By Jasper Ward and Alexandra Valencia
WASHINGTON/QUITO, March 6 (Reuters) – The U.S. and Ecuador carried out a joint operation targeting drug trafficking operations in the South American country, authorities in both countries said on Friday, with the U.S. calling the move “lethal kinetic operations.”
Neither the U.S. Southern Command, a branch of its military that oversees forces in Latin America, nor Ecuador’s defense ministry, said if anyone was killed or captured in the strike, which Ecuador dubbed operation “Total Extermination.”
The operations used helicopters, aircraft, river boats and drones to locate and bomb a drug traffickers’ training camp in north-east Ecuador near the Colombian border, Ecuador’s defense ministry said in a statement.
The camp belonged to the Comandos de la Frontera (CDF), a Colombian crime group made up of FARC dissidents, and had a capacity for 50 people, it added.
Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa has made a military crackdown on organised crime a cornerstone of his administration, and his government imposed tariffs on its larger neighbor Colombia, accusing it of not doing enough to fight drug trafficking.
He is set to travel to Miami this weekend to take part in the Trump administration’s “Shield of the Americas” summit, which brings together many right-wing leaders across the region with a focus on regional security and organized crime.
“The United States is a key ally in this fight,” the defense ministry said.
“At the request of Ecuador, the Department of War executed targeted action to advance our shared objective of dismantling narco-terrorist networks,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell wrote on X.
The operation followed a similar U.S-Ecuadorean operation announced by the U.S. Southern Command earlier this week.
(Reporting by Jasper Ward in Washington, Alexandra Valencia in Quito and Sarah Morland in Mexico City; Editing by Christian Martinez and Diane Craft)
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