Adam Namm, acting director of the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, has been nominated by the Obama administration as Ambassador to Ecuador.

QUITO -- The foreign minister of Ecuador, Ricardo Patino, announced on Tuesday that President Obama was naming Adam Namm to the ambassadorship of Ecuador, a contentious post that saw career diplomat Heather Hodges declared persona non grata in April after a Wikileaks cable revealed comments that she had made about endemic corruption in the government of socialist president Rafael Correa. 

The Ecuador ambassadorial post has proven to be one of the more controversial in the hemisphere, due to the downturn in diplomatic relations since Correa took office in January of 2007. In February of 2009, Correa expelled two other US diplomats, Mark Sullivan and Armando Astorga, after accusing them of meddling in the country's internal affairs. Correa also said that Sullivan was the CIA chief in Ecuador.

In May, regional director of the Drug Enforcement Administration Jay Bergman, called Ecuador a "United Nations of organized crime," and told Reuters that  the country had become a trafficking hub for cocaine trafficking from Peru and Colombia, noting, "We have cases of Albanian, Ukrainian, Italian, Chinese organised crime all in Ecuador, all getting their product for distribution to their respective countries."

Correa, a U.S.-educated economist, has become a steadfast partner of Hugo Chavez and has welcomed despotic regimes such as Iran into the country while ordering the U.S. military base at Manta to be shut down. Iranian vice president Mohammad Reza Rahimi is scheduled to visit Correa this week after first traveling to Cuba. Iran recently announced that it will open a "medical center" of the Red Crescent in Ecuador, the Muslim world's equivalent of the Red Cross.

Patino announced earlier in the week that Ecuador and the U.S. would restore diplomatic relations, and announced that Nathalie Cely, who is currently serving as Ecuador's minister of Coordination of Production, Employment and Competitiveness, had been named as Ecuador's new ambassador to the U.S.

The nomination of Adam Namm to the important ambassadorial post could prove controversial. Though Namm is a "career member of the U.S. Senior Foreign Service," he has not served in an ambassadorial position before, which is a rarity for what has been such a controversial post.

Namm is currently the acting director of the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, and served in the past as a management counselor in Pakistan, a human resources officer in Colombia, and as a general services officer in Dhahran and Santo Domingo, as well as a consular officer in Bogota and Santo Domingo. His nomination will require approval in the Senate.