In fight against 'narco-terrorists,' Ecuador is killing its democracy

Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, has used his country’s spiraling security crisis to tighten his grip on power. Under the banner of the “war on drugs,” his government has expanded emergency rule and intensified a crackdown on political opponents.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has continued to provide the Noboa government with political cover and military support despite mounting evidence of rising authoritarianism and human rights abuses.

President Noboa’s visit to the United States last month was overshadowed by a letter from twenty members of Congress demanding the Pentagon’s “immediate suspension” of joint U.S.-Ecuador military operations pending investigations into alleged human rights violations, including the bombing and torture of civilians. The legislators also expressed “concern that our military is deepening its ties with the Government of Ecuador, even as it undergoes an alarming authoritarian and anti-democratic drift.”

The letter adds to mounting congressional scrutiny in Washington of the Trump administration's security partnership with Ecuador, after a recent U.S.-backed anti-narcotics strike near the Colombian border hit the wrong target. A subsequent New York Times investigation found that the operation — publicly presented as part of a new offensive against "narco-terrorism" — had in fact struck a civilian dairy farm. Witnesses alleged that Ecuadorian soldiers beat and abused unarmed workers there in the days before the bombardment.

U.S. intelligence-sharing, operational coordination and military support have expanded continuously under Noboa. In February 2024, he ratified two military cooperation agreements with Washington that had been signed under his predecessor, Guillermo Lasso, including one allowing joint naval operations against drug trafficking, arms trafficking, human trafficking and illegal fishing. Noboa’s government has since become one of Washington’s closest security partners in the U.S. fight against “narco-terrorism,” even as allegations of human rights abuses, forced disappearances and authoritarian drift continue to mount.

In Ecuador, more than 70% of the population now lives under nightly curfew, with 75,000 troops deployed in what the defense ministry called the “largest internal security mobilization in the country's recent history.” Yet violence continues to surge. Ecuador recorded 9,216 murders in 2025 — the highest figure in its history. Whereas a decade ago, the country was among the safest in Latin America, its homicide rate is now just under 51 per 100,000 inhabitants, making Ecuador the most violent country in the Western Hemisphere. Noboa’s strategy of escalating militarization, pursued in close partnership with the United States, has clearly done little to curb violence or weaken organized crime.

As Noboa’s approval ratings continue to decline steadily after he lost a major referendum vote last November, his anti-drug platform has become a mechanism for holding on to power. His government routinely invokes the threat of organized crime to justify abuses of power and discipline critics while also accusing opponents across the political spectrum of links to narcotrafficking.

Noboa now exerts growing control over the judiciary. He has purged dissenting judges and repeatedly threatened the independence of the Constitutional Court. With the executive, legislature and courts now under his influence, Noboa has turned his attention to local government, where the Citizens' Revolution, the main opposition party, still holds important strongholds. As a result, in March, Ecuador's electoral authorities suspended Citizens’ Revolution and dissolved two other parties — Construye and Unidad Popular — ahead of next year's local elections.

In February, Aquiles Álvarez — the mayor of Guayaquil and one of the opposition’s most prominent figures — was arrested in a pre-dawn raid, placed in pre-trial detention and transferred to a maximum-security prison modeled on El Salvador’s notorious CECOT, where he was later shown on camera with his head shaved head and wearing an orange jumpsuit. By early April, three judges ordered Álvarez’s release from prison; within days, the prosecutor general moved to disqualify them. Noboa subsequently announced that he wanted his own mother to run for mayor in Álvarez's place.

Other opposition figures have fared no better. In April 2024, Ecuadorian forces raided the Mexican Embassy in Quito and seized former Vice President Jorge Glas, who had been granted political asylum there. The international community condemned the operation, but Glas remains in a maximum-security prison, with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights continuously insisting that his life is at risk. The home of Luisa González — twice the opposition's presidential candidate — has been raided by police. Another former presidential candidate, Andrés Arauz, has also been prosecuted in a case marked by serious violations of due process.

None of this has weakened the Trump administration’s stalwart support for Noboa. For the U.S. government, the dairy farm strike was seen not as a failure but as a precedent, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth presenting it as evidence of a new phase — one in which the United States was prepared to strike suspected drug operations on land, not just at sea. Ecuador is now a core partner in the "Shield of the Americas," an alliance that exalts the militarization of counter-narcotics operations and prioritizes political alignment over policy outcomes.

Not even the frequent discovery of cocaine in banana shipments tied to the Noboa family business empire — a conduit for Ecuadorian cocaine exports to Europe repeatedly exposed by investigative journalists — has weakened U.S. support for Noboa.

Still, Noboa would do well to remember that U.S.–Latin American relations are often volatile, and allies who once seemed useful can quickly fall from favor when a new administration comes to power in Washington. Noboa’s willingness to work with Trump in the “war on drugs” is winning him favor today. But the country’s authoritarian drift, coupled with an ever-worsening security crisis, may well undermine the U.S.-Ecuador partnership in the long term.