Play as · WW3 2026 · L1 · Internal Armed Conflict

Ecuador - 2026

Ecuador is governed by Daniel Noboa, who declared an "internal armed conflict" against the principal drug-trafficking organizations in January 2024 - the most explicit militarization of internal-security in modern Ecuadorian history, prompted by the collapse of public security through 2022-23 that included the August 2023 assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio and the rise of homicide rates from among the lowest in Latin America to among the highest in less than a decade. Population about 18M, GDP around $240B PPP. The country has been dollarized since 2000 (the post-1999 economic crisis response that has anchored the monetary system to the US dollar), holds the Galápagos archipelago and a substantial Pacific EEZ, and is one of the major OPEC-state oil exporters of the Western Hemisphere. The strategic identity is the Pacific state in militarized security recovery - Ecuador's traditional regional-soft-power role has been substantially displaced by the security crisis and the response to it.

Starting position

The Ecuadorian Armed Forces are about 40,000 active personnel, substantially mobilized internally since the January 2024 internal-armed-conflict declaration. The Noboa government's security cooperation with the United States has expanded substantially - the August 2023 referendum on US military basing in the Galápagos and on the mainland produced majority approval for hosting US bases (the first such authorization since the Manta base closure of 2009), and the practical implementation has begun. The dollarization makes monetary-policy levers unavailable and creates an enforcement environment that the criminal-economy actors have exploited, particularly through the Guayaquil port that has become one of the principal South-to-North cocaine transit nodes. The Galápagos enforcement against Chinese distant-water fishing fleets has been a continuing operational tempo.

What turns the campaign

What Ecuador wants is the internal-armed-conflict campaign brought to a operational result that demonstrably reduces homicide rates and territorial control by the criminal organizations, the US security-cooperation framework deepened to the level the operational requirements justify (basing access, intelligence cooperation, equipment transfer, financial-investigation cooperation), the Galápagos and Pacific maritime sovereignty preserved against the Chinese distant-water fishing pressure, the dollarization preserved as the monetary anchor, and the political consolidation of the post-2023 Noboa administration sustained through the 2025 election cycle. What Ecuador fears is a security-operation failure that produces continued elevation of homicide rates and criminal-organization territorial control, a US strategic shift that downgrades the post-2024 cooperation framework, an oil-revenue collapse that the dollarized fiscal architecture cannot easily absorb, and a domestic-political crisis that the security-emergency politics has so far been able to manage but that the underlying social-economic conditions could produce.

Signature challenge