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Transnational Thursday for January 25, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Ecuador

The war between the cartels and the government rages on. The Noboa Administration has now declared that they have arrested El Gringo, Carlos Arturo Landázuri Cortés, the leader of Oliver Sinisterra, a breakoff group of the Colombian FARC which is itself also involved in cocaine trafficking. He will be extradited to Colombia where it’ll be interesting to see how things go, given that President Petro is currently attempting to negotiate a peace deal with another FARC offshoot, FARC-EMC, and actually just extended their current ceasefire until July.

Noboa has also requested debt refinancing from the US and the EU and his Economy Minister will be having talks with American / European economic officials soon about the same. The US is likely willing and is currently sending officials to discuss more security cooperation. Noboa is also talking about extending a controversial gas drilling operation with was decisively rejected in a referendum, I think I actually covered it in the first ever TT post, before we had a name for it.

CNN has a few good videos and some coverage of the current crisis in Ecuador, probably more than other English language outlets.

Thanks, I'll check those out.