U.S. military bases in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Key Points

* Military bases in Latin America and the Caribbean are an interlocking web that supports U.S. objectives for securing access to markets, controlling narcotics flow, and obtaining natural resources, especially oil.

* Although the United States has closed bases in Panama and Puerto Rico, it has opened an array of smaller bases throughout the region, including several that support U.S. operations in Colombia.

* Base operations and maintenance are increasingly being contracted to private companies.

The United States maintains a complex web of military facilities and functions in Latin America and the Caribbean, what the U.S. Southern Command (known as SouthCom) calls its "theater architecture." U.S. military facilities represent tangible commitments to an ineffective supply-side drug war and to underlying policy priorities, including ensuring access to strategic resources, especially oil.

Much of this web is being woven through Plan Colombia, a massive, primarily military program to eradicate coca plants and to combat armed groups (mostly leftist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). In the last five years, new U.S. bases and military access agreements have proliferated in Latin America, constituting a decentralization of the U.S. military presence in the region. This decentralization is Washington's way of maintaining a broad military foothold while accommodating regional leaders' reluctance to host large U.S. military bases or complexes.

After the U.S. military withdrawal from Panama in 1999, military troops and commands were reconcentrated in Puerto Rico, adding fuel to a nonviolent mass movement to throw the Navy out of its bombing range in Vieques, Puerto Rico. On May 1, 2003, the Navy vacated the Vieques range (though it remains in federal hands) and followed in March 2004 by closing the massive Roosevelt Roads Naval Station. Regional headquarters for the Army, Navy, and Special Forces have moved out of Puerto Rico to Texas and Florida; headquarters of SouthCom (the joint command) is located in Miami.

The Navy continues to operate an "outer range" of nearly 200,000 square miles to practice high-tech naval maneuvers, an underwater tracking range for submarines, and an electronic warfare range in waters near Vieques. The ranges are used by the Navy and by military contractors to test sophisticated ships and weapon systems. The Army also has access to a large National Guard firing range, Camp Santiago, in Salinas, Puerto Rico.

In addition, the Pentagon is investing in expanded infrastructure in the region, with four military bases in Manta, Ecuador; Aruba; Curacao; and Comalapa, El Salvador, known as "cooperative security locations," or CSLs. These CSLs are leased facilities established to conduct counternarcotics monitoring and interdiction operations. Washington has signed ten-year agreements with Ecuador, the Netherlands (for Aruba and Curacao), and El Salvador and has funded the renovation of air facilities in Ecuador, Aruba, and Curacao. SouthCom also operates some 17 radar sites, mostly in Peru and Colombia, each typically staffed by about 35 personnel.

The CSL and radar facilities monitor the skies and waters of the region and are key to increased surveillance operations in Washington's Andean drug war. "The majority of assets available to us are focused on the tactical fight in Colombia," SouthCom chief General Hill said in March 2004. Approved by the short-lived government of Ecuadorean President Jamil Mahuad in November 1999, the base in Manta hosts up to 475 U.S. personnel.

All of the above is in addition to existing bases, including a missile tracking station on Ascension Island in the Caribbean, housing up to 200 U.S. personnel, and Soto Cano in Palmerola, Honduras, which since 1984 has provided support for training and helicopter sorties. Furthermore, the United States has small military presences and property in Antigua, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and on Andros Island in the Bahamas. The U.S. military had used offices in Venezuela for more than 50 years but was evicted from the site in May 2004.

Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, which enjoys a lease with no termination date, serves as a logistics base for counterdrug operations and, increasingly, as an off-shore detention center.

The Pentagon is moving to shift much of the operation and maintenance of its military bases to private, for-profit contractors. For example, the Air Force contracted the operation of its Manta base to Dyncorp, and even "host-nation riders" who accompany military flights over Colombia are "outsourced" to a private U.S. military contractor.

In Panama, all U.S. military forces left the country, and bases were closed at the end of 1999 in accordance with the Panama Canal treaties. But the Pentagon continues to enjoy access for military flights into and out of Panama on a contract to transport cargo and passengers daily between Honduras, Panama, and dirt strips in Colombia. In June 2002 the United States signed an agreement with Costa Rica for an International Law Enforcement Academy, but popular movements have so far prevented the pact's ratification.

Bases belonging to Latin American militaries but built or used by U.S. soldiers, such as the Joint Peruvian Riverine Training Center in Iquitos, Peru, are not considered U.S. bases but often serve similar purposes. The up to 800 U.S. military and contract personnel operating at any given time in Colombia are also housed at nominally Colombian bases. The Bush administration in March 2004 announced its intention to increase the cap for such personnel to 1,400.