A drone hovering over a burning Ecuadorian fishing boat hours after it was bombed belonged to a San Diego-based defense contractor with an $800 million contract with the US Navy. Investigative journalist Camila Lourdes Galarza tells Zoe Alexandra and Rania Khalek that boat was one of three unarmed fishing vessels bombed in what the Washington Post later confirmed was part of a covert CIA program to kill “suspected drug traffickers” in the Pacific – without any oversight or public acknowledgment. As Operation Southern Spear marks its first year, Galarza breaks down how Ecuadorian President and Miami-born billionaire Daniel Noboa has turned his country into a testing ground for US military expansion under Trump’s Donroe Doctrine: from former Blackwater mercenaries at polling stations, to martial law decrees shielding US troops from Ecuadorian law, to the SOUTHCOM general she says admitted the real target of all of this is Ecuador’s lithium stores and rare earth minerals. Galarza connects the boat strikes, on which she reported extensively for Drop Site News, to a much larger pattern, linking Fernando Cerimedo’s CIA and Israel ties to a US embassy plot to interfere in Colombia’s elections, to the assassination in June of Ecuadorian prosecutor Alexandra Bravo as US troops patrolled the streets. Watch full episodes of BT Live, join breakthroughnews.org as a member today!

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