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Ecuador looks for “Egalitarian” trade agreements with the us
Posted On 25 Jan 2018
Ecuadornews:
The president of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, said today that his government aspires to reach equal agreements with the United States and without prejudice to national production, according to a statement from the Secretariat of Communication (Secom).
Moreno, who today held a conversation with journalists in the city of Santo Domingo (north), highlighted the possibility of reaching such agreements for trade, but that this must be done “with a certain sense of equality” and without prejudice to Ecuadorian producers.
The statements come shortly after it was learned that a high-level US delegation that had planned to arrive tomorrow, Thursday, to the country to analyze these issues has postponed the trip, newspaper El Comercio reported. It was the first visit of its kind in a decade and its objective is to reach a commercial pact.
In his analysis, today of relations with Washington, the Ecuadorian president considered that “the United States is a wonderful country, our main trading partner” and “the nation that welcomes around one million Ecuadorians, so our relationship It must be cordial.” And he appreciated that the previous government of Rafael Correa practiced, by distancing himself from Washington, “an exclusionary foreign relations policy, in which we do not practice what the Charter of the United Nations says, that there must be a harmonious relationship between all countries.”
In response to a question from a journalist about whether Ecuador would accept the possibility of installing a US base again in the city of Manta, province of Manabí (east), Moreno responded with humor that he would be “delighted”. “Enchanted in the moment in which the United States allows us to also put a base in Miami for us to control that the rights of migrants are not violated,” he said.
The Manta base was available to the US Air Force between 1998 and 2009, when Correa demanded its dismantling and the departure of US forces. “That is not going to happen,” Moreno added, “because we will respect the independence that the United States has to have only those forces it wishes on its soil,” and explained that the departure from the Manta base occurred because it “violated our sovereignty in some way.” (I)
