On Oct. 15, Ecuador elected its youngest president in history, Daniel Noboa. A 35-year-old businessman, Noboa founded the centrist National Democratic Action party to support his candidacy. On the campaign trail, he promised Ecuadorians a future free from corruption and extortion.
Ecuador faces many challenges, and among them is extreme violence: Citizens are terrorized daily by high levels of crime, and many have lost faith in Ecuador’s democratic institutions due to allegations of corruption and extortion. But that’s not all. The climate consequences of the El Niño weather pattern have also caused droughts that compromise hydroelectric power plants and force Ecuadorians to ration energy. (Ecuador relies on hydropower for nearly 80 percent of its electricity.) The government faces a large deficit, and the economy has undergone a de facto dollarization. The nation’s pension system will also soon become financially unsustainable due to a declining number of contributors from the formal workforce.
Since Sunday, Noboa has been in Washington for his first visit as president-elect. Focused on securing financing mechanisms to implement his campaign promises, he has met with representatives from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, the Organization of American States, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Inter-American Development Bank. Once Noboa is inaugurated on Dec. 1, his partnership with the United States will be key to combating all the above issues—especially organized crime in the Americas.
Noboa has an ambitious five-year agenda for Ecuador, but he is facing a time crunch. That’s because he was elected in a snap vote following current President Guillermo Lasso’s dissolution of Congress earlier this year. Noboa will only have roughly 18 months to govern—finishing Lasso’s term—until Ecuador’s next regularly scheduled presidential elections in May 2025.
Ecuador’s relationship with the United States grew stronger under Lasso. His government was one of only a few in Latin America to secure bipartisan support for U.S. funding for key national priorities, in part through initiatives such as the creation of the bipartisan Friends of Ecuador caucus in the U.S. Congress and the passage of the Innovation and Development Ecuador Act. In December 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the U.S.-Ecuador Partnership Act, requiring the State Department to increase cooperation with the Ecuadorian government in Quito on areas of shared interest, particularly security. Earlier this year, Ecuador also carried out the largest debt-for-nature swap in history with the support of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.
Noboa is expected to maintain a similar level of bipartisan U.S. support. As the heir to his family’s business empire, he is known for his economic liberalism and openness to the U.S. market. He has also taken positions on major foreign-policy issues that align with Washington’s own positions: He openly denounced Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and criticized Russia’s war on Ukraine.
This is not a given for Ecuadorian politicians. Although Noboa’s election rival Luisa González sought to continue diplomatic relations with the United States, her political party, the Citizen Revolution Movement (RC), has had a tumultuous relationship with Washington in the past.
The party is led by former President Rafael Correa, who is in exile while avoiding a corruption sentence but remains a symbol of hope for many Ecuadorians, who remember Correa’s 2007 to 2017 presidency as an era characterized by low crime rates, access to health care, and growing state infrastructure that was mainly financed by Chinese credit, which resulted in low costs for the state.
Under Correa, anti-U.S. sentiment was widespread in Ecuador. Many Ecuadorians were upset with the United States for its perceived imperialism in the Americas, which they saw as a cause of the region’s impoverishment. In 2011, Correa expelled the U.S. ambassador to Ecuador after Wikileaks revealed that the ambassador had alleged widespread corruption within the Ecuadorean police force. The following year, Correa withdrew from free trade negotiations with Washington.
Ecuador remains a polarized nation today—Noboa narrowly won the runoff election by only 4 points. Sentiment toward the United States is still somewhat negative, primarily due to its association with IMF debt restructuring programs that were implemented during the tenures of previous Presidents Lenín Moreno and Lasso. These programs led to significant reductions in public spending that provoked extensive anti-government protests in both 2021 and 2022.
Yet Noboa needs the United States to fight drug trafficking and organized crime. Ecuador is positioned between the two largest coca-producing nations in the world, Colombia and Peru, and occupies a strategic position in the hemisphere’s drug trade. Many illicit supply chains operate within the country to facilitate the export of drugs from South America and their transportation north. After Colombia and the United States, Ecuadorian authorities seize the most drugs from drug traffickers in the world, according to U.N. statistics.
Effective U.S. support for Ecuador depends on a strong diplomatic mission in the country. The State Department must bolster its embassy in Quito to manage U.S. government projects and communicate effectively with Ecuadorian citizens, many of whom remain skeptical of Washington.
To do so, Washington could look to its embassy in Colombia. Colombia is historically considered the United States’ most important partner in South America, and the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá is one of the country’s biggest and most efficient embassies. Though Ecuador is much smaller than Colombia, it now bears many similarities to Colombia in the 1980s, the country’s most violent period. Ecuador’s strategic geographical location, appeal for money laundering due to being a dollarized economy, and increasing number of cyberattacks reported in recent years make it a hub for organized crime.
Among other actions, Washington should increase its U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) staffing in Ecuador to ensure that USAID programs are effectively implemented. The embassy should also continue delivering capacitation trainings and technology transfer to Ecuadorian authorities. And the U.S. mission’s commercial division should be bolstered to increase Ecuador’s access to U.S. markets and improve the country’s competitiveness.
U.S.-backed security assistance is crucial to Ecuador’s future. Yet Washington must avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. The United States has a long-standing history of using military personnel to train Latin American police forces, from Brazil in the 1960s to Colombia in the 2000s. While some instances of such aid have yielded positive outcomes, such as Colombia’s 2016 peace accord, others have resulted in failed military interventions, as in the case of Cuba in 1961.
On Oct. 3, Lasso authorized the deployment of U.S. armed forces to Ecuadorian soil under the command of an Ecuadorian general to help fight organized crime. (Details of the operation, including the number of troops involved, have not been made public.) For such cooperation programs to gain popular legitimacy, they will need to operate within the bounds of the Ecuadorian Constitution and respect Ecuador’s sovereignty. Most importantly, U.S. armed forces must establish trust with Ecuadorian communities.
Unfortunately, this trust is currently lacking. U.S. armed forces in Ecuador should focus on supporting the Ecuadorian military and national police in capacity-building and training efforts. This cooperation will not be easy—and will require respect for the Ecuadorian constitution and sovereignty.
Ecuadorian citizens have protested to demand the Ecuadorian military’s presence at ports, airports, and borders to help protect their businesses—yet resources are limited, and Lasso’s government has been unable to deliver.
In the short term, the United States should play a leading role in supporting these efforts—for example, by providing Ecuadorian authorities with intelligence-gathering and drug-seizing technologies, such as advanced port scanners and ocean patrol vessels. Doing so would not only bolster Ecuador’s law enforcement and crime fighting capacity, but also help build trust in the United States.
U.S.-backed securitization and militarization efforts must also be complemented by social programs. The foreign entities that help to organize these programs—such as the U.S. Agency for International Development—should work hard to carry out their proposed initiatives effectively, acting as visitors rather than intruders and taking care to listen and engage with local communities.
The next 18 months will be a defining period for Ecuador as its new president seeks to combat unprecedented insecurity. It is in the United States’ best interest to assist him during this time.
