En Marcha: The Military Subordination to the US is Advancing

En Marcha 2079 from January 17 to 23, 2024

Central Organ of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador 

The Military Subordination to the U.S. is Advancing 

On October 6, 2023, then-Foreign Minister Gustavo Manrique signed the Agreement Relating to the Status of the Armed Forces between the U.S. Government and Ecuador with U.S. Ambassador Michael Fitzpatrick.  

Under this agreement, military and civilian personnel working as members of the United States Armed Forces, as well as U.S. contractors under contract or subcontract with the U.S. Department of Defense, may be temporarily present in the territory of the Republic of Ecuador in response to natural and man-made disasters such as:  cooperative activities to address shared security challenges, including illicit trafficking, international terrorism and illegal fishing.  

Through this rule, these U.S. officials would be granted diplomatic privileges, which would be: free movement throughout the country, non-payment of taxes, use of the radio spectrum, criminal jurisdiction over their personnel, freedom of importation and contracting, and immunity from claims by third parties.  

This Agreement is part of the strengthening of military relations between the United States and Ecuador, the same ones that have been developing since the Moreno government, with the return of USAID and the visit of the heads of the Southern Command.  

The Noboa government, in the context of its declaration of armed conflict, pointed out that the country needed foreign military support to militarily confront, together with the National Police, the attacks of 22 organized crime groups that, under Decree 111, have been declared "terrorists." Senior U.S. defense officials, including the head of the U.S. Southern Command, have announced their upcoming arrival in Ecuador to support that requirement.  

What lies behind this Agreement? For several years, the United States has been working for one that will allow it to consolidate the bourgeois governments in Peru and Ecuador, a line that is part of the geopolitical design that Washington has been developing in order to consolidate its influence in Latin America and, with it, to confront its main competitor, China. Everything makes us see that the presence of U.S. troops is not temporary because of drug trafficking or organized crime, it is responding to a strategy of great effort.