The US touted a joint operation with Ecuador targeting drug traffickers. Those on the ground tell a different story. One local resident tells USA TODAY he had ‘nothing illegal.’
Joint US-Ecuadoran military operation bombed farms, residents say
Ecuadoran officials said a joint operation with the U.S. destroyed a hideout for a drug trafficking group. Residents say it destroyed farms.
- Ecuadoran officials said they launched Operation Total Extermination, which included aerial bombardment, alongside the United States.
- Residents of San Martin told USA TODAY the operations destroyed farms and homes of longtime farmers who have no ties to drug traffickers.
- The United States has pressured countries to take a militarized approach against organized crime. Observers say this leaves room for human rights abuses by governments.
A joint American and Ecuadoran military operation bombed farms and homes in an Amazon village in Ecuador, according to residents and their lawyers.
Ecuador’s defense ministry on March 6 said Operation Total Extermination included aerial bombardment in the province of Sucumbios, which sits in the country’s northeastern corner, on the border with Colombia. Ecuadoran officials said the operation, conducted with U.S. intelligence, destroyed a hideout for a Colombian drug trafficking group.
Residents of San Martin, the farming village of about 27 families in Sucumbios, told USA TODAY that the operation, which took place March 1-6, didn’t target drug traffickers. Instead, they said military personnel destroyed farms. Detained local workers have told a United Nations human rights group that Ecuadoran soldiers tortured them.
«The government’s version is that they bombed encampments of certain armed groups,» Vicente Garrido, vice president of the community of San Martin, who has lived there for nearly 40 years, said in an interview. «But what we’re showing the world is that these aren’t encampments, these are peasants’ homes.»
American military personnel said the operation showed the success of the partnership with Ecuador, whose conservative government has emerged as a key ally of the Trump administration in Latin America.
Kingsley Wilson, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of War, formally known as the Department of Defense, said operations were done jointly with Ecuadoran forces and in coordination with Ecuador’s government. Wilson declined to respond directly to questions about specific tactics or targeting details and referred questions about Ecuadoran military actions to the country’s government.
«All U.S. military actions are conducted through rigorous, multilayered targeting processes and each target is validated through established procedures,» Wilson said in a statement. «Cartel networks threaten the stability of our hemisphere, and the Department of War will continue working with committed partners to take decisive action against those who endanger our shared neighborhood.»
The Ecuadoran defense and interior ministries did not respond to USA TODAY’s emailed questions for comment.
In early March, President Daniel Noboa, a conservative strongman, announced a new phase against «narcoterrorism and illegal mining» by conducting joint operations with regional allies, including the United States.
In a March 17 X post, Noboa reaffirmed the commitment to take on organized crime.
«Today, together with international cooperation, we continue in that fight, bombing the places that served as hideouts for these groups, largely Colombian ones that their own government allowed to infiltrate our country due to neglect its border,» he said.
Human rights have worried about militarized approaches to fighting suspected drug traffickers and the toll on civilians.
«Under the government’s banner of fighting crime and drug trafficking, human rights are being violated,» said Maria Espinosa, a defense lawyer with the Alliance of Organizations for Human Rights, based in Ecuador. «Security cannot be built on serious human rights violations. The government has obligations and standards it must abide by.»
In San Martin, Espinosa said no residents died in the operations. But residents worry what’s next amid heightened military presence.
Accusations of drug trafficking in farming village
On March 3, U.S. Southern Command announced Ecuador and the United States launched operations against designated terrorist organizations in the South American country, but didn’t name any criminal group. Border Command, the group Ecuadoran officials identified, isn’t among the U.S. State Department’s designated terrorist organizations. Border Command is among several groups operating in northeastern Ecuador, which has become a key cocaine smuggling route, as well as an area for illegal mining and logging, according to InsightCrime, an organization that tracks organized crime.
Garrido and Espinosa said Ecuadoran and Colombian military groups have patrolled the area for years. San Martin, which sits along the San Miguel River that’s part of a natural border between the two countries, is known for coffee, cacao and cattle. Its residents come from both Ecuador and Colombia, living at times on either side of the border.
On the morning of March 1, residents said they saw at least four Ecuadoran military helicopters land in the area, according to a March 12 human rights complaint filed with Ecuador’s interior ministry by Espinosa’s organization, which is representing residents. That evening, residents said fires burned two uninhabited homes that sat on active farm and grazing lands. It’s unclear how the fires started.
The next day, Espinosa said, residents identified the two owners of the burned homes.
On March 3, residents said they saw at least four Ecuadoran military planes, the complaint said. Near one of the homes that burned, they saw a plane drop a bomb on a woman’s farmland, blowing a gaping hole in the ground. The news agency AFP showed the crater from the explosion, and the complaint noted a drone flying around.
Across the San Miguel River, a bomb landed in Colombia but didn’t detonate on March 3. The New York Times reported the bomb is an American-designed Mark-82, weighing about 500 pounds. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a socialist leader who has been critical of Trump, said he didn’t give an order to bomb the area, and that armed groups don’t have planes.
Ecuador has denied responsibility for the bomb. Noboa on March 17 said Ecuador was acting to fight narcoterrorism on its territory, not in Colombia.
In San Martin that day, a helicopter landed, unloading between 20 and 30 soldiers who entered a property and detained five people who had been sowing grass and tending to pastures, the complaint said.
In an interview, Miguel, a carpenter who has lived in the area for 11 years, said the men worked and lived on his property, with four of them staying in a small dormitory. Miguel, who asked USA TODAY not to use his last name since he fears for his safety from security forces, was working on the other side of the border, in Colombia, at the time of the operation.
One worker, who is about 70, was released. Four younger men were tied up, with black bags covering their heads, and taken to a helicopter, the complaint said.
Video by local residents showed the men being taken by soldiers to the helicopter on the shoreline of the Rio San Miguel. As residents approached, shots can be heard ringing out, the video shows, seemingly as a warning. Keep recording, a woman says in the video.
The four workers have told the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights they were subjected to torture, including electrocution, suspending their bodies upside down for more than two hours, simulating drowning and beatings, according to the complaint.
Soldiers questioned where the men hid «stashes» and accused them of being guerrilla fighters. The men said they weren’t aware of armed groups in the area.
Espinosa said they were released at dawn on March 4 along the side of the road in Lago Agrio, a city about two hours away, and they didn’t know where they were. They were told not to tell anyone, that if they did, they’d be killed, the complaint said.
The South America U.N. human rights office confirmed in a March 18 news release that staff met virtually with the workers.
Lawyers and residents have said they haven’t received responses from the Ecuadoran government.
“President Trump has effectively restored American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere and tackled the scourge of illicit drug trafficking unlike any of his predecessors,» Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told USA TODAY in an emailed statement. «That includes enlisting regional partners to eliminate deadly threats that narcoterrorist cartels pose to our homeland. All operations conducted by the United States Military are meticulously planned and targeted against those who seek to harm Americans – any insinuation otherwise is false.”
‘I had nothing illegal,’ says farmer
In a March 6 X post, Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesman, said the joint operation successfully targeted a «narco-terrorist supply network.» A minute-long, grainy video, labeled «unclassified,» showed troops boarding a helicopter, an aerial view of a property, and a building exploding. Ecuador’s defense ministry said forces destroyed a hideout for a Border Command leader and also a training area with capacity for up to 50 drug traffickers.
Reviewing the Pentagon’s video, Miguel said the footage showed buildings on his property being destroyed. Along with housing for the workers, he said the area also had a kitchen, as well as storage for tools and equipment for livestock, and an area to make cheese. Some chickens were killed in the bombing.
The bombing came from the air, he said, making a whizzing noise that hit his property.
«I had nothing illegal,» Miguel said in a phone call, adding he didn’t even have a shotgun.
Marine Corps Gen. Francis Donovan, commander of U.S. Southern Command, told U.S. lawmakers President Donald Trump spoke by phone with Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa to agree on operations, though it’s unclear how detailed this was with relation to Operation Total Extermination.
In a March 19 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Donovan said special operations forces «could quickly plan with the Ecuadorans to ensure that any use of force fell within our requirements.» He described observing «professional planning,» though the level of American military involvement is still unclear.
US pressure on militarized approach
The White House has taken on an aggressive approach to organized crime in Latin America. Since September, the United States has launched lethal strikes on suspected drug smuggling boats, killing more than 150 people in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea. Officials have provided scant evidence that those killed were drug traffickers, and some legal experts have said the killings violate U.S. and international law.
The administration now appears poised to take fights to land. Amid operations in San Martin, the United States hosted ideologically aligned leaders in Florida to encourage a militarized approach. Tactics to combat drug traffickers required military leaders exercising might, not lawyers telling generals what to do, according to Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff.
«You’re dealing with a lot of lawyers in your own country, I’m sure,» Miller said at the «Americas Counter Cartel Conference» on March 5. «You have my permission not to listen to them.»
The Department of State referred questions to the Pentagon.
Militarized operations have been an established U.S. tactic in its decades-long war on drugs. They’ve had little success stopping the flow of drugs without also addressing corruption, impunity and criminal groups’ finances in countries, experts said.
«You multiply that among all of these countries and you’re going to have a pretty dire situation if it’s taken to its logical conclusion,» said Orlando Pérez, a political science professor at University of North Texas, Dallas, and an expert on Latin American security. «The reaction is not going to be very positive for U.S.-Latin American relations.»
Since 2024, Noboa has declared an «internal armed conflict» in Ecuador in response to rising crime. The country has seen the rise of powerful criminal organizations in its borders, along with international drug cartels from Mexico, Italy and Albania also operating in Ecuador.
Noboa has kept renewing a state of emergency, but it doesn’t appear to have caused crime to drop. Homicides have only increased, reaching a new high in 2025. Meanwhile, cocaine shipments, which now mostly pass through Ecuador, have reached record levels globally.
«The government response hasn’t contained violence in the country,» said Martina Rapido Ragozzino, North Andes researcher at Human Rights Watch. «But rather, it has only multiplied abuses.»
Human Rights Watch has issued warnings of forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and excessive use of force by Ecuador’s military. On March 9, eight U.N. experts sent a report to Ecuador’s government warning of human rights abuses in its approach to fighting crime.
Along Ecuador’s border region, Espinosa said communities face stigma for perceptions around criminal trafficking groups. Now, she said, communities like San Martin are living with the consequences.
Miguel, the farmer, is trying to continue work, though he says workers are scared to return. He is, too, pointing to constant noise of military helicopters and planes daily. But he said he sacrificed too much for the land.
On March 27-28, San Martin planned to host a «festival for life and peace,» according to a flyer on WhatsApp. The flyer said the hope was kites would fly in the sky, not war helicopters.
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