US Military Bases and Anti-Military Organizing

US Military Bases and Anti-Military Organizing An Ethnography of an Air Force Base in Ecuador Erin Fitz-Henry

US MILITARY BASES AND ANTI-MILITARY ORGANIZING Copyright © Erin Fitz-Henry, 2015. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-50117-2

All rights reserved. Chapter 3 is a revised version of “Distant Allies, Proximate Enemies: Rethinking the Scales of the Antibase Movement in Ecuador,” originally published in American Ethnologist, Volume 38, Issue 2, pages 323–337. May 2011. Chapter 5 is a revised version of “The Sovereign City: Negotiating SelfDetermination in an American Military Enclave,” originally published in Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, 51, pages 153–183. 2010. First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-57992-1 ISBN 978-1-137-48969-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137489692

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fitz-Henry, Erin Elizabeth, 1975– US Military Bases and Anti-Military Organizing : an Ethnography of an Air Force base in Ecuador / by Erin Fitz-Henry. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Military bases, American—Ecuador—Manta. 2. Military bases, American—Ecuador—Manta—Public opinion. 3. Military bases, American—Social aspects—Ecuador—Manta. 4. Manta (Ecuador)— Politics and government. 5. United States—Military relations—Ecuador. 6. Ecuador—Military relations—United States. 7. Peace movements— United States—History—21st century. 8. Militarism—United States— History—21st century. 9. Manta (Ecuador)—History. 10. Ecuador— Public opinion. I. Title. II. Title: Ethnography of an Air Force base in Ecuador. UA26.E37F58 2015 358.4⬘170986634—dc23

2015006827

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: August 2015 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Prologue: The Coca Wars at Empire’s Edge

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Introduction Officers, Activists, and an Anthropologist in an Imperial Contact Zone

1

1

A Brief History of Empire

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2

“But There’s No American Base Here!”: Becoming Domestic in a Foreign Sense

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The Scales of Occupation: Becoming Regional in an International Sense

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3 4

Obligatory Charities, Generous Obligations: Becoming Civilian in a Military Sense

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5 The Return of the City-State? Becoming Autonomous in a Sovereign Sense

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Conclusion

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Becoming Colombian in an Ecuadorian Sense

Notes

197

Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

A

special thanks goes first and foremost to the people of Manta, who let me into their homes and shared conversations about topics on which we often did not agree. To the US Southern Command, the US Military Group, and the anti-base activists working in and around the facility between 2006 and 2009 I extend my sincere gratitude for making my time in Manta both challenging and provocative. I have been changed in innumerable ways as a result of our conversations. Thank you also to the many audiences, colleagues, and mentors with whom I shared various drafts of this project at different stages in its development, most notably colleagues at Princeton University and the University of Melbourne. Last, to my partner, Victoria McLoughlin, who has suffered through more fieldwork trips and garbled first drafts than should be expected of any partner, my most heartfelt thank you.

PROLOGUE

The Coca Wars at Empire’s Edge

O

n September 15, 2009, the last radar planes departed from what had been, for just under ten years, the US Air Force’s largest forward operating location (FOL) in the Western hemisphere. Located on the arid outskirts of the coastal tuna-fishing port of Manta, Ecuador, it was a place, like so many others that continue to serve as home to the more than 766 US military facilities currently based on foreign soil, that remained largely invisible to the American public. While US military operations throughout Latin America attained marginal visibility during the War on Drugs of the 1980s and 1990s, by the mid-2000s, attention to the region had largely been eclipsed by the War on Terror, whose charred casualties refocused public concern squarely on the Middle East. Though arguably quieter, however, the War on Drugs that first brought US airmen and civilian contractors to the city of Manta in 1999 has continued to surge, generating enormous numbers of cartel casualties in Mexico and Guatemala (some 34,000 in Mexico alone between 2006 and 2010), a net increase in the amount of coca currently being grown for the market in both Bolivia and Peru, and a mushrooming basing infrastructure that rarely achieves even the most minimal press coverage in the mainstream media. This increasingly bloody illicit trade remains the US military’s principal rationale for a continued and expanding presence in Latin America—a presence that, since 2008, and under the stewardship of President Obama, has extended beyond Manta into places as otherwise diverse as Colombia, Panama, and even the long-neutral Costa Rica. To the dismay of many, a recent report published by the Fellowship for Reconciliation even reveals that under the Obama administration, US military construction in Central and South America more than doubled between 2009 and 2010. Despite the growing consensus among Latin American heads of state that legalization needs to be much more seriously considered, new counter-narco-terrorism

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sites are being planned in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Belize, Chile, Argentina, and Ecuador. Growing numbers of progressive observers have even begun to argue that it is thus not unfair to characterize President Obama as more militaristic than his predecessor when it comes to the establishment of military bases in Latin America (Kozloff 2008). While such claims may be somewhat exaggerated, it is true that the Obama administration has neither participated in a drawing-down of troops throughout the region nor moved toward the closure of facilities in either Central or South America. It was ostensibly in order to stanch the flow of coca nearer its source in the Bolivian and Peruvian highlands that, in 1999, the United States Southern Command—one of ten unified combatant commands that currently comprise the US military—signed an agreement with Ecuador’s then center-right president, Jamil Mahuad, for an US$80 million expansion of an existing airfield in Ecuador’s fifth largest city: Manta. Located fully within an Ecuadorian Air Force base some 2 kilometers west of Manta’s city center, this considerably expanded runway would, for just under a decade, serve as the central hub of all antinarcotics missions in Latin America, operating in close conjunction with the three other forward operating locations established at approximately the same time in Aruba, Curacao, and El Salvador. Staffed by nearly 150 US Air Force personnel and some 200 State Department contractors, its mission was to fly nearly continuous Airborne Warning and Control System (AWAC) flights over a 4,000-mile route in the Eastern Pacific in search of the fast boats most often used by cocaine traffickers as they make their way north. According to the US Embassy in Ecuador, between 2000 and 2009, approximately 1,700 metric tons of illegal cocaine was intercepted by the US military operating out the facility at Manta, and “information gathered by flights out of the FOL contributed to over 60 percent of the captures of illegal drugs on the high seas of the Eastern Pacific.” Unfortunately for the US military, however, and despite the relative nonviolence of Ecuadorian politics (the country has never been home to the kind of sustained communist movements that have periodically occupied its neighbors and its coups, while frequent, are also frequently bloodless), antagonism toward the facility among the majority of Ecuadorians was given fresh momentum by the broad-based international opposition to the US-led war in Iraq that emerged in the middle of 2003. As coordinated protests unfolded throughout the world beginning in April of that year against the excesses of the second Bush administration, national sentiment throughout the country continued to sour on the facility—a souring that began as early as 1999 when it first became clear that the

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Americans would not only be granted access to the facility, but offered total diplomatic immunity from criminal prosecution at the International Criminal Court. By 2005, on the heels of the alleged sinking of eight Ecuadorian fishing vessels in Ecuadorian territorial waters by the US Navy or Coast Guard (ostensibly using data gathered by the AWACs), anger about the facility reached an unprecedented peak. Following escalating mobilizations on the part of the only anti-base group that operated in the city of Manta itself, the Movimiento Tohalli, as well as a number of national and provincial human rights and campesino (farmer) organizations including the Association for Christian Youth (ACJ), the Regional Foundation for Human Rights Assistance (INREDH), and the Service for Justice and Peace (SERPAJ), some four years after the global protests that paralyzed cities from New York to Rome, in March of 2007, the first International No-Bases movement was officially inaugurated at the Catholic University in Quito on March 4, 2007. Their aim was to end the imperialism of US military bases in Latin America and in particular, the use by Americans of the base at Manta for their ongoing support of paramilitary forces in the Colombian conflict. Just over one year later, in June of 2008—in no small part because of the ascension to power of leftist-populist president Rafael Correa—the No-Bases movement officially achieved the long sought-after nonrenewal of the base agreement set to expire in November 2009. In the face of this resurgent and ultimately successful anti-imperialism, however, there remained one group of people willing to fight on behalf of the forward operating location until the very end—even when, unlike in other base cities in places like Germany, Turkey, and Australia, it meant paltry or nonexistent economic compensation from the US government, alienation from some of their closest compatriots, and resistance to what was arguably one of the most powerful anti-military movements the world has seen since the antinuclear protests of the 1980s. Up until the very last day when the base was officially returned to the Ecuadorian command in September 2009, more than 70 percent of the residents of the city—whether artisanal fishermen, real estate agents, teachers, or tuna factory canners—continued to support the facility. Not only did they continue to support it, but more importantly for the purposes of this book, they actively resisted the anti-base movement that was operating, if always in very small numbers, throughout the province of Manabí. Why? The question is not insignificant. As a long tradition of political scientists has repeatedly insisted, the question should not be, “Why do people rebel?,” but much more crucially, “Why do they not?” (Moore 1978).

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Manta is a city that does not appear on most scholarly maps and one that has never sustained the attention of social scientists from either Ecuador or abroad. In a recent volume that presents itself as a comprehensive overview of the history, culture, and politics of Ecuador, the map provided in the opening pages does not even suggest the presence of Manta—a particularly surprising fact given that it is the country’s largest deepwater port and fifth most populous city (de la Torre and Striffler 2008). Despite growing investments on the part of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese port constructors and operators, as well as the slated establishment of the largest, state-run oil refinery in South America by 2015, the city’s invisibility has perhaps most to do with its perpetually struggling economy. The economic problems faced in Manta are pronounced, even relative to the rest of the country’s metropolitan centers, and the local economy, while growing, is still clearly laboring. As in most of Ecuador, the average monthly salary at the time of my research was approximately US$270 (it has since increased substantially), and, to make matters particularly miserable for the poorest of the poor, even the most basic of public infrastructures—from electrical lines to sanitation systems and roads—had for many years been underfunded to the point of near collapse. While the socialist administration that came to power in 2007 has embarked on an aggressive project of road construction over the past six years, during the time of my tenure in the city, the conservative Social Christian Party (PSC) mayor, Jorge Zambrano, often reminded disgruntled residents that the municipality simply didn’t have the money to fund most of the infrastructural and security projects that needed doing. “This canton (canton) is lacking basic services,” he frequently explained on evening television, “lacking attention to the parks and critical improvements to many other aspects of the city, but everything can’t be done by the municipality because economic conditions simply don’t permit it.” For years, in fact, the citizens of Manta had waited in vain for the megaproject (mega-proyecto) of the port to be brought to fruition— a project that would have linked the country’s only deepwater port to roads leading as far away as Manaos in Brazil—but already a decade or so in, in 2007 they suffered the withdrawal of the Hong Kong–based company Hutchinson, which had promised to build it but then revoked their offer upon learning of the “unfair conditions” to which they felt they would now be subject following the election of Rafael Correa. According to the Consejo Nacional Para la Reactivaci ón de la Producción y la Competitividad (The National Council for Production and Competition), while Manabí is the third most populous province and boasts the highest percentage of rural laborers, out of 22 provinces

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it ranks sixteenth in general development indicators, eighteenth in human development, fifteenth in productive capacity, and fourteenth in infrastructure. (For quick comparison, the province of Pichincha, in which the capital city of Quito is located, ranks first in general development indicators and infrastructure and second in human development and productive capacity. Still closer to home, the province of Guayas, in which the commercial center of Guayaquil is located and which is just south of Manabí, ranks third in general development indicators, sixth in productive capacity, and second in infrastructure.) To make matters even worse, as is the case elsewhere on the coast, unemployment hovers around 18 percent (4 percent higher than the national average), and 53.5 percent of the population in Manta alone is categorized as suffering the “poverty of unsatisfied basic needs” (Saavedra 2007: 83). Prepared to spend a year investigating the relations between American military personnel and the residents of the city at the height of the Bushled War on Terror, I arrived in Manta for the first time in the middle of the night at the end of November 2006, just in time for a major anti-military protest organized by the only major opposition group at the time, the Movimiento Tohalli. I had spent nearly ten hours on a bus, descending through the Andes to the accompaniment of provincial love songs and Dolph Lundgren movies (a particular favorite among coastal Ecuadorians). What little I knew of the city came from disparate and often conflicting sources—generic photographs of luxury condominiums e-mailed to me by a wealthy Californian landlady eager to find anyone who would pay American prices for what she termed, with no trace of irony, “the next French Riviera”; a terse blurb from the Southern Command’s website about the enormous quantities of cocaine confiscated by the Expeditionary Operations Squadron 478 with whom I would spend many months working; articles from the Quito-based El Comercio documenting the winter rains that had once again unleashed a minor outbreak of dengue fever; and, though I tried unsuccessfully to hide it from the “natives,” a second-hand copy of the Lonely Planet Guide to Ecuador, which pithily portrayed the city as dreary, devoid of historical interest, even more devoid of good surfing, and otherwise thoroughly forgettable. “Most tourists don’t stop here,” it noted unpromisingly, “but instead, press on in search of cleaner beaches and stronger currents.” “What struck me when I visited New York or Chicago in 1941,” writes Levi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques (1955: 96), “was not the newness of these places but their premature aging. It did not surprise me to find that these towns lacked ten centuries of history, but I was staggered to discover that so many of their districts were already fifty years old

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and that they should display the signs of decrepitude . . . , when the one adornment to which they could lay claim was that of youth, a quality as transitory for them as for living creatures.” Although Manta cannot, under any circumstances, be said to be new (the history of the pre-Incan civilization of Jocay that had its seat at Manta testifies to its age), it shares with Levi-Strauss’s perception of New York in the 1940s an atmosphere of simultaneous youth and premature aging. As James Ferguson (1999) has similarly noted of the Copper Belt in Zambia, it seemed to me upon first arrival somewhat schizophrenically animated by both the expectation of development and the kind of resignation that cannot help but set in when those expectations have been stillborn one too many times. It is as if money has come and gone, development plans been proposed and then aborted, buildings constructed and then abandoned—leaving only three-story cement complexes in various stages of becoming that look like both architectural sketches for a future yet to come and testaments to lives that have long since moved on. This strange temporality of development in Manta is visible not just in the upscale district where I had been frightened into making my home, but on the opposite side of the city and most everywhere in between. Just 50 meters back from one of the beaches on the easternmost side of the city, on which exquisitely crafted boats are still hewed by hand by artisanal fisherman alongside the enormous tuna factories, the dingy, 1970s-style hotels that were once up-and-coming hotspots, like Las Gaviotas , now house tourists in third-rate rooms—shuttering their once-lovely, but now vacant restaurants by eight o’clock in the evening. Within sight of the enormous military control towers reconstructed by the Americans, small shopkeepers sell single cigarettes and sweet crackers from behind cast iron bars—those low-tech approximations of the bullet proof glass that one still finds in inner-city convenience stores in the United States. While adventurous investors from the commercial capital of Guayaquil have set up high-end convenience stores along Playa Barbasquillo (the cleanest and most westerly of the city’s three beaches), hoping against hope for an economic boon, and tourists from other parts of the province regularly arrive in brightly colored, windowless buses to spend the weekend by the sea, for visitors from as nearby as Quito and as far away as New Jersey, it is the unrealized dream of development that is most immediately palpable in the city. As one Op-Ed piece that appeared some two years later in the local paper concluded, referring both to the proposed eviction of the American military by the national government and the decision on the part of a Hong Kong–based port operator to invest elsewhere, “They’ve finally taken everything from us.”

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Part of the reason for Manta’s appearance of simultaneous youth and age is the fact that it is a city through which drug money runs at the speed of light, erecting buildings overnight, only to abandon them when sources dry up, launderers are exposed, or small-scale traffickers go to prison—a situation that has only deteriorated further in the second decade of the twenty-first century. While many of the still-skeletal buildings in Manta are part of legitimate construction projects that have suffered from sporadic financing by small-scale foreign investors and from mismanagement by the city council, the pervasive and longtime presence of money-launderers in the city is widely acknowledged. The owner of the last apartment complex into which I moved was serving time for just such a crime. As the 20-something property manager explained as delicately as she could when I finally got up the nerve to ask her about him, he had claimed innocence at a court in Guayaquil just south of Manta, but had been put away anyway. After all, he had, over the years, been in and out of jail—and with such regularity that the American contractors who had formerly lived in the building had been forced to leave because the base could not risk such a public relations scandal. Everyone in Manta, in fact, had some story about a supposed businessman whose connections to the drug trade eventually become apparent. “When we see that someone who used to have just a little bit of money starts suddenly driving around in a fancy car . . . people always think he’s involved with the drugs,” a neighbor once told me. “It shouldn’t be that way—but that’s what we think. How did you get all that money overnight if you’re not involved?” Most resented the kind of insecurity with which they were increasingly forced to live. Indeed, the situation had become so dangerous by late 2012 that the Ecuadorian military was regularly being deployed to deal with intensifying citizen insecurity and protests for enhanced security measures became a recurring feature of life in the city. Owners of hotels were not just jailed, but shot. Wealthy property-owners were kidnapped for exorbitant ransoms and American Embassy personnel routinely warned against the armed ATM robberies in which taxi drivers were increasingly complicit. Well-pressed packages of cocaine washed up on the beaches, having been thrown overboard by transporters fleeing the authorities, and were collected by small-scale fishermen in desperate need of a living wage. Taxi drivers were so frequently attacked that some had even taken to carrying machetes beneath their seats (“Just for the Colombians!,” one smiled at me late one afternoon). Every morning, in fact, bodies showed up in the section of the local paper called La Cr ónica Roja (The Red Chronicle)—their faces crushed, in pools of blood, splayed out across the streets where they had

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met their demise or on the metallic waiting tables at the city morgue, just about to be lifted into body bags. While not all of these deaths, of course, were drug-related (a fair proportion were burnings and automobile accidents), the fear fueled by such incidents weighed on residents with considerable intensity, particularly when their adolescents were caught in the crossfire. “Will I see you next year?,” I once eagerly asked a taxi driver who, through the months, had driven us to remote parts of the province and graciously waited for sometimes hours at time. “If I live to see another year you will,” came his mutedly realistic response. Whether in the stories of the taxi drivers who regularly go on strike when one too many of them turns up dead or the dramatic surge in the number of vigilante killings of unwanted Colombians, Manta is a city, as many of its residents recognize, of fierce and sometimes violent edges—a city that, even beneath the watchful eye of the United States for more than a decade and far removed from the plantations on which coca is grown, continues to suffer the indirect effects of the still-intensifying War on Drugs. It was against this backdrop of citizen insecurity, unregulated urban planning, an inf lux of money-laundering capital, and the most doggedly persistent kind of belief in something like development that community members mobilized in defense of the US forward operating location in their city. This is their story—a story of how, in this tiny outpost of empire, longtime city residents, American military personnel from Maine and Alabama, and US private military contractors fresh from Iraq came to understand themselves as uneasily aligned. More importantly, it is, in the end, a sobering tale about how the global anti-bases movement that was arguably at its most focused and persuasive in more than a decade in the mid-2000s, was effectively blunted and dispersed by a US military-community alliance that made its structure, aims, and tactics appear not only dubious, but more asymmetrically “imperialist” than the US military itself. At a time when the US military has boldly extended itself more deeply into Latin America than it was even under the Bush administration, and when social movements throughout the world continue to struggle to convince wide swathes of the public of the urgency of their messages, it is crucial that we begin to grapple seriously with the affective complications by which base communities misunderstand, neglect, or otherwise fail to respond to the f ledgling anti-military movements in their midst. Only then, it is my contention in this book, might we have a chance of building a truly grassroots network opposed to the growing behemoth that is the US military.