Manta, Ecuador — American airmen armed with M-16 assault rifles keep a close watch on U.S. Navy spy planes parked on a runway at an airfield on the outskirts of this Pacific port.
The Ecuadorean air base has become the new hub of U.S. surveillance flights over the vast cocaine-producing areas of South America, and the U.S. military guards have reason to be vigilant.
The drug-fueled violence that Ecuadoreans long feared would spill over the Colombian border has arrived intensifying a debate over the wisdom of giving the United States a foothold close to the troubled frontier.
Many Ecuadoreans worry their country is being set up as a staging ground for U.S. intervention in Colombia and could be sucked into a regional conflict.
"We support the base being used to fight drug trafficking," Antonio Posso, an influential congressman, said in an interview in Quito, the capital. "But the base apparently is being used also to put together an operation to fight Colombia's guerrillas, which involves us in a conflict that is not Ecuador's."
The United States is spending $62 million to expand and improve the Manta runway and build hangars, dormitories and a dining hall. The number of U.S. servicemen assigned to Manta has risen to 125 and that figure will reach 400 after construction work is completed in October.
At that point, giant U.S. AWACS surveillance planes and tankers to refuel them will replace the smaller Navy aircraft, allowing the United States to monitor air and marine activity far into the Caribbean. That will allow full resumption of U.S. anti-drug surveillance flights, which were cut by two-thirds when U.S. forces evacuated Howard Air Force Base in Panama in 1999.
The United States maintains the Manta base will remain under Ecuadorean control and is being used only as an observation post to track drug-smuggling aircraft and boats. U.S. officials insist it has nothing to do with the $1.3 billion U.S. aid package for the counternarcotics offensive in Colombia.
"The closing of Howard Air Force Base in Panama stopped the ability of the U.S. government to easily look at the movement of drugs from Latin America to the United States," U.S. Ambassador Gwen Clare said in an interview in Quito.
"Manta, which sits in the middle of the source zone, has improved dramatically our ability to monitor movement of drugs in the region," Clare said. "Why would we put at risk this pearl that we have? Why would we put at risk this opportunity to see, as we have never seen before, what is going on in the transit zone."
But many Ecuadoreans remain suspicious and the anxiety level in the country has risen as Colombia's violence has begun to directly impact Ecuador.
A recent attack in a coastal village on the Colombian border, Palma Real, stunned Ecuadoreans by its savagery.
Colombian drug traffickers abducted and killed a village official and six of his relatives and friends, including his 14-year-old daughter. They disfigured their victims' faces with acid and slit open their abdomens, spilling out their intestines.
The motive? The official had dared to confiscate 200 kilos of cocaine the Colombians had tried to smuggle through Ecuador.
The violence was a nightmare for many Ecuadoreans, who fear U.S. use of the Manta base may provoke bloody reprisals from powerful Colombian rebel groups who protect the narcotics trade.
Ecuadoreans' suspicions of U.S. plans for Manta may stem partly from the secrecy surrounding the government's agreement to let the United States use the air base for 10 years.
Jamil Mahuad, the president who approved the arrangement in November 1999, was overthrown two months later in a military-backed coup provoked by widespread public discontent over his mismanagement of the economy. He fled the country in disgrace.
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