Ecuador’s security forces launched a string of raids across the country this week, killing three alleged drug traffickers and capturing dozens more, and heavily armed American soldiers were right there with them.
The operations, announced by the Ecuadorean government, mark a deeper U.S. military role in Latin America’s drug wars as the Trump administration vows to take down criminal groups it has labeled narcoterrorists.
On Thursday, 50 U.S. military personnel joined more than 300 national police officers in raids in the city of Guayaquil and several other locations. The target was a drug network that Ecuadorean officials said has ties to Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
Images posted by Ecuador’s interior minister showed police inside a home in an upscale Guayaquil neighborhood, flanked by masked American soldiers with U.S. flags stitched onto their uniform shoulders. More than 30 people were detained.
One day earlier, Ecuadorean soldiers working with U.S. Southern Command, which oversees American forces in Latin America, killed a local drug boss known as “Charlie” along with his two security guards in the coastal province of Manabí. Officials said Charlie belonged to Ecuador’s Choneros gang and also had ties to the Jalisco cartel.
“We said it was either prison or hell, and this one didn’t make it to prison,” Ecuadorean Defense Minister Gian Carlo Loffredo said in a video posted on X.
Loffredo and other officials shared photos showing three men sprawled on a bloodstained road next to a bullet-riddled truck.
The U.S. has long supplied Ecuador and other Latin American governments with intelligence, equipment and training to fight powerful criminal groups that ship drugs north and fuel violence at home.
But until now, U.S. military personnel have mostly stayed on the sidelines of local operations rather than taking part directly in drug raids, according to Adam Isacson, a security expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, a think tank.
“What we are seeing in Ecuador is unlike anything we’ve seen even during the Cold War,” Isacson said. “If it is the model that gets replicated in the region, we are going to see U.S. troops on the ground very close to or participating in combat.”
In an emailed statement, U.S. Southern Command said the Ecuador-led joint operations “demonstrate Ecuador’s steadfast resolve to defeat hemispheric threats.” The command declined to provide details.
Under President Daniel Noboa, Ecuador has emerged as a key partner in the Trump administration’s Shield of the Americas security alliance, which includes other right-wing Latin American governments.
Sandwiched between Colombia and Peru, the world’s two largest cocaine producers, Ecuador has been overrun by drug-fueled violence as it has become a major cocaine transshipment hub. The country now has one of the highest homicide rates in Latin America.
Noboa has called for more international help, saying Ecuador is under siege by narcoterrorist organizations.
“No state alone can defeat an enemy that knows no borders,” Noboa said this week at the United Nations General Assembly. “For a long time, organized crime was treated as a police problem. Today, we know it is more than that.”
In March, the U.S. helped Ecuador bomb suspected drug traffickers along its border with Colombia. Over the past month, the U.S. military has also blown up several Ecuadorean fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean that were allegedly used to move drugs north.
During a visit to Quito earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said elite U.S. forces are now working alongside Ecuadorean personnel to hunt down drug traffickers.
“That’s an incredible development, and that’s an important development,” Rubio told reporters. “That’s the only way you’re going to beat these narcotrafficking terrorists.”
