US military bases and anti-military organizing: an ethnography of an Air Force base in Ecuador

Abstract

The first decades of the twenty-first century in Latin America have been characterized by rapidly intensifying US-led militarization, with the US acquiring controversial rights and unprecedented access to facilities in Panama, Honduras, and Peru. US Military Bases and Anti-Military Organizing is the first book to look closely at the struggles of anti-military activists in Ecuador as they attempted to challenge what was, for just under ten years, the US Air Force's largest forward operating location in the Western hemisphere. Drawing on sixteen months of fieldwork with US military personnel, US private military contractors, and anti-military activists on and around this facility in Manta, Ecuador, Fitz-Henry reorients contemporary anthropological and political debate about US-led militarization by focusing on the neglected range of ways in which the anti-base movement came to be rejected by local residents.