This story originally appeared in NACLA on Mar. 27, 2026. It is reprinted here with permission.
When Ecuador’s government announced on March 11 that the FBI would open a permanent office in the country, officials presented the move as a necessary response to escalating transnational crime. Interior Minister John Reimberg and U.S. chargé d’affaires Lawrence Petroni framed the initiative as a milestone in bilateral cooperation, aimed at combating drug trafficking, arms flows, money laundering, and terrorism financing.
Yet there is little that is new about this announcement.
Rather than marking a break with the past, the FBI’s expanded presence in Ecuador represents the continuation—and normalization—of a much longer history of U.S. intervention in the country’s internal affairs. That history, largely forgotten in official narratives, reveals patterns of surveillance, political policing, and collaboration with local security forces that complicate contemporary claims about security cooperation.
Rather than marking a break with the past, the FBI’s expanded presence in Ecuador represents the continuation—and normalization—of a much longer history of U.S. intervention in the country’s internal affairs.
The timing of this announcement is significant within Ecuador’s domestic political landscape. Since taking office in 2023, Daniel Noboa has embraced a hardline security agenda in response to escalating violence linked to organized crime. Declaring an “internal armed conflict,” his government has militarized public security, expanded executive powers, and strengthened ties with foreign security agencies. Noboa has justified these measures as necessary to restore order in the face of rising homicide rates and prison violence.
Critics have raised concerns about the erosion of civil liberties, the militarization of public security, and the potential for abuses against marginalized communities. As seen with Nayib Bukele’s mass incarceration policies in El Salvador, these policies represent a broader regional turn toward punitive, militarized responses that produce limited long-term results while increasing the risk of human rights abuses.
In this light, the establishment of a permanent FBI office appears less as an isolated policy decision than as part of a converging logic between U.S. security priorities and Ecuador’s internal political strategy—one that recalls earlier Cold War–era collaborations in which anti-crime and counter-subversion efforts served as overlapping justifications for expanding state surveillance and repression.
To understand what is at stake in the FBI’s return, it is necessary to look beyond the present moment and recover this longer history.
Emboldening Repressive Forces
U.S.-backed security initiatives directly shaped domestic political struggles in Ecuador. One of the clearest examples of this dynamic was the FBI’s relationship with Héctor Salgado, the head of Ecuador’s militarized police known as the carabineros. After receiving training in the United States, Salgado returned to Ecuador and implemented policing practices that targeted labor organizers and political activists. These efforts contributed to attempts to block the formation of the Confederation of Ecuadorian Workers (CTE) in 1943.
The FBI’s close collaboration with the carabineros reveals the extent to which U.S. intelligence agencies embedded themselves within Ecuador’s coercive apparatus. Agents maintained intimate relationships with police leadership and relied on these connections to conduct surveillance and gather information. Even after a May 1944 revolution, known as the Gloriosa, overthrew the existing regime and dismantled the carabineros, FBI agents quickly established ties with the new security forces and continued their activities without interruption.
This continuity underscores a key point: U.S. intervention was not tied to specific governments or political configurations but rather to a broader project of maintaining influence over internal political developments. Whether under the guise of anti-fascism or anti-communism, the underlying objective remained the same: to monitor and shape the trajectory of political change in Ecuador.
Whether under the guise of anti-fascism or anti-communism, the underlying objective remained the same: to monitor and shape the trajectory of political change in Ecuador.
The end of World War II and the creation of the CIA in 1947 did not represent a significant turning point in U.S. intelligence operations. Formally, responsibility for foreign intelligence shifted from the FBI to the newly established CIA, while the FBI was theoretically confined to domestic security in the United States. In practice, this division was never absolute. The FBI maintained an international presence through its legal attaché offices—so-called legats—that continued to operate in U.S. embassies around the world.
Today, Ecuador falls under the jurisdiction of the FBI’s Bogotá office, in Colombia, one of several regional hubs in Latin America. This structure reflects a longstanding pattern in which U.S. intelligence agencies maintain overlapping and sometimes competing roles that blur the distinction between domestic and foreign operations.
The recent announcement of a permanent FBI office in Ecuador represents less a departure than an institutionalization of an already existing presence. It formalizes relationships and practices that have deep historical roots, even as it reframes them in the language of contemporary security threats.
Dubious Justifications
As in the 1940s, the justification for this expanded presence deserves careful scrutiny. Then, the FBI invoked the specter of Nazi infiltration to legitimize its activities. Now, it points to drug trafficking, organized crime, and terrorism. While these threats are real, the framing of U.S. intervention as a necessary response obscures the extent to which such policies have historically served broader geopolitical objectives.
Moreover, there is a striking continuity in the mismatch between stated goals and actual practices. During World War II, FBI agents devoted significant resources to monitoring leftist movements despite the absence of a meaningful fascist threat. Today, similar questions arise about whether expanded law enforcement cooperation will primarily target transnational criminal networks or once again be directed toward political actors and social movements.
A broader political context reinforces this skepticism. The return of the FBI to Ecuador comes at a time when U.S. policy in Latin America continues to prioritize security cooperation at the expense of addressing underlying social and economic conditions. It reflects a long-standing tendency to externalize the causes of transnational problems, treating them as issues to be managed abroad rather than confronting their roots within the United States itself.
The return of the FBI to Ecuador comes at a time when U.S. policy in Latin America continues to prioritize security cooperation at the expense of addressing underlying social and economic conditions.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of drug trafficking. Decades of research have demonstrated that the global drug trade is driven primarily by consumer demand rather than supply. Efforts to disrupt production and distribution networks in Latin America have repeatedly failed to reduce overall consumption, while generating significant social and political costs in the region. If the goal were truly to combat drug trafficking, more effective strategies would focus on reducing demand through treatment and public health interventions in the United States and Europe.
A similar dynamic applies to the flow of firearms. A significant proportion of the weapons used by criminal organizations in Latin America originate in the United States, where they are legally purchased before being trafficked south. Efforts to curb violence in countries like Ecuador cannot succeed without addressing this upstream source of supply. Yet U.S. policy has largely avoided meaningful restrictions on domestic gun sales, instead emphasizing enforcement measures abroad.
These contradictions highlight the limitations of a security-centered approach to transnational crime. By focusing on policing and surveillance, such strategies risk reproducing the very dynamics they seek to address, while reinforcing asymmetrical power relations between the United States and Latin American countries.
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