Ecuador leader proposes lifting ban on foreign military bases

President Daniel Noboa is trying to come to grips with the criminal gangs that have driven up Ecuador's murder rate

Ecuador's president, Daniel Noboa, has said he wants to change his country's constitution to allow the presence of foreign military bases.

He made the proposal 15 years after the last US soldiers left the base of Manta, on Ecuador's Pacific coast, and returned it to the Ecuadorean military.

President Noboa argues that Ecuador needs foreign military help to fight transnational crime gangs which are using the country as a major transit route for drugs smuggled from South American to Europe and the US.

The 36-year-old leader declared war on the gangs in January, but gang-related violence continues to blight cities such as Manta, Durán and Guayaquil.

Noboa made the announcement in a video recorded at the Manta base which was uploaded onto X, formerly known as Twitter.

In it, he criticises the decision taken by then President Rafael Correa in 2008 to not only not renew the accord under which the US had leased the Manta base, but also to enshrine a ban on any foreign military presence in the constitution.

"They argued that Ecuador would regain its sovereignty, but what they did was hand it over to the drug-traffickers," Noboa says in the video without explicitly naming Correa.

"In a transnational conflict, we need a response at national and international level," he adds.

He said he would send the partial constitutional reform to Ecuador's National Assembly, which will have to vote on it for it to pass.

But before it can be voted on by lawmakers, the change to the constitution will have to be approved by the constitutional court.

Any change to the constitution also has to be put to the Ecuadorean people in a referendum in order to come into force.

It is not the first change to the constitution President Noboa has proposed.

In April, his government put 11 measures to a popular vote, of which nine were approved.

Many of those measures were related to security as well, including allowing soldiers to patrol the streets and allowing for the extradition of criminals to stand trial in the US.

President Noboa came to power less than a year ago after a snap election following the resignation of President Guillermo Lasso.

Noboa has already said he will run for re-election in February 2025 and Monday's announcement is seen as an attempt to be seen as a decisive and active leader, despite the gang violence which continues to blight Ecuador.

Polls suggest there has been a fall in the president's approval ratings in recent months.

Analysts say this is mainly due to the lack of results in the "war" he has declared on criminal groups operating in Ecuador.

Port cities, in particular Guayaquil and Durán, have seen the number of murders and kidnappings skyrocket.

Before the US handed over the Manta base in 2009, it had been an important outpost for its counter-narcotic operations in South America.

President Noboa has long argued that evicting the US military was a mistake which led to transnational crime groups taking hold in Ecuador.