Trump met with Ecuadorean President Noboa in Florida on Saturday

By Andrea Shalal and Alexandra Valencia

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump met with Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa in Florida on Saturday, ahead of a tight April 13 run-off election that will pit Noboa against leftist Luisa Gonzalez.

Noboa, 37, was elected in 2023 to serve out the remainder of his predecessor's term on promises to combat drug gangs that have roiled the once-placid South American country.

Trump has made combating fentanyl, responsible for some 70,000 deaths a year in the United States, a key pillar of his second term in office by imposing tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China.

Noboa posted a photograph on X of himself and his wife with Trump late on Saturday, but added no commentary about the encounter. White House officials had confirmed the meeting would take place on Friday, but gave no details.

Trump held a surprise meeting earlier in the day with Finnish President Alexander Stubb, who joined Trump at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida to discuss their countries' bilateral partnership and play a round of golf.

Noboa and his wife also attended Trump's inauguration in Washington in January.

Ecuadorean officials have told allies of Trump that they are interested in hosting a U.S. military base and have expressed interest in a bilateral free trade deal like those already in place for Colombia and Peru, Reuters reported this month.

The son of one of Ecuador's richest businessmen, Noboa has used state of emergency declarations to deploy the military on the streets and in prisons, implemented harsher sentencing and cheered the arrests of major gang leaders, actions he says reduced violent deaths by 15% last year.

Noboa has said Ecuador will not receive deported migrants of other nationalities but that it will always welcome citizens, and he criticized Venezuela's president for briefly rejecting flights of Venezuelan migrants deported from the United States.

Noboa has also announced a "strategic alliance" with Erik Prince - a prominent Trump supporter and founder of private military firm Blackwater - to take on crime and narcoterrorism in the country of 17 million.

Mark Feierstein, a former senior official in the Biden and Obama administrations, said the timing of the Ecuadoran president's meeting with Trump shortly before elections suggested both sides believed it could help Noboa.

"Trump's standing is falling in the U.S. and crashing all over the world. Ecuador is a pro-U.S. country, but this kind of intervention could give Gonzalez a little boost," he said.

Noboa has publicly argued for bringing foreign military bases to Ecuador. The Ecuadorean legislature is in the early stages of a legislative process that could eliminate a constitutional ban on such facilities instituted in 2008 with the support of former leftist President Rafael Correa.

The Biden administration had already expanded U.S. security cooperation with Ecuador after Noboa took office, including the launch of a bilateral defense working group in 2023.

Noboa ratified two military cooperation agreements with the United States in February 2024, establishing a framework for U.S. military personnel to operate in Ecuador and allowing for joint naval operations to combat drug trafficking and other illicit activities.

The U.S. government had a military base on the environmentally sensitive Galapagos Islands during World War Two and a separate base used largely to combat narcotics trafficking on the mainland until 2009. 

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Alexandra Valencia in Quito; additional reporting by Gram Slattery in Washington; editing by Diane Craft, Rod Nickel and Michael Perry)