By AFP | 2025-09-05

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on September 4 promised security aid to violence-wracked Ecuador as he sought to rally the region behind a force-first anti-crime campaign following a US strike on a boat allegedly linked to Venezuela.

Ecuador's President Daniel Noboa has deployed troops to combat violence that has transformed the country from one of Latin America's safest to one of its most dangerous.

Rubio, meeting with Noboa in the centuries-old palace in Quito's old city, said the United States would provide nearly $20 million in security aid, including $6 million in drones.

He also said that the United States was designating two gangs, Los Lobos and Los Choneros, as foreign terrorist organizations -- putting them directly into US crosshairs.

Rubio told reporters that he was helping Ecuador to "wage war against these vicious animals, these terrorists."

Speaking of US President Donald Trump's push against criminal groups, Rubio said, "This administration is confronting it like it's never been confronted before."

Noboa's mass deployment of force has won him popular support but has yet to dent crime, which mostly consists of gang battles.

At a joint press conference, Ecuador's Foreign Minister Gabriela Sommerfeld said that Ecuador wants to see the Americas region free of "threats from transnational organized crime groups and terrorist groups that want to subjugate our citizens."

The visit comes two days after US forces said they blew up an alleged drug-running boat from a gang tied to Venezuela's leftist leader Nicolas Maduro, in an operation the US government said killed 11 people.

In a sign of escalating tensions, the Pentagon said that two Venezuelan military planes flew near a US Navy vessel in international waters on August 4.

Rubio denounced Maduro, who was indicted in the United States, as a "fugitive of American justice."

But he also said that countries that cooperate with the United States need not worry about US strikes and in fact "help us find these people and blow them up."

Sommerfeld promised to keep up assistance in one of the United State's top priorities -- curbing migration.

"Ecuador is going to support the United States. It's symbolic, and it's important for our partner, and we're going to do it in a coordinated way," she said.

A senior US State Department official said Ecuador has agreed to accept people from third countries deported from the United States and that implementation was "very, very near."

Rubio said that the United States would also aim within "a couple of weeks" to seal an economic agreement with Ecuador.

Invitation to US forces

For years, the United States operated a military base at the Pacific port of Manta, and the Drug Enforcement Administration had a sizable footprint in the country.

The base was closed in 2009, after leftist then-president Rafael Correa refused to renew the lease.

Noboa has taken steps to amend Ecuador's constitution to allow a return of US forces.

"If they invite us to return, we will consider it very seriously," Rubio said.

Ecuador is increasingly compelled to recalibrate its warming ties with the United States against its dependency on China, to which it owes billions of dollars through infrastructure-for-loan agreements often described as a debt trap.