Noboa wants to bring back foreign military bases to Ecuador

Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa announced Monday that he will send to the National Assembly (Parliament) a bill to eliminate an article of the Constitution that prohibits the establishment of foreign military bases and facilities with military purposes in the Andean country.

“In a transnational conflict (against organized crime), we need national and international responses,” said Noboa, who is fighting criminal gangs linked to drug trafficking.

The announcement was made through a video recorded at what was once the Manta base, on the central coast of Ecuador, where a US base operated several years ago and which had to be released in 2009 after the Constitution drafted during the Government of Rafael Correa (2007-2017) prohibited foreign military installations on national territory out of respect for sovereignty.

The project seeks to eliminate the prohibition on the establishment of foreign military bases or facilities for military purposes, as well as the prohibition on transferring national military bases to foreign armed or security forces.

Sovereignty vs. surrender

In the video, Noboa pointed out that by eliminating the Manta base, “they wanted to say that we would recover Ecuador’s sovereignty, and what they did was hand it over to drug trafficking. That was the first pact with transnational crime,” he stressed.

“And, in this fight to recover the country, it is the pact that we have to reverse and break. Today, Ecuadorians deserve a government that is up to the events we are going through. They deserve a president who makes decisions with determination because Ecuador did not lack opportunities but honesty and political will,” he added.

He therefore announced that this Monday they will present a draft partial reform of the Constitution to the National Assembly, “which will substantially modify article 5 of the Constitution, which prohibits the establishment of foreign military bases and installations with military purposes.”

Without mentioning names, the head of state asserted that they are “raising the country that they brought to its knees, the country that they turned into a cradle of drug trafficking, the one that they handed out to the mafias with a false notion of sovereignty.”

The president tried to allude to Rafael Correa’s government to hold it responsible for the violence, but omitted that it was during the governments of Lenín Moreno, who betrayed the Citizen Revolution, and of Guillermo Lasso, of the extreme right, when crime took over Ecuador and also took over a good part of the political system of the Andean nation.