Noboa and Kast Unite in Valparaíso as a New Regional Security Axis Takes Shape

VALPARAÍSO, CHILE — Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa was among the first foreign leaders to embrace José Antonio Kast on Wednesday as Chile’s new president was sworn in at the National Congress in the coastal city of Valparaíso—a ceremony that marked not only the most pronounced rightward shift in Chilean politics since the return of democracy in 1990, but the public consolidation of a new regional security axis that is quietly reshaping the fight against transnational criminal organizations across South America.

Right-wing leader Kast was sworn in on Wednesday as Chile’s new president, marking the Latin American nation’s most pronounced shift to the right since the return of democracy in 1990, taking office on a promise to tackle surging rates of violent crime and carry out mass deportations of “irregular migrants.”

Among the high-ranking officials attending the ceremony were Argentina’s President Javier Milei, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino, Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, and Spain’s King Felipe VI.

For Noboa and Kast, Wednesday’s ceremony was the formal public expression of a partnership that had been developing for months. In December 2025, Kast—then president-elect—traveled to Quito specifically to meet with Noboa at the Carondelet Palace, with transnational security as the central focus of the talks.

Both leaders agreed on the need to coordinate cooperation and develop a joint action plan to counter the growing threat posed by transnational criminal groups, with the aim of strengthening security, stability, and development across the region.

Another objective of Kast’s Quito visit was to examine Ecuador’s high-security incarceration model, which was inspired by El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison developed under President Nayib Bukele—a model Kast has said he aims to draw lessons from as he considers potential reforms to Chile’s notoriously overburdened prison system.

Kast has made no secret of his admiration for Bukele’s approach, having publicly stated that Chile needs “more Bukele” to address its own rising crime rates.

Ecuador as the Regional Model

The Noboa-Kast partnership is anchored in a shared conviction that Ecuador’s experience confronting organized crime offers a replicable blueprint for the wider region. The United States has become a key partner for Ecuador in the war that President Noboa declared in early 2024 against criminal gangs, which he labeled terrorists for causing the worst wave of violence in the country’s history, with Ecuador leading Latin America in homicide rates at the time of his declaration.

On March 3, Ecuadorian and U.S. military forces launched joint lethal kinetic operations against designated terrorist organizations in Ecuador, targeting Los Choneros and Los Lobos—two of the country’s largest and most violent drug trafficking networks, both of which have established operational links to Mexican cartels, including the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG.

Around 70% of the drugs produced by Colombia and Peru, the world’s largest and second-largest cocaine producers, respectively, are shipped through neighboring Ecuador—making it a critical logistics hub for cocaine trafficking whose destabilization has consequences for every country in the supply chain.

Noboa’s decision to accept U.S. military help acknowledged a hard reality: sovereignty means little without the ability to enforce law within national borders.

The operation may signal a broader shift in regional drug policy—for decades, governments hesitated to directly confront cartels, often fearing backlash or diplomatic fallout, an environment in which the cartels thrived.

“The defining theme of José Antonio Kast’s future government is a sense of emergency, particularly in security,” said political analyst Mariano Machado of risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft, adding that “the economy and immigration are also framed within this narrative of social decline,” attributing to the arrival of migrants linked to criminal networks.

Chile has experienced a dramatic surge in Venezuelan gang activity—including the Tren de Aragua—in recent years, giving Kast’s security agenda an urgency that resonates directly with the experiences of Noboa’s Ecuador.

The Colombia Problem

The emerging Noboa-Kast security axis faces its most significant structural obstacle not from within its own ranks, but from its neighbor to the north. Colombia—the source of approximately 70% of the cocaine flowing through Ecuador’s ports and a country that shares a long and porous border with Ecuador—remains governed by President Gustavo Petro, whose ideological opposition to U.S.-led counter-narcotics operations and whose government’s ongoing peace negotiations with dissident FARC factions have directly complicated the regional security picture.

The March 3 joint U.S.-Ecuador operation struck a training camp belonging to the Border Commandos—a dissident FARC faction—in Ecuador’s northeastern province of Sucumbíos, near the border with Colombia.

The operation destroyed the hideout of Mono Tole, the faction’s leader, and a training area used by drug traffickers operating along the Ecuador-Colombia border corridor.

Petro’s response was pointed. Rather than condemning the FARC-linked camp or expressing solidarity with Ecuador’s security operation, the Colombian president went to the UN narcotics commission and argued that Washington had sidelined decades of shared counter-narcotics expertise built with 75 countries—in favor of what he characterized as unilateral military adventurism.

The statement placed Petro in the uncomfortable position of appearing to defend the operational space of groups that Ecuador and the United States had just bombed on Ecuadorian soil.

The tensions are structural, not merely rhetorical. Many of the leaders in the Shield of the Americas coalition share Trump’s hardline view of crime and migration, favoring crackdowns over deeper social fixes. Colombia under Petro has pursued the opposite approach—negotiating with armed groups rather than militarily confronting them—a strategy that critics argue has provided criminal organizations with time, territory, and legitimacy they have used to expand operations into Ecuador and beyond.

The Axis Grows

Wednesday’s inauguration crystallized the contours of a new regional security coalition that now stretches from Ecuador through Chile and Argentina, with Bolivia and Paraguay as newer members, all connected by the Shield of the Americas framework signed at Doral on March 7.

Kast has made overtures to the Trump administration and praised the U.S. operation that culminated in the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. These signals intensified when Kast abruptly ended the transition process with outgoing President Gabriel Boric following a clash over a Chinese submarine cable project connecting Chile to Hong Kong—a project that drew intense criticism from Washington and further deepened tensions between the Boric administration and the incoming government.

Kast has vowed to criminalize illegal immigration, intensify mass deportations, and install fences and walls along Chile’s borders—specific policies aligned with Noboa’s own revocation of the amnesty that had allowed Venezuelan migrants without formal status to regularize their situation in Ecuador.

Both leaders view irregular migration and drug trafficking as interconnected security threats requiring coordinated regional responses rather than individual national policies.

The coalition is being sold as a response to cartels, but the broader structure also points to reducing Chinese influence in Latin America—an approach that gained its first tangible expression when Kast’s clash with Boric over the Chinese submarine cable project signaled to Washington that Chile’s new government would prioritize the U.S. relationship over Chinese infrastructure investment.

Whether the Noboa-Kast axis can translate shared ideology into operational security cooperation—intelligence sharing, joint interdiction operations, coordinated border enforcement—will depend on the institutional frameworks both governments build in the coming months. Ecuador has demonstrated that the model works. Chile now has the political will to try it. The question, as always in Latin America, is whether political will alone is enough.