* Trump and Noboa share interest in fighting drugs
* Ecuador said pitching Trump for U.S. base
* South American country keen to secure bilateral trade deal
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida, March 29 (Reuters) – U.S.
President Donald Trump will meet with Ecuadorean President
Daniel Noboa in Florida on Saturday, a White House official
said, ahead of a tight April 13 runoff election that will pit
Noboa against leftist Luisa Gonzalez.
Noboa, 37, was elected in 2023 to serve out the remainder of
his predecessor’s term, on promises to combat drug gangs which
have roiled the once-placid South American country.
Trump has made combating fentanyl, responsible for some
70,000 deaths a year in the United States, a key pillar of his
second term in office, by imposing tariffs on Mexico, Canada and
China.
White House officials gave no details about the meeting, or
whether Trump and Noboa would speak to reporters. Trump arrived
at his golf club in West Palm Beach on Saturday morning and it
was unclear if Noboa would join him there.
Ecuadorean officials have told allies of Trump that they are
interested in hosting a U.S. military base, and have expressed
interest in a bilateral free trade deal like those already in
place for Colombia and Peru, Reuters reported this month.
The son of one of Ecuador’s richest businessmen, Noboa has
used state of emergency declarations to deploy the military on
the streets and in prisons, implemented harsher sentencing and
cheered the arrests of major gang leaders, actions he says
reduced violent deaths by 15% last year.
Noboa has said Ecuador will not receive deported migrants of
other nationalities but that it will always welcome citizens,
and he criticized Venezuela’s president for briefly rejecting
flights of Venezuelan migrants deported from the United States.
Noboa has also announced a “strategic alliance” with Erik
Prince – a prominent Trump supporter and founder of
controversial private military firm Blackwater – to take on
crime and narcoterrorism in the country of 17 million.
Noboa has publicly argued for bringing foreign military
bases to Ecuador. The Ecuadorean legislature is in the early
stages of a legislative process that could eliminate a
constitutional ban on such facilities instituted in 2008 with
the support of leftist former President Rafael Correa.
The U.S. government had a military base on the
environmentally sensitive Galapagos Islands during World War II
and a separate base used largely to combat narcotics trafficking
on the mainland until 2009.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Alexandra Valencia in Quito;
additional reporting by Gram Slattery in Washington; editing by
Diane Craft)
