The Manta Base

Winter 2007

Featured Story

The Manta Base: A U.S. Military Fort in Ecuador

by Luis Ángel Saavedra

On March 31, 1999, the Ecuadorian government signed with the United States an “Agreement for the Leasing of Logistical Facilities,” by which U.S. soldiers would operate the Eloy Alfaro Air Base in Manta on Ecuador’s Pacific coast. The agreement, which lasts ten years and can be renewed for additional ten-year periods, involves an air base, a naval base, the Manta Port, and all the areas neighboring this infrastructure.

But grassroots opposition to the base and the election in November 2006 of left-leaning Rafael Correa as president may lead to the base’s closure when its lease is up in 2009.

For more than 20 years, the Ecuadorian government consolidated the military complex involved in the agreement through the expulsion of more than 800 local peasant families. Nearly 25,000 acres of land around the Jaramijó naval base were assigned to the Ecuadorian Navy, but without establishing land boundaries. The dislocated families were never paid any compensation, nor were they relocated, which is why the farmers insist on recovering their lands. The land arbitrarily given to the naval base currently amounts to 60,000 acres, including a military training area, and affects five townships in the province.

The agreement was designed for the interdiction of drug trafficking. The Ecuadorian government it as an opportunity for the city of Manta’s development: they said it would attract foreign investment, reactivate tourism, and create a new urban structure. Some human rights organizations filed suit against the agreement as unconstitutional, although the Manta population mobilized to defend it. The groups filing suit lost and the agreement was ratified. In this process a dichotomy became evident between Manta civic organizations that defended the base and the human rights and social organizations that warned of its future negative consequences.

Seven years of U.S. military presence have shown that the base’s main activities are not related to fighting the drug trade. Instead, it provides logistical support for the counterinsurgency war in Colombia, giving real-time information on the movement of guerrilla forces that operate there. It also exercises immigration control by locating boats with people trying to reach the United States in search of the so-called “American dream.”

Although the agreement restricts maritime interdiction to the Ecuadorian Navy, U.S. military ships have conducted more than 45 illegal actions, boarding boats that carried immigrants or were at work fishing, as well as sinking or causing damage to at least eight Ecuadorian boats between 2001 and June 2005.

The base’s security measures have generated conflict with civil society, since they affect the traditional subsistence activities of the surrounding population, centered mostly on fishing and agriculture. Similarly, the militarization of the Manta Port prevents local fishermen’s boats from entering, under the rationale that they could be part of a terrorist attack on the port’s infrastructure.

Far from being a secure port, Manta has become a principal point for the export of drugs, and several small drug trafficking cartels have set up centers for operations in the city.

In addition, as in other communities where a U.S. military base is established, constructing the base has awakened cultural conflicts, such as those prompted by the increased number of sex workers and nightspots since 2000.

Ecuadorian media have also uncovered several attempts by the U.S. company Dyncorp to convert Manta into a center for recruiting mercenaries. Since March 2002, Dyncorp has had a work force of 134 people on the Manta base. Besides its known work of training and incorporating mercenaries into U.S. service around the world, Dyncorp has also been implicated in the trafficking of girls for sexual slavery.

In August 2005, media documented the existence of a company called EPI Security & Investigators, owned by Jeffrey Shippy, a former fireman tied to the Dyncorp team in Manta. Shippy maintained a Web site that recruited Colombian mercenaries to be sent to Iraq. EPI had hired nearly a thousand Colombians and had received files of several Ecuadorian ex-soldiers interested in working as mercenaries in Iraq. They were offered salaries from $2,500 to $5,000 a month, depending on their “operational capacity.” But EPI Security & Investigators disappeared from the Web, and its supposed owner also disappeared, so that Dyncorp again remained safe from any connection to these events.

The periodic presence of human rights organizations in Manta and the public forums carried out in these seven years have permeated public opinion in the province, and now local actors support the idea of not renewing the agreement for another ten years. According to an October 2006 survey, 49% of Ecuadorian society do not want to renew the agreement in 2009, while 41% accept the U.S. military presence. In the Ecuadorian highlands, the rejection of the Manta Base reaches 54%.

Correa said, "We can negotiate with the U.S. about a base in Manta, if they let us put a military base in Miami..."

The Manta base also became an issue of debate in the presidential elections last November. While Alvaro Noboa called for renewing the agreement, his opponent, Rafael Correa, proposed not renewing it. After his victory by a decisive margin, Correa said, “We can negotiate with the U.S. about a base in Manta, if they let us put a military base in Miami; if there is no problem, we’ll accept.” Ecuador’s Foreign Relations Strategic Plan, a consensus document of different Ecuadorian social sectors, also affirms that a principle of Ecuador’s foreign policy is to prevent the establishment of foreign troops in the country.

Finally, it is worth stressing that the renewal of the agreement in 2009 would be very serious, as it would consolidate the U.S. military presence: its departure would not be easy to achieve in subsequent years. So the current moment is crucial for beginning actions to document, raise awareness, take legal action, and organize to hold Correa to his pledge to decline the renewal. One of these actions will be the International Conference of the No Bases Coalition in March, which will bring together in Ecuador organizations that struggle against military bases around the world.

Luis Ángel Saavedra is president of the Regional Foundation for Counsel on Human Rights (INREDH) in Ecuador, and a member of the No Bases Coalition.