US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrived in Quito in November 2004 for a biennial gathering of Western Hemisphere defense ministers, the final leg of a regional tour that had also taken him to El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama.
Haiti topped the agenda. Brazil was leading the UN stabilization mission (MINUSTAH) with 3,100 of 6,700 deployed troops, and Rumsfeld pressed counterparts from Ecuador, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Central America to sustain their contributions. Every Mercosur member state had soldiers in the mission, and Pentagon officials flagged Haiti as the most pressing regional concern.
Rumsfeld also pushed for stronger cooperation against the convergence of drugs, gangs, organized crime, and terrorism. He warned in Managua that smuggling corridors used to move people into the United States across the southern border could be exploited by terrorist networks, including Al-Qaeda-type groups. The Pentagon sought tighter coordination across each country's military, police, customs, and immigration services.
Naval cooperation in the Caribbean and around the Panama Canal was another priority, with Washington seeking to close security gaps in what officials called the third US border. Rumsfeld also solicited broader regional backing for Plan Colombia and thanked El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic for past contributions to Iraq, though El Salvador was by then the only Latin American country with forces still deployed there.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in November 2004, in its own words.