The U.S. Southern Command reported the sinking of the fishing vessel Por siempre don Carlos and the disappearance of its 25 crew members 140 nautical miles off the coast of Manta, Ecuador. With this action, the total number of vessels destroyed by U.S. troops—invited into the country by President Daniel Noboa with the alleged aim of combating drug trafficking—now stands at 10. Furthermore, the attack marks an escalation of human rights violations committed by Washington, as in previous cases the crews were kidnapped, subjected to torture on U.S. ships, and then handed over to Ecuadorian authorities, who almost always had to release them due to a lack of evidence linking them to any criminal activity. Now, either the tactic of murdering the sailors—as was done systematically in the Caribbean and the Pacific—has been employed, or a decision was made to conceal the fishermen’s whereabouts.
These events illustrate the erosion of sovereignty and the rule of law under the Noboa administration. It should be recalled that the president has used the pretext of organized crime to violate individual rights across much of the country and open the door to U.S. occupation. Since 2024, the far-right president has imposed recurring states of emergency and curfews during which freedom of movement and the exercise of constitutional rights to the inviolability of the home and the privacy of correspondence are suspended, while search and seizure operations are authorized. However, between the first half of that year and the first half of the following year, there was a 47 percent spike in the number of homicides, and 2025 ended as the most violent year in Ecuador’s history, with approximately 9,300 violent deaths—52 per 100,000 inhabitants.
At the same time, the son of the country’s richest man has been working diligently to establish a U.S. military presence in Ecuador. First, he pushed for a referendum to amend the Constitution in order to repeal the article that proclaims the country “a territory of peace” where “the establishment of foreign military bases or foreign facilities for military purposes shall not be permitted” and in which “the transfer of national military bases to foreign armed or security forces is prohibited.” After his capitulationist attempt was rejected, he resorted to subterfuges such as the creation of “floating bases” or the unofficial handover of facilities to Washington. The commander of the Ecuadorian Air Force, Mauricio Salazar Machuca, was dismissed for pointing out that the Taura base is already operated by the U.S. Air Force and for requesting from Quito “authorizations, guidelines, legal or administrative instruments or mechanisms, or, where applicable, specific conventions or agreements” that would resolve the contradiction between the de facto transfer and the Constitution’s explicit prohibition.
To make matters worse, last August Noboa granted full immunity to members of the U.S. armed forces, civilian employees of the Department of War, foreign companies contracted or subcontracted by that agency, and their non-Ecuadorian workers. These foreign agents are protected from administrative sanctions and are guaranteed diplomatic channels for resolving any conflicts in which they are involved; as a result, they can commit any crime and go unpunished, as has already occurred in all cases of kidnapping and torture against innocent people. Furthermore, the Ecuadorian government keeps the figures on extrajudicial killings perpetrated by the United States under wraps.
A chilling aspect of the assault on the people of Ecuador is that it is led by an individual against whom there is strong evidence of links to large-scale drug trafficking: between 2020 and 2025, at least eight large shipments of cocaine—camouflaged in banana crates belonging to the Noboa family and destined for Europe—were seized. One of the journalists who exposed the use of Noboa Trading for drug exports was forced into exile due to the death threats he received. The conclusion is clear and echoes what has been observed throughout the region: Washington does not seek to eradicate drug trafficking, but rather to impose sympathetic regimes to control territories, natural resources, and perhaps the drug trade itself.