QUITO — Ecuador's president, Daniel Noboa, pinned a decoration on Marco Rubio, the United States secretary of state, citing his role in “helping to promote peace in the region.” The ceremony took place in this capital while ten Ecuadorian fishers whose boat had been blown up by US forces were adrift in the eastern Pacific. Both governments treat the overlap as a scheduling matter, unrelated to the sea.
The sequence, as documented: on 8 September, one day before Rubio arrived, a US patrol vessel intercepted the Ecuadorian fishing boat Don Rufo in international waters near Ecuador. The vessel was subsequently blown up by US forces, and its ten crew members were left adrift in open water. The secretary of state landed the following day and proceeded to the ceremony.
An attorney for the fishers told reporters that the men were “losing their livelihoods.” Fishing, for the dominant local primate, is the practice of removing animals from the ocean and exchanging them for currency. The boat is the instrument of the exchange. Destroying the boat ends the exchange. This arithmetic is understood by every party to the transaction, including the party that performed the destruction.
“The decoration was prepared by the protocol office, and the Pacific is administered by a different undersecretariat,” said Marisol Villacrés, deputy director of ceremonial affairs at Ecuador's foreign ministry. “No conflict was identified between the two portfolios.” Asked which office monitors the fishers, Villacrés said the query had been forwarded.
The Trump administration has said it is not wavering. Rubio maintained in public remarks that the United States remained willing to “blow up ships if need be.” “Peace is a policy track, and the vessels are an operational track,” said Chase Lindqvist, a State Department spokesman for the hemisphere portfolio. “The tracks run in parallel. That is what parallel means.”
The strikes are part of a US campaign against vessels the administration says carry narcotics. The Don Rufo was not the only Ecuadorian fishing boat struck, and local coverage describes the strikes as raising humanitarian concerns. In local practice, a decoration is a stamped metal disc pinned to the chest to certify that an official has performed a designated category of behavior — in this instance, “peace.” The disc is photographed by both governments. The Pacific is not issued a disc.
The ten fishers, at last report, were still in the eastern Pacific, where no calendars operate. On Terra, peace is conferred ashore in daylight while the consequences float offshore; the ceremony is filed under diplomacy and the adrift are filed under fisheries, and the two files are never opened by the same clerk. The species regards this as coordination.
