Find in Jungle of Ecuador Called a Game-Changer in the War on Drugs It has long been the stuff of drug-trafficking legend, but federal authorities announced on Saturday that they have helped seize the first known and fully operational submarine built by drug traffickers to smuggle tons of cocaine from South America toward the United States. The diesel-electric powered submarine was captured in an Ecuadorian jungle waterway leading to the Pacific Ocean, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. [continues 693 words]
U.S. Planes That Search Pacific Ocean for Drug Boats Coming From Colombia Could Lose Their Base MANTA, Ecuador - Every day, great silver AWACS, or Airborne Warning and Control System, surveillance aircraft take off from a sunbaked airstrip to soar high above the Pacific Ocean in search of planes, boats and crude submarines packed with cocaine and headed toward the United States. "It's hours and hours of sheer boredom," the detachment commander, Lt. Col. Charles Moore, said of the duty, "and then one suddenly falls in your lap. It's outstanding. We got one!" [continues 779 words]
Ecuador - The scene at the Manta Ray Cafe, a mess hall here at the most prominent American military outpost in South America, suggests all is normal. A television tuned to Fox Sports beams in a golf tournament. Ecuadorean contractors serve sloppy Joes near refrigerators bulging with Dr Pepper and Gatorade. Air Force personnel in jumpsuits preparing to board an Awacs surveillance plane leaf through dog-eared paperbacks. But by next year, if President Rafael Correa gets his way, this base will be gone, and, with it, one of the most festering sources of controversy in Washington's long war on drugs. [continues 933 words]
As Anti-U.S. Sentiment Grows Stronger In Ecuador, A Small U.S. Coastal Base Crucial To The Drug War Faces Near-Certain Closure MANTA, Ecuador - The U.S. military's lone outpost in South America is a modest affair -- some 220 Americans share space with a local air force wing and an international airport. They are allowed no more than eight planes at a time. But these surveillance planes -- chiefly A-3 AWACs and P-3 Orions -- play a vital role in keeping Andean cocaine and heroin from reaching the United States. They are responsible for about 60 percent of drug interdiction in the eastern Pacific. [continues 739 words]
The U.S. military's lone outpost in South America is a modest affair - some 220 Americans share space with a local air force wing and an international airport. They are allowed no more than eight planes at a time. But these surveillance planes play a vital role in keeping Andean cocaine and heroin from reaching the United States and are responsible for about 60 percent of drug interdiction in the eastern Pacific. That matters little to newly inaugurated President Rafael Correa, whose rejection of a U.S. military presence in Ecuador reflects widespread resentment over Washington's foreign policy in a region where President Bush's administration now has few reliable allies. [continues 784 words]
Both Fighter and Front in the Drug War, It Chafes at U.S. Presence on Its Soil. MANTA, ECUADOR -- The United States is battling a dangerous new front in its South American drug war -- just as a protege of anti-American leader Hugo Chavez comes to power in Ecuador vowing to shut down a U.S. base dedicated to narcotics surveillance. Officials have expressed growing concern that this Andean nation is being "Colombianized," illustrated by record cocaine seizures in the last two years, the destruction of a major cocaine-processing lab and a recent gangland-style killing. [continues 1312 words]
QUITO, Ecuador - U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that Latin American counties must work together to counter drug trafficking and international terrorism. Rumsfeld, in South America for a conference of Western Hemisphere defense ministers, told reporters that he hopes to strengthen regional security agreements in the Americas aimed at stopping narcotics and terrorist organizations. The conference was to begin today. [end]
Ecuadorean President Lucio Gutierrez Is Largely Considered Inept And Has Seen His Popularity Sink Since Being Accused Of Accepting Drug Money QUITO - Allegations last month that President Lucio Gutierrez' electoral campaign received $30,000 from a suspected drug trafficker has shaken a year-old government already mired in complaints of political ineptitude. Gutierrez was viewed as an astute politician before taking office in January, a man would hop out of his car to deliver rousing populist speeches during the electoral campaign and then hop back in to discuss economic policy with reporters. [continues 633 words]
QUITO - Colombia's effort to eradicate drugs in the border area is damaging Ecuadorean crops, rivers, soil and people's health, Foreign Minister Nina Pacari said Wednesday. "(Colombian) fumigation has caused serious damage," she said, adding that Colombia has failed to respect a 2002 agreement that created a six-mile buffer zone in the border area. "The verbal agreement has not been fulfilled and we want to safeguard legal crops for the development of the border zone in Ecuador," she said. [continues 176 words]
Farmers File Lawsuit Alleging Crop Damage, Health Problems Ecuador - Walking along a dirt trail here in the heart of Ecuador's Amazon forest, farmer Santiago Tanguila points to trees with yellow, withered leaves. Life for subsistence farmers has always been precarious here in San Francisco 2, a village of only 32 people next to the Colombian border, but now they face a new danger. Colombian government planes spray U.S.-manufactured herbicides inside Colombia in an attempt to eradicate cocaine-producing coca plants. [continues 720 words]
Plan Colombia, Globalization Stir Unrest In Ecuador. Hundreds of indigenous people, environmentalists and activists set up a "Permanent International Camp for Social Justice and Dignity of the Peoples" in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, in mid-March to protest the effects of Plan Colombia and globalization on the small Andean nation. Protests and events were held in Lago Agrio on the Colombian border, at the U.S. military base in Manta and in other parts of the country, involving a slew of Ecuadorian indigenous and community groups as well as hundreds of activists from other parts of South America and the world. [continues 625 words]
GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador -- Authorities seized three tons of unrefined, pure cocaine in an abandoned warehouse in the biggest drug bust in Ecuador since 1994, police said Wednesday. The cocaine was found Tuesday night in an industrial area outside this coastal city, 165 miles southeast of the capital Quito, a police statement said. There were no arrests, but police were searching for a "network" of traffickers in connection to the seizure, the statement said. An anonymous tip led police to the warehouse, where they found the cocaine packed into 123 boxes. About 70 percent of the confiscated drugs consisted of coca paste, an unrefined form of cocaine. The haul had an estimated U.S. street value of $130 million, police said. [end]
For the sixth time in 15 months, Ecuador's foreign minister has come to Washington to ask for additional U.S. aid as his nation confronts a drug-influenced civil war in its unstable neighbor, Colombia. But when Heinz Moeller left town in late June, it remained unclear if Ecuador would get the help he says it needs to cope with the stepped up war against Colombian drug producers on his country's northern border. The money, Ecuador maintains, is needed to help insulate it from the violence, refugees, and other spillover effects of the U.S.-backed military push to eradicate coca crops in the drug-producing region of southern Colombia. The United States contributed about $1.3 billion last year to Plan Colombia, an internationally financed, multiyear $7.5 billion program conceived in 1999 with the aim of promoting the peace process, fighting drugs, and strengthening democratic institutions in Colombia. But this year, the Bush Administration and Congress are considering a broader regional approach that would spread more aid around to other countries-but not to the extent that Ecuador believes it deserves. [continues 1496 words]
Flights Could Lead To Military Hub WASHINGTON -- The United States will expand its military presence in South America this fall when a major anti-drug airborne surveillance facility begins operating at the coastal airport of Manta, Ecuador, U.S. officials said. The buildup will be the first in Latin America since U.S military bases closed in Panama in 1999 and will intensify American operations in the war against the drug trade centered in Colombia, the world's largest cocaine producer. [continues 611 words]
The US plans to triple the number of troops operating from a base in north-west Ecuador in its fight against the drugs trade in south America. At least 200 mostly air force and navy personnel will be temporarily stationed at the Ecuadorean airforce base in Manta from October after the US completes work to expand the runway. Up to 400 personnel may be stationed there under a ten-year accord with the Ecuadorean government. Until April, when construction work began, an average of 100 troops were flying up to three missions a day in P3 propeller aircraft similar to the spy aircraft at the centre of the recent US-China dispute. [continues 423 words]
MANTA, Ecuador -- The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will shut down the local airport in a few days for a $65.3 million overhaul, deepening an increasingly bitter debate about Ecuador's role in the regional fight against drug trafficking. Officially, the government says the strip is little more than a "filling station" for the various spy aircraft used by the Pentagon to monitor clandestine drug flights around the Andes, but many here see it as a threat to national sovereignty that could drag Ecuador deeper into the region's drug wars. [continues 594 words]
MANTA, Ecuador--American airmen armed with M-16 assault rifles keep a close watch on U.S. Navy spy planes parked on a runway at an airfield on the outskirts of this Pacific port. The Ecuadorean air base has become the new hub of U.S. surveillance flights over the vast cocaine-producing areas of South America, and the U.S. military guards have reason to be vigilant. The drug-fueled violence that Ecuadoreans long feared would spill over the Colombian border has arrived--intensifying a debate over the wisdom of giving the United States a foothold close to the troubled frontier. [continues 350 words]
MANTA, Ecuador -- American airmen armed with M-16 assault rifles keep a close watch on U.S. Navy spy planes parked on a runway at an airfield on the outskirts of this Pacific port. The Ecuadorean air base has become the new hub of U.S. surveillance flights over the vast cocaine-producing areas of South America, and the U.S. military guards have reason to be vigilant. The drug-fueled violence that Ecuadoreans long feared would spill over the Colombian border has arrived -- intensifying a debate over the wisdom of giving the United States a foothold close to the troubled frontier. [continues 254 words]
MANTA, Ecuador -- American airmen armed with M-16 assault rifles keep a close watch on U.S. Navy spy planes parked on a runway at an airfield on the outskirts of this Pacific port. The Ecuadorean air base has become the new hub of U.S. surveillance flights over the vast cocaine-producing areas of South America, and the U.S. military guards have reason to be vigilant. The drug-fueled violence that Ecuadoreans long feared would spill over the Colombian border has arrived -- intensifying a debate over the wisdom of giving the United States a foothold close to the troubled frontier. [continues 838 words]
Ecuadoreans Worry That New U.S. Base Invites Colombian Traffickers' Reprisals MANTA, Ecuador -- American airmen armed with M-16 assault rifles keep a close watch on U.S. Navy spy planes parked on a runway at an airfield on the outskirts of this Pacific port. The Ecuadorean air base has become the new hub of U.S. surveillance flights over the vast cocaine-producing areas of South America, and the U.S. military guards have reason to be vigilant. [continues 747 words]
Inside Ecuador
