Pentagon Deploys Troops to Ecuador for Anti-Narco Operations

The United States announced the deployment of a U.S. Air Force contingent to the South American nation of Ecuador on Wednesday.

The deployment will help assist Ecuadorian security forces in combating local drug trafficking organizations, although Pentagon officials did not specify what the details of future operations in Ecuador involved.

Local gangs have catapulted the once peaceful nation, known for its natural tropical scenery and home to the Galapagos Islands in the eastern Pacific Ocean, to one of the murder capitals of the world.

The region is now the focus of the United States Pentagon, where numerous military strikes have been conducted on suspected drug vessels transporting loads of illicit narcotics along the eastern Pacific Ocean, mainly from the western port city of Guayaquil to Central America and Mexico, eventually bound for the U.S. coast, according to U.S. officials.

Recent multinational security agreements between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Krisit Noem, and the Ecuadorian government of newly elected President Daniel Naboa, have kick-started military cooperation between the two governments, representing a renewed focus on transnational crime and criminal drug trafficking networks in South America, which have attained tremendous control over the region's lucrative drug routes in recent years.

U.S. Air Force personnel will arrive at Ecuador's Manta military base in the country's western coastal city of Manta, 200 kilometers north of the port city of Guayaquil and roughly 400 kilometers west of the nation's capital of Quito.

U.S. forces had a strong anti-drug presence at Eloy Alfaro Air Base in Manta, aimed at restricting the flow of drug trafficking in the region, but the U.S. lease was eventually terminated by Ecuador's President Raffael Correa in 2009.

These new developments come amid ongoing tensions between the United States and the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro, whom the U.S. State Department alleges to be heading a criminal enterprise called the 'Cartel de Los Soles'–or Cartel of the Suns–profiting from drug and human trafficking operations in the region.

The Maduro government rejects these claims, accusing the U.S. government of spoiling for war and attempting to usurp the nation's natural resources in oil and gold.

On Wednesday, Ecuador's National Assembly voted in support of a potential U.S. intervention in Venezuela that would remove the "narco-dictator" from power and help "restore democracy in the region."