MANTA, Ecuador: The scene at the Manta Ray Café, a mess hall here at the most prominent U.S. military outpost in South America, suggests all is normal.

A television tuned to Fox Sports beams in a golf tournament.

Ecuadorean contractors serve sloppy joes near refrigerators bulging with Dr Pepper and Gatorade. Air force personnel in jumpsuits preparing to board an Awacs surveillance plane leaf through dog-eared paperbacks.

But by next year, if President Rafael Correa gets his way, this base would be gone - and with it, one of the most festering sources of controversy in Washington's long war on drugs.

To the Bush administration, the U.S. air station here is a critical component in the war on drugs in the Andes. The 180 service members based here conduct about 100 flights a month over the Pacific looking for drug boats from Colombia, the source of about 90 percent of the cocaine used in the United States.

Last year, those flights led to about 200 cocaine seizures, the air force said.

But to Ecuadoreans, Manta is a flash point in a regional debate over the limits of U.S. power in Latin America.

In 1999, U.S. officials negotiated a 10-year agreement with President Jamil Mahuad to set up the elaborate airborne radar detection project at Manta, a port city with a population of 250,000.

The deal did not require the United States to pay rent to Ecuador. Nor did it allow Americans stationed here to be judged in Ecuadorean courts for crimes committed in Ecuador. Nor was it submitted to Ecuador's Congress for approval.

Mahuad was toppled in a military coup a few weeks later.

Correa, who opposes renewing the agreement allowing the U.S. base at Manta, sees the base as compromising Ecuador's sovereignty. Many Ecuadoreans fear it could end up dragging their nation further into Colombia's long civil war, a fear that was heightened in March, when Colombian forces raided a rebel camp in Ecuadorean territory.

Particularly after the Bush administration explicitly sided with Colombia in the diplomatic crisis that erupted after the raid, critics of the United States here see little reason to keep the base.

But to Correa, the debate is personal as well as political. When he was a child in Guayaquil, his father was imprisoned in the United States for several years on smuggling charges.

He has no intent of ensnaring Ecuadoreans further in the U.S. war on drugs. He has proposed pardoning couriers with long prison sentences for smuggling small amounts of cocaine. He is also one of the most vocal proponents of creating a Latin American defense council that excludes the United States.

In a shake-up of the armed forces in April, Correa named Javier Ponce, a poet who advocates less military cooperation with United States, as defense minister. "Should Ecuador have a base in Miami? Or New Jersey?" Ponce said. "The decision of the government is not to renew this accord."

For now, operations here continue as they have for years. When asked what his mission consists of, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Leonard, the ranking U.S. officer in Ecuador, points to the blue waters of the Pacific.

The surveillance planes sitting on the tarmac at Manta are useless over Colombian soil; the jungle canopy effectively renders them blind for spotting small aircraft, Leonard said.

But over the ocean, the plane's radar sometimes happens upon speedboats, some of which transport Colombian cocaine to points north. The personnel here are the first to acknowledge that they're using a $300 million plane to track down far more primitive and cheaper vessels.

"It is a big game of cat and mouse," Leonard said. "We look for dots on a radar screen. Those dots are smuggling drugs."

None of the planes here are armed; their mission is detection.

The military says it spends $15 million a year for its operations here, although that figure excludes major expenses like fuel.

Finding another location would have been easier a decade ago, when U.S. standing in the region was higher and allies were easier to find. For now, U.S. officials are resigned to transferring Manta's operations when the agreement expires in November 2009, most likely to bases in Curaçao, a Dutch possession in the southern Caribbean, and in El Salvador.

Together, officials here said, those three bases, known in military jargon as FOLs, or forward operating locations, helped seize $1.1 billion worth of drugs in 2007, with the focus of these seizures on smuggling out of Colombia. The officials said they had no estimate of how much cocaine eluded them.

-- International Herald Tribune

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