Washington moves Reaper drones from Africa to Colombia and Ecuador

The United States has moved MQ-9 Reaper drones from Africa to Colombia and Ecuador, two US officials told the New York Times, as Washington puts aircraft that can both watch and strike onto the Andean drug war. Ecuador's defence minister, Gian Carlo Loffredo, said on Friday that two of the aircraft had been turned over for cooperation and were already flying in Ecuadorian skies.

The number sent to each country is small, the officials said, and it is not clear how many have arrived. Colombia said over the summer that it had agreed to receive three Reapers and would look at buying one more. El País, reporting from Bogotá on Wednesday, confirmed the transfer from two military sources speaking to the Times, and noted that Colombian coverage in August had already carried the figure of three aircraft plus a possible purchase. The aircraft had been stationed in Africa. Commanders quoted in the American reporting worried that Islamic State and al-Shabaab activity could rise once the drones leave.

A Reaper is not a small surveillance toy. The airframe can cost up to 50 million dollars. It stays aloft for many hours, carries cameras and radar, and can fire Hellfire missiles. The same type killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in 2020. The fleet is short. The Times reported that at least 45 Reapers, about a quarter of the American inventory, were destroyed in the Iran war. Moving even a handful from Africa to the Andes is a choice about a scarce asset, not a surplus one.

Colombia and Ecuador are among a small set of countries that have agreed to joint operations with the United States inside their own borders. Washington has designated several trafficking groups in both countries as terrorist organisations, which is the legal label the administration has used to justify military, rather than only police, cooperation. Colombia's president, Abelardo de la Espriella, has started a military push against leaders of groups tied to cocaine. The Reaper's advertised use in that terrain is tracking men who have spent years under jungle canopy and in cloud forest, where a helicopter search has a short window and a drone can loiter.

The split between watching and shooting is the part neither capital has spelled out. Loffredo said the two aircraft in Ecuador were operating. He did not say they had fired. Colombian officials have spoken of receiving aircraft and of buying one, which implies a future Colombian-owned airframe as well as American-flown ones. An American crew firing a missile inside Colombia would be a different political fact from an American crew passing coordinates to a Colombian unit. The Times account says the drones are the kind used for precision strikes. It does not say a strike has been authorised. El País noted that the primary role is surveillance and that offensive use is possible.

Africa is the cost of the move. Reapers there have been used against al-Shabaab in Somalia and against Islamic State factions in the Sahel and West Africa. Pulling them does not end those campaigns. It ends the persistent overhead picture those campaigns had. The officials who described the transfer did so on condition of anonymity, because they were not cleared to discuss an operational movement. That is why the public record is still a range: two confirmed in Ecuadorian skies by the defence minister, three discussed for Colombia, an undetermined total shifted from Africa, and a fleet already cut by about a quarter.

What to watch is not the arrival photograph. It is whether a Reaper weapon release is reported inside either country, and whether the African missions name a replacement aircraft. Until then the concrete change is Loffredo's sentence: two aircraft, already flying, over Ecuador, taken from a fleet that lost at least 45 airframes in the Iran war and that cannot be in both theatres at the old tempo.