Eloy Alfaro was one of Latin America's more consequential radicals. A liberal revolutionary who twice held the Ecuadorian presidency, he built the railway that climbed from Guayaquil to Quito, separated church from state, and made enemies of the same oligarchs he had fought to unseat. In January 1912, a Quito mob dragged his body through the streets and burned it in a park. Seven decades later, the Ecuadorian Air Force named a new dual-use airfield after him - civilian airport in front, military base behind, both sharing a long runway on the Pacific coast near Manta. For a man who made his name breaking through Ecuadorian isolation, an airport was an appropriate monument.

In 1999, Ecuadorian President Jamil Mahuad signed a ten-year agreement allowing the United States to station up to 475 military personnel at a corner of the airfield, rent-free. The deal created what the Pentagon called Forward Operating Location Manta, home to USAF E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft and Navy P-3 Orion patrol planes flying roughly 100 missions a month in search of drug-smuggling boats slipping north from Colombia. The numbers, by U.S. accounting, justified the arrangement: in 2007 alone, surveillance from Manta led to about 200 cocaine seizures totaling roughly 230 tons - around 60 percent of all U.S. drug interdiction in the eastern Pacific. Feeds ran from the flight line at Manta to the Joint Interagency Task Force South command in Key West, Florida.

Not everyone agreed about what the Americans were doing. By the time Rafael Correa took office in 2007, resentment at a foreign military presence had hardened into policy. Correa made clear before his election that he would not renew the lease. Then on March 19, 2008, the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly went further, voting to outlaw any foreign military base anywhere in Ecuador. Four months later, Ecuador's Foreign Ministry formally told the U.S. embassy the lease would expire in November 2009 and would not be extended. Admiral James Stavridis, head of U.S. Southern Command, admitted there was no backup plan - surveillance flights would simply redistribute to existing bases in El Salvador, Curacao, and Key West. Eventually the mission partly relocated to Palanquero Air Base in Colombia.

The final U.S. anti-narcotics flight took off from Manta on July 17, 2009. The air base continues as the Ecuadorian Air Force's Wing 23, while the civilian side operates as the fourth-busiest airport in Ecuador, serving Quito and Guayaquil on domestic routes and, since early 2023, connecting Manta to Panama City via Copa Airlines. The city itself, built around tuna fishing and tourism aimed at the Pacific beaches just outside town, has absorbed the change without much noise. The spy planes are gone. The container ships still call. The airport that carries the name of a president torn apart by political violence has become, once again, mostly a place people fly through on their way somewhere else.

Approach from the south and the runway lies parallel to the Pacific, with the blue rectangle of the harbor off to the right. Manta itself spreads inland - a city of about 260,000 known for yellowfin tuna processing and the fisherman statues on its seafront. The dry, sun-baked coastal landscape is typical of Manabi Province, where the cool Humboldt Current keeps rain mostly to winter and the vegetation stays low and scrubby. At the western edge of town, the Pacific drops off into one of the world's richest tuna grounds - the same reason the Mochica and Manteno peoples settled here two thousand years ago, long before anyone named the place for a revolutionary president.