notes that the Israeli Tactical School, a global consulting company located in Washington DC, operates a Counter Terror Academy in the city of Guayaquil that provides training in special security techniques developed by former members of Shin Ben, Mossad, and the Israeli Navy among others.
There is a clear political backdrop to deepening ties between Ecuador and Israel’s security establishment: the only interregnum in the supply of Israeli weaponry to the Ecuadorian military came under Correa who, in 2010, put an end to military cooperation with Israel and stopped the purchase of weapons. The main reason for frosty relations was, predictably, the oppression of the Palestinians. In 2014, Correa cancelled a scheduled visit to Israel over its policies in Gaza just two days after foreign minister Ricardo Patiño announced that Ecuador would open an embassy in the Palestinian Authority.
After Correa’s exile, Israel acted fast to rebuild security cooperation. LenínMoreno reversed his predecessor’s principled stance and embraced a US-Israeli axis, and by 2019 was buying $30m of Israeli weapons per year. In September 2019, Moreno’s minister of defence Oswaldo Jarrín confirmed that elite units of Ecuador’s military would begin training in Israel. In a sideswipe at the breakdown in relations under Correa, Israeli officials told Ecuadorian media that there was now a “flourishing relationship” between the two countries.
In his short and inglorious reign, Lasso also expended disproportionate effort consolidating ties with Israel. In May 2022, within a year of taking power, he became the first president to visit Israel in Ecuador’s history, pledging to “move toward Israel” in the UN. At the time of that visit it was reported in Bloomberg during a meeting with executives of IAI in Tel Aviv that Lasso was seeking Israeli technical assistance to combat drug-trafficking and organised crime in Ecuador. The then president referenced in particular in his comments that the transfer of technology and expertise would help avoid incidents such as a bloody riot that month at a prison in Santo Domingo west of Quito. Bloomberg quoted the IAI’s executive vice-president of marketing, Yehuda Lahav, as saying his vision for IAI was as “a strategic ally” for Ecuador. Lasso was also joined on his Israeli junket by his foreign minister Juan Carlos Holguín, who told Bloomberg that a key tool being offered by IAI was in the realm of prisons.
Questions and motives
There is no direct evidence that the US and Israel are dictating Ecuador’s security policy, no smoking gun or paper trail. But in matters of longstanding covert American interference in the affairs of Latin American states and the role played by Israel in facilitating this, there never is.
Sometimes the overwhelming motive to meddle and the sheer volume of coincidence leaves a trail of crumbs that becomes impossible to ignore. It is a murder mystery without a body. This is one of those cases.
Serious questions must be asked, first, about whether efforts have been underway to destabilise Ecuador to prevent a return of the left and engineer a political outcome favourable to Washington and Tel Aviv. Both countries stand to gain enormously from establishing a Bukele-style security state right now in multiple ways—geopolitically, militarily and economically.
Moreover, since the ten-year presidency of the leftwing Rafael Correa it has been abundantly clear that the US has been trying to interfere in Ecuadorian politics. It obviously continues to do so. For example, although there is no direct evidence of Washington interfering in last year’s elections, a former energy minister testified in 2022 that US federal officials conspired with a right-wing political party prior to the 2017 elections to run a disinformation campaign against the correísta movement, and that he was personally offered money by the Americans to make false charges against Correa himself.
Why has so little information been provided by Ecuador’s right-wing government about the convulsive historic events that have transformed, in short order, the political climate of a country seen as critical to Washington’s influence in South America?
Questions must also be asked about who is drafting Noboa’s security policy—Ecuador’s president himself or the powerful foreigners at the end of a phone who back him and stand to gain enormously from his actions? Is policy being made by civilian politicians—or a military under the tutelage of the US and its zealous ally Israel, the purveyor of security expertise and hardware that will be crucial to the success of the young president’s strategy and hence his ability to retain power in May 2025.
Washington makes no secret of its support for democracy in Latin America—the world is sick of hearing about it—yet no one in their right mind will be unaware of its longstanding record of propping up anti-democratic actors in the region in support of its imperial vocation.
It is the secretive supporting role being played by Israel, however, at a time in which its atrocities against the Palestinians cannot be ignored by any self-respecting observer, that will taint Noboa hereafter.
Ecuador’s president risks being stained by association with foreign powers whose pretence of moral leadership has been irreparably damaged.
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Categories: Ecuador, North America, South America, United States