ECUADOR OPPOSES OUTPOST IN AMERICAN WAR ON DRUGS

Ecuador - The scene at the Manta Ray Cafe, a
mess hall here at the most prominent American military outpost in
South America, suggests all is normal.

A television tuned to Fox Sports beams in a golf tournament.
Ecuadorean contractors serve sloppy Joes near refrigerators bulging
with Dr Pepper and Gatorade. Air Force personnel in jumpsuits
preparing to board an Awacs surveillance plane leaf through dog-eared
paperbacks.

But by next year, if President Rafael Correa gets his way, this base
will be gone, and, with it, one of the most festering sources of
controversy in Washington's long war on drugs.

"It's not panic mode yet," said Steven Tate, 42, a Clearwater, Fla.,
contractor who moved here two years ago after retiring from the Air
Force to help run the base fire station. "I'm hoping a miracle will
happen that will allow us to stay."

To the Bush administration, the American air station here is a
critical component in the war on drugs in the Andes. The 180 service
members based here conduct about 100 flights a month over the Pacific
looking for drug boats from Colombia, the source of about 90 percent
of the cocaine used in the United States.

Last year, those flights led to about 200 cocaine seizures, the Air
Force said.

But to Ecuadoreans, Manta is a flash point in a regional debate over
the limits of American power in Latin America.

In 1999, American officials negotiated a 10-year agreement with
President Jamil Mahuad to set up the elaborate airborne radar
detection project at Manta, a port of 250,000. The deal did not
require the United States to pay rent to Ecuador. Nor did it allow
Americans stationed here to be judged in Ecuadorean courts for crimes
committed in Ecuador. Nor was it submitted to the Ecuadorean Congress
for approval.

Mr. Mahuad was toppled in a military coup a few weeks
later.

To Mr. Correa, 45, who opposes renewing the agreement allowing the
American base at Manta, the base compromises Ecuador's sovereignty.
Many Ecuadoreans fear it could end up dragging their nation further
into Colombia's long civil war, a fear that was heightened in March,
when Colombian forces raided a rebel camp in Ecuadorean territory.
Particularly after the Bush administration explicitly sided with
Colombia in the diplomatic crisis that erupted after the raid, critics
of the United States here see little reason to keep the base.

But to Mr. Correa, the debate is personal as well as political. When
he was a child in Guayaquil, his father was imprisoned in the United
States for several years on smuggling charges.

He has no intent of ensnaring Ecuadoreans further in the American war
on drugs. He has proposed pardoning couriers with long prison
sentences for smuggling small amounts of cocaine. He is also one of
the most vocal proponents of creating a Latin American defense council
that excludes the United States.

In a shake-up of the armed forces in April, Mr. Correa picked Javier
Ponce, a poet who advocates less military cooperation with United
States, as defense minister. "Should Ecuador have a base in Miami? Or
New Jersey?" Mr. Ponce, 59, said. "The decision of the government is
not to renew this accord."

For now, operations here continue as they have for years. When asked
what his mission consists of, Lt. Col. Robert Leonard, the ranking
American officer in Ecuador, points to the blue waters of the Pacific.

The Awacs sitting on the tarmac at Manta are useless over Colombian
soil; the jungle canopy effectively renders them blind for spotting
small aircraft, Colonel Leonard explained.

But over the ocean, sometimes the Awacs' radar happens upon
speedboats, some of which transport Colombian cocaine to points north.
If this seems like using a $300 million plane to track down far more
primitive and cheaper vessels, the personnel here are the first to
acknowledge that it is.

"It is a big game of cat and mouse," the colonel said. "We look for
dots on a radar screen. Those dots are smuggling drugs."

None of the planes here are armed; their mission is
detection.

The military says it spends $15 million a year for its operations
here, although that figure excludes major expenses like fuel.

Finding another location would have been easier a decade ago, when
American standing in the region was higher and allies were easier to
find. For now, American officials are resigned to transferring Manta's
operations when the agreement expires in November 2009, most likely to
bases in Curacao and El Salvador.

Together, officials here said, those three bases, known in military
jargon as F.O.L.'s, or forward operating locations, helped seize $1.1
billion worth of drugs in 2007, with the focus of the seizures on
smuggling out of Colombia. The officials had no estimate of how much
cocaine eluded them.

"We have had a lot of success in the fight against drugs with the
F.O.L.," Linda Jewell, the American ambassador to Ecuador, said
recently. "We will talk to the government to find ways in which we can
continue working together."

But some antinarcotics experts in Ecuador and the United States
question whether it is worth the cost of maintaining the base, both
economically and politically.

And many Colombian traffickers have shifted tactics in ways that
render Manta less effective. Smugglers, for instance, have begun to
rely less on speedboats and more on semi-submersibles, the low-tech
subs built for $1 million each in Colombia's jungle that easily elude
high-tech Awacs.

Russell Crandall, a former White House adviser and an expert on Andean
antinarcotics efforts, said interdiction efforts, as well as
Colombia's resilient drug trade, would survive without Manta. "Manta
is just icing on the cake," he said. "We had the drug war going full
speed before Manta, and we'll have it full speed after Manta."

Meanwhile, the four-member crews take off each day here for 12-hour
sorties. "We have hours of sheer boredom followed by moments of sheer
terror," said Lt. Charles Moore, the leader of one Awacs crew. "It is
like finding needles in a haystack."