Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this Thursday an aid of almost 14 million dollars to Ecuador to confront the violence of numerous drug trafficking gangs and designated two of them as terrorist organizations.

Rubio called the gangs “wild animals” and assured that the United States will help Ecuador to bring them down. “This administration is addressing it like never before,” he said.

He declared that the Trump administration wants to help partner governments mount violent attacks against criminal groups, following the strategy the U.S. military used this week to carry out a deadly attack on a ship in the Caribbean.

“Those governments will help us find and destroy those individuals,” he said at a news conference in Ecuador. “Perhaps they will do it themselves, and we will help them do it.”

That’s why he said the State Department would allocate an additional $13.7 million to help combat drug trafficking and other crimes, and that the agency would spend $6 million on drone equipment for Ecuador. The two countries are also negotiating the terms of a possible new extradition treaty.

In addition, the official said the State Department would designate two criminal groups operating in Ecuador, Los Lobos and Los Choneros, as foreign terrorist organizations, giving the U.S. government greater power to impose economic sanctions on individuals linked to them. He added that more groups are likely to be designated soon.

Despite the announcement, Marco Rubio assured in Quito that he does not believe that in "friendly countries" like Ecuador, military attacks like the one carried out this week on a boat allegedly transporting drugs from Venezuela will be necessary, "because they cooperate."

In the same vein, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Gabriela Sommerfeld, Rubio asserted that "in Venezuela they are involved" with drug trafficking and insisted that a grand jury and the U.S. prosecutor's office...Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has already been indicted as a “drug kingpin.”