According to a high-level Ecuadorian official familiar with the planning, construction of a new naval facility in the coastal city of Manta is part of that preparation, with barracks-style housing and administration offices designed to support sustained operations and US military personnel. The official requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa has made no secret of his desire for foreign boots on the ground as gangs unleash terror across the country – a request he is expected to reiterate this weekend. Noboa is set to meet Trump in Florida on Saturday to discuss immigration, trade and “security cooperation.”

Noboa told the BBC he wants the US, Brazil and European nations to join his war on gangs. During an interview in early March, the president claimed Ecuador is dealing with “international narco-terrorist” groups and that his country needs the “help of international forces.” In a local radio interview, he said his government was “already in talks” to receive foreign military support for provinces such as Guayas, known for high crime, but did not specify which countries were involved in the talks.

“We have a plan in place with our law enforcement agencies, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Defense, the armed forces, the Strategic Intelligence Center, and international assistance and support from special forces. That’s essential,” he told Guayaquil’s Radio City.

Noboa’s efforts are heavily dependent on April’s presidential runoff as he’s set off to face leftist candidate Luisa Gonzalez, who opposes the presence of any foreign force in the country.

The rapid pace of construction in Manta, the official said, reflects how soon Ecuador hopes international help might arrive.

The projects are supported by the United States, documents appear to show, and a US representative was present at the signing of the agreement, the Ecuadorian official said.

One rendering for a floating dock, dated August 2024, is labeled “Southcom Floating Dock,” an apparent reference to the US Southern Command, also known as Southcom. Another rendering, dated June 2024, has the US State Department’s International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) logo and the project name of “Equipped Containers for the Ecuador’s Antinarcotics Special Unit and the DEA” and describes the project as an “international collaboration with the US Embassy.”

Plans for these projects have continued under the Trump administration. On March 26, Ecuador’s government announced several US-backed investments “paused due to geopolitical factors” are resuming in the country, with hundreds of thousands of dollars earmarked for construction of a pier and DEA-linked base.

There is precedent; the last time US troops operated here was from 1999 to 2009, at the now-defunct Manta Air Base. Back then, they ran surveillance flights targeting drug routes in the eastern Pacific.

Noboa has also publicly asked the Trump administration to designate Ecuadorian armed groups as terror organizations, as it has already done for several organized crime groups in the region. Such a designation could potentially empower the US government to use military force abroad in combatting the groups.

From ‘island of peace’ to a country on edge

Ecuador now has the highest homicide rate in Latin America, according to InSight Crime – recording nearly twice as many killings as Mexico. The surge is fueled by drug trafficking routes, turf wars, and alliances between local gangs and foreign cartels.

Despite the sweeping operations, many officials admit the violence feels more like it’s being managed than curtailed. Still, dozens of arrests were made.

“Cartels, gangs and other transnational criminal organizations in our part of the world are engaging in a wide array of illicit activity, from narcotics trafficking to money laundering, smuggling of illegal immigrants and human trafficking, which endanger the health, welfare and safety of everyday Americans,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said during her testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Tuesday.

Ecuador’s location – flanked by the world’s top cocaine producers, Peru and Colombia – and its deep-water ports make it a key transit point for narcotics. But its vulnerability goes beyond geography.

The dollarized economy and historically loose visa policies make it easy for criminal networks to move money and people. And corruption, experts say, greases the wheels.

“It’s widespread and far-reaching,” said James Bargent of InSight Crime. “Corruption is rampant from low-level police to the upper echelons of political power, and this facilitates trafficking and provides protection to the criminal groups involved.”

In Durán, one of the country’s most violent cities, Police Chief Roberto Santamaria acknowledged corruption among police. He said they sometimes employ random polygraph testing and check bank accounts for unusual activity to try to root out corrupt officers.

Seeking global backing

Noboa has framed his crackdown as both a domestic fight and a global plea for help. Ahead of the runoff election set for April 13, he has positioned himself as a hardliner on security. In January, he and his wife were seated front and center at Trump’s inauguration, applauding as the president vowed to fight cartels and restore “law and order.”

Unlike Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who has firmly rejected foreign troops’ involvement against cartels in her country, Noboa is actively seeking it. His face-to-face meeting with Trump this weekend is expected to be his most direct appeal yet for US backing.

Before leaving for Florida, Noboa also addressed Ecuador’s improving ties with the US on Friday. “We’re one of the few countries where cooperation programs are being resumed,” Noboa said to Radio Centro. “We are working on security, on providing jobs so that people don’t leave. And the US has honored that relationship.”

Ecuador’s efforts aren’t limited to government partnerships. This month, Noboa announced a “strategic alliance” with Erik Prince, the founder of the private military firm formerly known as Blackwater.

The partnership – which Noboa described as part of his plan to fight narcoterrorism and illegal fishing – was met with sharp criticism inside Ecuador, including from a former Army commander who warned of turning to a “mercenary army.” Still, it signals how far Noboa is willing to go to bring in outside support.

“They’re helping with training in urban warfare … and bringing new technology,” Noboa said Friday, speaking on Prince’s involvement. “They’ve operated in a dozen countries – including the US.”

For Noboa, foreign support isn’t a distant hope – it’s a strategy already in motion. Ecuador is expanding military infrastructure, clearing political hurdles, and making its case to the region, to its citizens, and now, directly to the United States.

Whether that help arrives – or arrives soon – remains to be seen.

A powerful, deadly earthquake struck at the heart of civil war-ravaged Myanmar on Friday, piling fresh misery on an impoverished nation that was cut off from much of the world even before this natural disaster struck.

The timing could hardly be worse. The Southeast Asian country is reeling from a raging civil war between a military junta that seized power in 2021, and pro-democracy fighters and ethnic rebel groups battling to overthrow it.

The war – now in its fifth year – has ravaged communications and transport in Myanmar, making it particularly difficult to get a clear picture of the damage.

So far authorities say more than 1,000 people have died. But experts fear the real toll will be far higher and could take weeks to emerge.

Here’s what we know so far.

A historic city hit hardest

On Saturday fragments emerged showing the destruction wrought by the quake from former royal capital Mandalay, home to around 1.5 million people and the city closest to its epicenter.

And they spoke of desperately rushing injured loved ones to medical care – or the agonizing wait for news of friends still missing or trapped under the rubble.

“It hit very strong and very fast,” she said of the earthquake. She recalled she was boiling water to make milk for her baby when the 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck not far from her home to the east of the city.

Part of the wall of the house collapsed onto the woman’s grandmother who was sitting nearby, burying her legs in rubble and debris, she said.

“The door couldn’t open as a fence had collapsed onto it. I shouted out for help and my husband came in from the street. He jumped on the door and managed to open it.”

“Until now, we have not been able to recover their dead bodies from rubble,” he said.

The quake also shattered some of the city’s mosques which were busy with worshippers attending Friday prayers, one man said.

“When the buildings collapsed, many Muslims got trapped inside, causing casualties and deaths… In one mosque, there are more than a hundred injured.”

Across the mighty Irrawaddy river that runs past Mandalay, there is also destruction in Sagaing region, a more rural area, where many live in more flimsy – but more earthquake survivable – wooden and thatched houses.

Nang Aye Yin, 34, heard news that the nunnery where a relative of his was studying had collapsed.

“Luckily no one died, but two were badly wounded. One of my nieces aged 11 lost three toes and another nun had her head broken as well as one of her legs.”

Hospitals in both Sagaing and Mandalay turned them away as they were already at full capacity, he said.

A rare call for outside help

Myanmar’s military junta seized power in a 2021 coup after a brief 10-year experiment with democracy. Before that, Myanmar’s generals ruled for decades. And generally, whenever disaster struck, they would eschew foreign help and play down the impact.

This time it’s different.

Junta chief Min Aung Hlaing took the unusual step of quickly asking for foreign aid. He visited the city of Mandalay on Saturday to inspect the damage, state media reported, as well as the capital Naypyidaw which was also hit hard.

On Saturday several neighboring countries began sending rescue teams and aid.

A team from China – historically one of the junta’s closest partners – were the first to arrive, touching down in Myanmar’s commercial hub Yangon bringing relief supplies, Chinese state media said.

Singapore, Malaysia, India and Russia also announced they would send help.

But for those in quake-stricken Mandalay, around 380 miles away and with transportation uncertain, the wait driving them mad.

“My head is going to explode while waiting for calls for friends who cannot be found yet,” the former lawyer said.

It’s been 30 years, but Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka still remembers the first time she ever saw a mountain gorilla.

It was the summer of 1994. Deep in the jungle of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, the then-23-year-old student was hundreds of miles from her home in the country’s capital, Kampala.

Bwindi is one of only two places in the world where mountain gorillas live, and after graduating from the Royal Veterinary College in London, Kalema-Zikusoka had her heart set on seeing the great apes. For the first week of her month-long placement, she’d been stuck at base camp with a terrible cold, unable to join the jungle treks, with her frustration and anticipation rising every day.

Finally, after what felt like endless waiting, Kalema-Zikusoka was cleared to hike.

Pushing through tangled vines and roots in the thick forest, she could hear bubbling waterfalls, birds squawking, and chimpanzees hooting. But gorillas, she says, are silent.

“You don’t hear them, but you see their trails as you’re walking,” says Kalema-Zikusoka. “You can be looking for them, thinking will I ever see them? Then suddenly — they’re there. It’s such a magical feeling.”

Sitting in a forest clearing was a silverback gorilla, called Kacupira.

“When I got to see Kacupira, having wanted to see gorillas for so long — suddenly this gorilla was sitting there chewing on a piece of bark, and I was like, ‘wow,’” recalls Kalema-Zikusoka, now 55.

“I looked into his very intelligent brown eyes, and I felt a really deep connection. He was just willing to let us into his presence, and not at all threatening.”

After this encounter, Kalema-Zikusoka decided to stay at Bwindi. Her one-month summer placement turned into three decades of conservation work at the park, where she became the nation’s first wildlife veterinarian in 1996. With her help, Bwindi’s gorilla population grew from less than 300 to 459, and the subspecies is no longer critically endangered, according to the IUCN Red List.

“The mountain gorillas have really shaped my life,” says Kalema-Zikusoka. And in turn, “the gorillas have really transformed Uganda, and brought Ugandan conservation and tourism back on the map.”

A violent history

For millennia, mountain gorillas roamed across the forests of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But in the last 100 years, rampant deforestation, poaching, and conflicts have left them on the brink of extinction, clinging to just two surviving habitats: Bwindi and the Virungas.

In the 1970s, Uganda’s gorillas faced another existential threat. The eight-year dictatorship of Idi Amin — who was known as the “Butcher of Uganda” for his brutality — devastated the country, killing up to 300,000 people, destroying land and resources, and slaughtering much of the nation’s wildlife.

Kalema-Zikusoka was just two years old at the time of the military coup, and her father was a minister in the government that was overthrown by Amin.

“When Amin came into power, my dad was one of the first victims,” she recalls. “He was abducted when he was taking a relative back home; he was followed by a vehicle, and never seen again.”

Growing up in political turmoil, Kalema-Zikusoka found solace with her many household pets: her older siblings often rescued stray cats and dogs, who became her companions, and she decided at “a very young age” that she wanted to be a veterinarian. It was her neighbor’s pet monkey, Poncho, that sparked her interest in primates: the mischievous creature would sneak in through the window and pull the dog’s tail, steal food, and even plunk keys on the piano.

As a teenager, Kalema-Zikusoka joined her school’s wildlife club, and on a field trip to Queen Elizabeth National Park she saw firsthand how little wildlife remained, even in conservation areas. “I started thinking to myself, why can’t I become a vet who brings back the wildlife to Uganda?”

While Kalema-Zikusoka’s veterinarian studies took her to the UK, she always planned to return to Uganda and build on the work of her father.

“When I was old enough to understand what had happened to him, I felt like I wanted to continue his dream, his legacy, of a prosperous Uganda, through my passion for wildlife.”

Health for all

Less than a year after Kalema-Zikusoka began working at Bwindi, there was an outbreak of an unknown skin disease among the gorillas: they were losing hair and developing white, scaly skin. Kalema-Zikusoka consulted with a doctor friend, who told her about the human disease scabies, common at the time among low-income communities in rural Uganda.

After chimpanzees and bonobos, gorillas are our closest genetic relatives, sharing around 98.4% of their DNA with humans. This genetic similarity also makes gorillas vulnerable to many of the same diseases as humans.

Kalema-Zikusoka and the team tracked down the afflicted gorilla family: it was Kacupira’s group, the gentle giant she had met on her first trek. Many of the apes were extremely unwell, including a baby gorilla that, despite medical interventions, died.

“This made me realize that you couldn’t protect the gorillas without improving the health of their human neighbors,” she says.

Bwindi is located in one of Uganda’s most densely populated rural regions, leaving limited space for a buffer zone. Instead, farmland and villages are pressed up against its borders. The park is also relatively small — at just 321 square kilometers (123 square miles), it is just 2% of the size of the 14,700-square-kilometer (5,600-square-mile) Serengeti in Tanzania — which puts further pressure on its borders and resources and increases the likelihood of human-gorilla interactions.

To help remedy the situation Kalema-Zikusoka founded Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH) in 2003, a non-profit that has worked with around 10,000 households around the national park to improve the community’s health and well-being.

Local farmers are trained to safely herd gorillas back to the forest when they venture onto community land, and a network of village health teams educates families on ways to improve hygiene and reduce the spread of disease.

And now that the gorilla population is growing, so is tourism in the area: 27 gorilla families are now habituated to people, and the number of “gorilla tourists” in Uganda has risen from around 1,300 in 1993 to almost 39,000 in 2023.

It’s improved the well-being of villagers living near the park, says Joshua Masereka, the community conservation warden at Uganda Wildlife Authority. “When tourists come to this place, there’s more money and therefore more benefits, more jobs, more opportunities, more developments,” he says, adding that the park allocates 20% of its revenue to community projects, such as building schools and roads.

CTPH is one of the wildlife authority’s “prime partners” and has been pivotal to the conservation work at the park, says Masereka. “Gladys, I think she’s born with conservation in her blood. If you go through the life of her family, how she was brought up, she was brought up in that life of being a conservationist and I think she’ll die a conservationist.”

Kalema-Zikusoka’s dedication has inspired others in the community into action. Born and raised around Bwindi, Alex Ngabirano worked for CTPH for 15 years, before starting his own non-profit organization, Mubare Biodiversity, which focuses on reforming poachers around the park. Gorillas are rarely poached intentionally, but subsistence hunters looking to put food on the table sometimes go after pigs or antelope in the forest, and accidentally snare or spear gorillas in the process.

By educating the local community on the benefits of gorilla tourism, Ngabirano and his team have convinced more than 300 former poachers to give up their tools, and are now retraining them as rangers, guides, and farmers.

“Dr. Gladys has done amazing work in Bwindi community. She’s the first person to introduce the one health approach in this area,” says Ngabirano. “The (community) started understanding that in the future, their children will become rangers and guides, all those jobs associated with conservation and tourism activities.”

Kalema-Zikusoka’s conservation efforts have been recognized internationally, too: she is a National Geographic explorer, and her many accolades include the Whitley Gold Award in 2009, the Leopold Award in 2020, and the Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize in 2022.

And her hard work continues to show in the expanding gorilla population: in the last two months alone, three baby gorillas were born in the forest.

“I always get very excited when I hear that a baby mountain gorilla has been born,” says Kalema-Zokusoka. “It gives me hope that the numbers are continuing to grow. It means that we’re bringing the gorillas back from the brink of extinction.”

India has emerged as a growing player in the illicit fentanyl trade, a new US intelligence report says, a designation likely to raise alarm in New Delhi as President Donald Trump wields tariffs on countries he accuses of not doing enough to stop the deadly drug from flowing into the United States.

Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that can be 100 times more potent than morphine, is the most common drug involved in overdose deaths in the US – fueling an opioid crisis that has become a high-priority issue for the Trump administration.

For many years, China has been the largest source of both legal supplies of the drug – which is prescribed for severe pain relief – and illicit supplies of precursor chemicals that are typically processed in labs in Mexico before the final product is smuggled across the US border.

But India’s role in the illegal trade is becoming more prominent, according to the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment (ATA) report published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence this month.

“Nonstate groups are often enabled, both directly and indirectly, by state actors, such as China and India as sources of precursors and equipment for drug traffickers,” the report said.

“China remains the primary source country for illicit fentanyl precursor chemicals and pill pressing equipment, followed by India.”

Last year’s ATA report named India as among countries other than China where Mexican cartels were sourcing precursor chemicals to a “lesser extent.” The 2023 report made no mention of India in relation to fentanyl.

India is a global leader in generic drug manufacturing, supplying a significant portion of the world’s vaccines and medicines. It has a pharmaceutical industry so large, it is often referred to as the “Pharmacy of the World.” But the industry has been marred by controversy, raising concerns about regulation and quality control.

Days later, the US Department of Justice indicted three top executives from a Hyderabad-based pharmaceutical company for allegedly importing ingredients used to make illicit fentanyl.

The report comes at a delicate time for India as it mounts a case to avoid US tariffs.

The US was India’s largest trading partner in 2024, accounting for almost $120 billion in trade, yet India only ranked tenth in the list of US trading partners for the same year.

Indian economist and researcher Soumya Bhowmik said the ATA report “may introduce complexities in India-US relations,” and could “open the door for tougher rhetoric and potentially even targeted tariffs.”

Earlier this month, the Trump administration enacted tariffs against the US’ top three trading partners: China, Mexico and Canada, saying the levies of up to 25% were necessary to stem the flow of fentanyl into the US.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Washington in February, where he spoke with Trump about a range of issues from defense and technology to trade and economic growth.

The two leaders “resolved to expand trade and investment to make their citizens more prosperous, nations stronger, economies more innovative and supply chains more resilient,” a joint statement from that meeting said.

A Washington delegation is currently in New Delhi for trade talks.

India has “proactively undertaken measures to respond to potential trade tensions and mitigate the impact of impending US tariffs,” said Bhowmik, including a proposal to remove import duties on goods essential for manufacturing.

The ATA report also “highlights the critical importance of collaborative efforts between (the US and India) to address the global opioid crisis,” Bhowmik said.