Imagine if your local TV station’s newsroom were stormed by armed thugs in hoods and skull masks. Your community would be in shock, viewers would be panicking, and the authorities would be taking all necessary measures to restore security.
That’s exactly what happened in Ecuador last week. After President Daniel Noboa declared his intention to create a new maximum-security prison for gangsters, crime lord Adolfo “Fito” Macias escaped from jail, drug traffickers stormed the headquarters of Ecuador’s TC Television, and the government declared a state of emergency.
Things aren’t looking good. As I write, four police officers have been kidnapped, two have been killed, the lawyer prosecuting TC Television’s invaders has been assassinated, dozens of prisoners have escaped from their cells, and the people of Ecuador are mostly hiding indoors as soldiers patrol the streets of the country’s largest city, Guayaquil.
This is a new and terrifying experience for Ecuador. I traveled to Guayaquil and Quito last February and knew that the nation had to confront many challenges. But the destabilizing influence of Venezuela’s narco-regime, combined with the soft-on-crime policies of both Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Colombian President Gustavo Petro, has empowered cartels to make new inroads into the strategically located equator state.
What should be the role of the U.S. in all this? First, we must stand by President Noboa and his administration. If their efforts to restore security fail, history teaches that significant swaths of Ecuador will fall under the drug traffickers’ control. That would spell disaster for Ecuadorians, our region as a whole, and the many Ecuadorian-Americans. But it would also mean more drugs and illegal immigrants making their way to — and through — our southern border. That is something every American has an interest in preventing.
Congress passed the bipartisan U.S.-Ecuador Partnership Act in December 2022, which authorized a comprehensive diplomatic strategy to strengthen our commercial and security relations with Ecuador. But laws only work if they are enforced. The Biden administration is chronically inattentive to this region, even to nations that are willing and reliable partners. This creates vulnerabilities that are willingly exploited by adversaries such as Venezuela, China and the cartels.
To improve the situation, we should consider working with Ecuador to update the crimes that qualify for the extradition of criminals to the U.S. As history shows, drug lords have long feared U.S. prisons more than those in Latin America. The current U.S.-Ecuador extradition treaty is insufficient for these troubled times and must be updated.
Finally, the U.S. must abandon any attempts to appease the international actors aiding and abetting Ecuador’s narco-terrorists and organized criminal groups, namely Venezuela’s dictatorship.
In sum, Noboa and the people of Ecuador need all the help they can get, and the U.S. would be ridiculous not to support them. If we don’t act quickly, we may lose a key friend and ally in our hemisphere.
Marco Rubio is the senior senator from Florida and a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations.
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