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LatinNews Daily - 07 September 2026
US ups military cooperation with Colombia and Ecuador
Colombia/Ecuador: On 27 August senior military officials from the US, Colombia, and Ecuador met in San Lorenzo canton in Ecuador’s northwestern province of Esmeraldas, which sits across the border from Colombia, to strengthen military cooperation against drug trafficking organisations operating along the Colombia-Ecuador border. The meeting was attended by the head of US Southern Command (Southcom), General Francis Donovan, as well as the defence ministers of Colombia and Ecuador, Jorge Eduardo Mora and Gian Carlo Loffredo, respectively. In a social media post Southcom cited Donovan as describing the Colombia-Ecuador border as “a geographic chokepoint that violent cartels have long exploited” and emphasising that “today, we are changing the game”. Donovan praised the meeting as a “powerful display of regional unity”, saying that the three countries had established “a unified strategy to hunt cartel leadership, shatter their logistics, and permanently deny them safe haven”. Southcom also praised Colombia’s “decades of unrivaled experience in fighting cartels”. Separately, on 27 August, Donovan and Mora met in Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, to establish new plans to accelerate joint lethal action against drug trafficking networks in the region. On the same day, in Tumaco municipality, Nariño department, the two officials were also briefed by Colombian military forces conducting operations against drug trafficking networks in the southern Pacific region. Border security was a major point of tension between Colombia’s former president Gustavo Petro (2022-2026) and Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa, causing Noboa to launch a trade war, but the bilateral relationship has improved significantly following the change of government in Colombia under the new right-wing president, Abelardo de la Espriella.
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