| The U.S. military currently maintains some 900 military facilities throughout the world. At last count, more than 190,000 troops and 115,000 contractors were deployed in 46 countries. While anthropologists of the military have described the diverse and often negative effects that this neo-colonial "empire of military bases" is having on many of the communities in which bases are located, significantly less attention has been paid to the processes by which local consent for those facilities is fashioned. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork on and around the U.S. Southern Command's largest forward operating location (FOL) in the Western Hemisphere, this dissertation traces the conflicting experiences of U.S. officers, contractors, anti-FOL activists, and city residents in Manta, Ecuador, as they together struggled to make sense of the facility during its last days in the country. While the Ecuadorian government refused to re-negotiate the lease agreement for the installation, arguing that the FOL compromised their national sovereignty, the residents of Manta fought on behalf of the U.S. Air Force in their community. To better understand the emergent conception of "municipal sovereignty" upon which they relied, I explore the discursive and sociological conditions under which the FOL came to be integrated into four local economies of meaning: Variously conceptualized as a necessary part of the national military, a node in a regional security network, a beacon of state-like development assistance, or an aid to regional autonomy, the forward operating location came to be upheld by residents as the quintessential expression of their "popular sovereignty."... |
