U.S. government agencies have different criteria for sanctioning adversaries and preventing them from engaging in the U.S. economy. Our biggest foreign adversaries, like China, benefit from this lack of interagency coordination, which must come to an immediate...
Three bills, led by U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), which prevent the Chinese Communist Party from taking advantage of our nation, has successfully passed the U.S. House of Representatives and are now awaiting Senate consideration. “The House of Representatives has...
Annually, Brazil hosts “Operation Formosa” which are military exercises conducted by several nations. This year, the Chinese Communist Party’s armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), has been invited to participate. Beijing participating in the exercises,...
Since Hamas’s horrific October 7, 2023 terrorist attack against Israel, U.S. cities and campuses are seeing a disturbing rise in antisemitic, pro-terrorist violence. There remains concern that participants in these acts are here on visas and are not being held...
U.S. Navy destroyer USS Carney, homeported at Naval Station Mayport, Florida after an eight-month deployment to the Middle East. This historic deployment saw 51 engagements with Iranian-backed terrorists, the most engagements with a foreign adversary by a Naval vessel...
The Office of the Surgeon General announced a public advisory warning of alarmingly high levels of parental stress. The advisory and the Surgeon General’s accompanying op-ed, offered a set of “solutions” that fail to address the actual wants and needs of struggling...
The US must stand with Ecuador against narco-terrorists
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)
January 19, 2024
…Things aren’t looking good [in Ecuador]. As I write, four police officers have been kidnapped, two have been killed, the lawyer prosecuting TC Television’s invaders has been assassinated, dozens of prisoners have escaped from their cells, and the people of Ecuador are mostly hiding indoors as soldiers patrol the streets of the country’s largest city, Guayaquil….
I traveled to Guayaquil and Quito last February and knew that the nation had to confront many challenges. But the destabilizing influence of Venezuela’s narco-regime, combined with the soft-on-crime policies of both Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Colombian President Gustavo Petro, has empowered cartels to make new inroads into the strategically located equator state.
What should be the role of the U.S. in all this? First, we must stand by President Noboa and his administration…. Congress passed the bipartisan U.S.-Ecuador Partnership Act in December 2022, which authorized a comprehensive diplomatic strategy to strengthen our commercial and security relations with Ecuador….
To improve the situation, we should consider working with Ecuador to update the crimes that qualify for the extradition of criminals to the U.S. As history shows, drug lords have long feared U.S. prisons more than those in Latin America. The current U.S.-Ecuador extradition treaty is insufficient for these troubled times and must be updated….
Finally, the U.S. must abandon any attempts to appease the international actors aiding and abetting Ecuador’s narco-terrorists and organized criminal groups, namely Venezuela’s dictatorship….