By Andrea Shalal, Alexandra and Valencia
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (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)
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