A taste of things to come under Trump’s “Shield of the Americas”?
As the world’s attention is fixated, for obvious reasons, on developments in West Asia, big things are happening elsewhere. That includes in the US’ “backyard”, which Washington once again wants to commandeer. As Michael Klare put it in a recent interview, the Western hemisphere is seen as a vast store of strategic resources that the US wants to control and exploit in its confrontation with the other great powers.
To that end, the Trump administration has launched an alliance of right-wing Latin American presidents totally subservient to closely aligned with Trump. The guest list for Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” summit, held last weekend in Doral, Florida, included the following heads of state and government:
- Argentine President Javier Milei
- Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz
- Chilean President-elect José Antonio Kast
- Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves
- Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader
- Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa
- Guyanese President Mohamed Irfaan Ali
- Honduran President Nasry Asfura
- Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino
- Paraguayan President Santiago Pena
- Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele
- Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar
Some of the attendees, of course, owe their position, at least in part, to Trump’s direct meddling in their national elections. They include Honduras’ Nasry Asfura, Bolivia’s Rodrigo Paz and José Antonio Kast, who on Wednesday became Chile’s first far-right president since Pinochet. As for Milei, he owes Trump for helping elect his party members to Argentina’s National Assembly in late 2025 by threatening to withdraw US economic support if any other party won.
The summit spawned the creation of the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (ACCC) through a proclamation by the Trump White House. The proclamation included the following excerpt:
“My Administration has designated a number of cartels and transnational gangs as foreign terrorist organizations and has since dedicated unprecedented resources towards their destruction. These international entities control territories and commerce, extort political and judicial systems, wield arms and field military capabilities, and use assassinations and terrorism to achieve their ends.”
According to Trump, five additional countries signed the proclamation: Guatemala, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela (presumably under duress), and Suriname, making for a grand total of 17 — almost exactly half the total number of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
To lead the ACCC, Trump appointed the disgraced former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. Rather than facing the firing squad for her multiple scandals and controversies, ICE Barbie was given a nice little promotion. Now, rather than overseeing the security of the US homeland, she will be leading the US’ projection of force across its direct neighbourhood.
The main objective, she says in the clip below, is “to destroy the cartels” — a feat the US has supposedly been trying to pull off for decades, to no apparent avail.
This is the broad backdrop against which the government of Ecuador’s US-born, narco-connected president, Daniel Noboa, just made its most brazen move yet against the country’s democratic system. And it did so either with Washington’s tacit blessing or at its direct behest.
Killing the Opposition
Just a few days ago, an electoral judge in Ecuador, acting on the request of the government-aligned Prosecutor General, ordered a nine-month suspension of the Citizens’ Revolution (RC) party, Ecuador’s largest political movement that was founded years ago by supporters of former President Rafael Correa (2007-2017).
The temporary disqualification means that the centre-left party will not be able to register its candidates by the October deadline for the elections of local authorities, such as mayors and prefects, to be held in February 2027.
The move has triggered howls of protest from left-wing policy think tanks and a deafening wall of silence from Western governments and media, who are usually so quick to denounce anti-democratic moves by non-US aligned governments in the region. In a press release, the London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) condemned Noboa’s latest putsch:
“The government of President Daniel Noboa, who is strongly backed by President Trump, is trying to accelerate the destruction of what is left of democracy in Ecuador,” said CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot.
In recent weeks, a series of judicial and administrative measures have been launched against the RC. Led by former president Rafael Correa, the RC is widely considered the principal opposition force in Ecuador, with the country’s largest member base and territorial presence.
“Democracy has been under attack since the presidency of Lenín Moreno (2017–2021), with not only the exclusion of political parties, but with persecution by lawfare, the imprisonment or forced exile of political opponents, and Noboa’s repeated assumption of ‘emergency’ powers and other abuses that have gutted civil liberties,” CEPR Director of International Policy Alex Main said.
Noboa has expanded the use of extraordinary measures in response to the country’s escalating security crisis. Nevertheless, the homicide rate has continued to rise, from 5.8 per 100,000 at the end of Correa’s presidency in May 2017, to 50.6. Prolonged states of emergency, curfews, and increased military deployment have been implemented nationwide.
On the same day as the ban on the RC, the Ecuadorian and US militaries conducted joint airstrikes near the Colombian border targeting an alleged FARC dissident site. These “lethal kinetic operations,” as SOUTHCOM called them, represent the culmination of Noboa’s efforts since his 2023 election to deepen ties with Washington — including attempts to reestablish a US military base in the country.
As we reported last week, the US military has opened up a new front in the Western hemisphere by launching joint military operations against “narco terrorist” organisations in Ecuador. The move came just three months after the Ecuadorian people voted unanimously in a referendum against the deployment of US military bases.
The military operations were conducted in an area close to Ecuador’s border with Colombia that is known for Indigenous resistance to President Daniel Noboa’s government, reports Arturo Dominguez for The Antagonist:
The White House and Noboa’s government claim the attack was against Comandos de la Frontera, a dissident group of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). However, the U.S.-led attack targeted coastal and border areas like Guayas and El Oro, where the Ecuadorian military previously deployed heavily to Imbabura to break Indigenous-led blockades. The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) condemned the military operation as an “unprecedented military occupation” and a “siege” on the city of Otavalo. Two days later, many Indigenous activists had their bank accounts frozen.
As we noted last week, another reason why this latest deployment of US troops, with the ostensible purpose of bolstering the Noboa government’s fight against the drug cartels, is controversial is that the Noboa family’s banana export business has been repeatedly implicated in cocaine trafficking.
This is standard operating procedure in the US’ War against Drugs. Throughout its 80-year history, the CIA has, for its own ends, supported the operations of narcotics manufacturers and distributors across the world, from Taiwan’s anti-communist Kuomintang to the Corsican mafia, to Colombia’s Pablo Escobar and Mexico’s Guadalajara and Sinaloa cartels.
It is the reason why Trump recently pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been sentenced by a New York court to 45 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle more than 400 tonnes of cocaine into the US.
NC reader Tom Dority distilled the US’ long history of involvement in the networks producing, distributing, and selling drugs with the following sentence:
“This is not a ‘fight against’ (“narco-terrorists”) but is a fight for control of the ownership of the drug trades.”
As for Noboa, he is accused not just of drug trafficking but also political assassination. On February 25, Darwin Chavarría (aka Pipo), the leader of Ecuador’s largest cartel, Los Lobos, alleged that Noboa had masterminded the assassination of former presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, in August 2023, which opened the way for the current Ecuadorian president to win that year’s elections.
The suspension of Ecuador’s largest political party is part of a gradual authoritarian drift that began under President Lenin Moreno, Rafael Correa’s hand-picked successor who ended up betraying his mentor by evicting Julian Assange from Ecuador’s London Embassy, allegedly in return for an IMF bailout, and allying with former political opponents to implement a neoliberal economic agenda. That drift was later accelerated by Guillermo Lasso and Noboa.
Since the right’s return to power after Correa’s departure in 2017, Ecuador has become one of Washington’s most loyal vassals in the sub-region. During that time, the Andean nation, wedged between the world’s two largest cocaine producers (Colombia and Peru), has also become the main regional hub for cocaine trafficking to the United States and Europe.
One of Noboa’s first acts in power was to declare a permanent state of “internal conflict” which has seen the homicide rate explode to an unprecedented high of 50.9 per 100,000 — the highest in the Americas. Like Milei, Noboa has taken a chainsaw to government ministries and departments — particularly those that were key to the supporting basic rights and environmental protections, explains an article by Frontline Defenders:
In July 2025, the government reduced the number of ministries from twenty to fourteen through Executive Decree No. 60. As a result, ministries that were key to guaranteeing rights, such as the Ministry of Women and Human Rights, were incorporated into the Ministry of Government and reduced to an undersecretariat. The decree also included the absorption of the Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition (MAATE) by the Ministry of Energy and Mines, forming the new Ministry of Environment and Energy.
This decision eliminates the autonomous oversight of the mining sector by the environmental sector, as the powers of the MAATE became subordinate to extractive policy, seriously weakening the protection of ecosystems and the communities that inhabit them, and increasing the risk of socio-environmental conflicts. This… is particularly concerning for the human rights defence landscape in Ecuador, where most cases of defenders at risk occur in contexts of socio-environmental conflicts, with repeated cases of criminalisation of social leaders who seek to guarantee their right to participation and prior consultation in decision-making processes on extractive projects to be implemented on their territories and communities.
Right now, the US is determined to extract as much mineral wealth as possible from the subsoil of countries like Ecuador, which will inevitably leave a vast trail of environmental damage and human rights abuses in its wake. Like Noboa, Milei has loosened mining regulations, including, most controversially, in protected areas close to glaciers.
In the last few days, Noboa has opened the doors even wider to US influence and outright control. In a televised interview, he said he would happily let US troops enter Ecuador to hunt down members of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards being trained in Ecuador while providing no evidence that these groups are even present on Ecuadorian soil.
As we warned in early September, Washington is looking to merge two “failed” wars in Latin America: the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, with the ultimate goal of securing exclusive domain over Latin America’s vast trove of strategic resources for it to exploit in its confrontation with its main strategic rivals, particularly China:
Like the Global War on Terror, the whole edifice of the US’ war on the drugs cartels, is built on a foundation of lies. Just as Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, Venezuela is a relatively minor corridor for drug trafficking organisations. Just as the US supported Islamist terrorist groups whenever it served its interests (Syria, Libya, Chechnya…), the US has a long history of supporting drug trafficking organisations (Fast and Furious, IranContra, the Medellin cartel, Corsican mafia, Kuomintang…).
That fight is now escalating rapidly. On Wednesday, the US announced the opening of its first Federal Bureau of Investigations office in Ecuador to combat the trafficking of drugs and weapons, along with money laundering and the financing of terrorism — in partnership with President Noboa, whose family business has been shown to have ties to drug trafficking…
Nick Corbishley 