MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Biden, Lasso discuss deepening bilateral ties between US and Ecuador

Ecuador is the only Latin American Pacific country that does not have a free trade agreement with the United States

US President Joseph Biden Monday told his Ecuadorian colleague Guillermo Lasso at the White House that his country was interested in strengthening ties with one of its staunchest South American allies.

 “Today we’re going to keep building on the progress we’ve made,” Biden said at the start of an Oval Office meeting with Lasso. “Together, we’ve made historic strides.”

Biden also underlined his zeal to strengthen the justice system in Ecuador and to improve the prison system, which has become one of the focal points of violence in the South American country. Lasso replied that he needed US$ 5 billion over the next three years to combat violence and was still looking for ways to obtain those funds.

Ecuador sits between the world's two biggest cocaine producers, Colombia and Peru, and criminal groups use the South American country as a transit route for drugs reaching the United States and Europe, according to the latest World Drug Report published by the United Nations.

Both leaders also discussed the migration crisis. “We have talked about migration, migration as a consequence of the economic problems in many Latin American countries, and we have ratified our commitment to continue supporting, as we have done, the migratory phenomenon, especially from Venezuela to Ecuador,” Lasso said.

The United States, Ecuador, and 18 other countries signed during the Summit of the Americas held in June in Los Angeles the so-called “Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection,” pledging to increase opportunities for legal migration. Ecuador is in the process of regularizing the situation of around 324,000 Venezuelans living in the country.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data, arrests of Ecuadorian migrants have gone from 750 in October 2021 to more than 7,000 in October of this year 2022.

One of Lasso's targets was to ask Biden to sign a Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Ecuador is the only Latin American Pacific country that does not have a free trade agreement with the United States. China, however, is on the verge of concluding a free trade agreement with Ecuador and this year has already overtaken the US as the Latin American country's main trading partner.

Lasso was to meet with USAID administrator Samantha Power later on Monday and was scheduled to hold talks with CIA Director William Burns, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as well as World Bank President David Malpass and Inter-American Development Bank President Ilan Goldfajn before returning to Quito on Wednesday.

Senator Marco Rubio, in a letter to US International Development Finance Corporation CEO Scott Nathan, urged the Biden administration to surge investment into Ecuador to counter China’s growing influence in the region.

The US Senate last week passed a bipartisan bill, the United States-Ecuador Partnership Act, which provides among other things for the transfer of two excess US Coast Guard cutters to help Ecuador patrol the protected waters around the Galapagos Islands, where China’s distant-water fishing fleet has become a recurrent presence.