Ecuador to U.S. – No vacancy at Manta base

Ecuador’s government will official boot the U.S. military from using the Manta air base when its lease expires net year. Manta has served as the U.S. army’s lone South American military outpost chiefly for counternarcotics operations and has stationed over 300 soldiers.

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has long promised to remove the U.S. military from Manta and the country’s draft constitution even has an article prohibiting “foreign military bases or installations…on Ecuadorian soil. According to Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry, surveillance flights will end in August 2009 and troops will leave three months after that.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said that the U.S. government would respect Ecuador’s decision but warned that the lack of a base would hinder counternarcotics efforts.

Will the U.S. try to find another large base in South America to replace the one at Manta? One senior Air Force official said in January that they would most likely try for “small, temporary, forward operating locations.” Yet that hasn’t stopped speculation that the U.S. military will establish a major outpost in Peru or Colombia.

Image- washingtonpost.com (“A US military plane lands at the US base airport in Manta, Ecuador, Friday, Dec. 14, 2006.”)

Sources- Al Jazeera English, earthtimes, Press TV, The Latin Americanist, BBC News, UPI,