Ecuador’s Early No-foreign Military Bases Movement*

Abstract

Peace activists from around the world gathered in Ecuador in 2007 for the International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases and demanded the closure of existing foreign bases, a cleanup of environmental contamination, and an end to legal immunity for foreign military personnel. They called for support for and solidarity with “those who struggle for the abolition of all foreign military bases worldwide.”1 The conference came immediately after Rafael Correa, riding a rising tide of anti-imperialist sentiment, assumed office. The leftist president highlighted the United States’ hypocrisy when he famously quipped that he would allow the United States to maintain its military presence in Ecuador if in exchange the United States would permit his country to establish a base in Miami. Correa refused to renew a ten-year lease on the military base at Manta. When the U.S. lease expired two years later, U.S. troops peacefully departed. The 2007 no-bases conference came four years after a decades-long struggle forced the U.S. navy to abandon its bombing range on the small Puerto Rican island of Vieques.2 The United States’ departures from Vieques and Manta joined a growing list of well-documented examples of organized pressure forcing the closure of military facilities. In 1990, protests led George H. W. Bush to stop military exercises on the Hawaiian island of Kaho’olawe. Local opposition led to the closing of the Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Repair Facility in the Philippines, as well as the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado. Military bases at Okinawa, Japan, and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean also faced significant resistance. Successful mobilizations against bases demonstrated that the U.S. military was not hegemonic and invincible, and that with significant organization, social movements could defeat imperial forces. The U.S. military advanced the narrative that it no longer needed a particular base and had willingly left of its own accord as part of a cost savings measure or due to changes in military strategy. The military’s previous entrenchment in the face of intense opposition, however, raised questions of whether their forces would have departed had they not confronted organized pressure.3