Pubdate: Sun, 13 Aug 2000
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2000 The Baltimore Sun, a Times Mirror Newspaper.
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Author: Jay Hancock

U.S. STEPS UP DRUG WAR, AND ECUADOR QUAKES

Officials Fear Influx Of Drugs, Refugees As Aid To Colombia Increases

WASHINGTON - Throughout two decades of revolt, murder and drug production 
along the Andean spine, Ecuador has remained a surprising haven of peace 
and relative order.

Its indigenous tribes are as poor and disenfranchised as those of its 
neighbors. Its high yunga valleys are just as friendly to the coca shrub 
that produces cocaine. Its government is as precarious and prone to 
corruption. But somehow Ecuador has avoided the coups, insurgencies and 
extensive cocaine production that have racked Colombia, Bolivia and Peru.

But the Ecuadorean government, U.S. officials and Latin American 
specialists fear that a multibillion-dollar, Washington-backed plan to root 
out drug production in Colombia could destabilize Ecuador and possibly set 
it up as the next major narcotics source in South America.

"Ecuador justifies the most concern and demands the most attention" of all 
countries bordering Colombia, said Michael Shifter, a democracy specialist 
at Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank focused on Latin 
America. "Ecuadoreans are deeply concerned about the prospect of growing 
violence and refugee flows from Colombia."

Shifter noted that Ecuador would face threats from Colombian turmoil even 
without the coming anti-drug initiative, called Plan Colombia. But U.S. 
officials and Ecuadoreans believe that Plan Colombia raises the risks of 
disruption for Quito, although they disagree on the degree of threat.

U.S. intelligence reports confirm local accounts of recent incursions into 
Ecuador by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the rebel group that 
finances itself by extorting money from the coca industry. The guerrillas 
evade border security, store weapons and exact taxes on local oil wells, 
according to humanitarian groups and Ecuadorean officials.

Three weeks ago, Colombian Economics Minister Augusto Ramirez Ocampo said 
coca cultivation was spreading into Ecuador and that Ecuadorean factories 
were supplying the dynamite used in FARC terror attacks. Colombian refugees 
have also been passing into Ecuador, according to United Nations officials, 
although the officials dispute accounts putting the number as high as 5,000.

Governments and agencies have mobilized to reduce the threat to Ecuador, 
but independent Andean experts are skeptical that the measures will be 
sufficient.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has opened an office in Colombia's 
Putumayo province in case of population displacement.

Ecuador intends to create a special military unit to guard its border. A 
month ago, the government announced plans to designate the border an 
emergency zone before reversing course, deciding that an emergency decree 
might create panic.

Much of the recent instability and precautionary measures along the border 
stem from Congress' approval last month of $1.3 billion in extra U.S. aid 
to battle Colombian drug production.

On top of the $300 million annually that Washington already gives Bogota, 
the money will put deadly teeth into Colombia's drug war by bolstering 
military training and providing 60 armed helicopters. As evidence of 
Washington's concern for spillover effects, the appropriation contains $20 
million for Ecuadorean crop substitution and military development.

Colombia has promised to devote $4 billion to Plan Colombia.

The initiative will hatch in coming months, when a powerful force of 
Blackhawk and Huey helicopters, fumigation planes and jungle patrols will 
descend on the lush Putumayo region. The force, staffed by Colombians and 
trained by several hundred Americans, will poison coca fields, fight 
guerrillas protecting the farms and try to persuade peasants to switch crops.

U.S. and Colombian officials hope the offensive will cut cocaine shipments 
to the United States, stanch the flow of revenue to local revolutionaries 
and reduce the lawlessness and violence that have convulsed Colombian society.

But many in Washington and Quito worry about side effects.

They fear that an established pattern is about to repeat itself, that the 
coca lords will evade the latest crackdown by slipping across a border and 
spread havoc to a country that lacks the means to fight them.

It happened in Colombia, when anti-drug efforts in Bolivia and Peru led 
directly to a sharp rise in Colombian cocaine production and to the 
heightened anarchy that grips much of that nation. That might happen in 
Ecuador.

Besides worrying about the foreign political consequences of spreading drug 
production, U.S. officials are concerned about the $1.3 billion American 
investment. Transplantation of Colombian cocaine sources into Ecuador or 
elsewhere would undercut U.S. eradication efforts and refill the narcotics 
pipeline to American cities.

By many accounts, Ecuador is in the greatest danger of such a transfer.

"Ecuadoreans are worried, and they have good reason to be," said Donald 
Schulz, a Latin American security specialist at Cleveland State University 
in Ohio, who has testified before Congress on the threat posed to 
Colombia's neighbors by escalated drug fighting.

"You already have a spillover, and I think it's going to be accelerated. I 
don't think this has adequately been accounted for by the folks who put 
together Plan Colombia, including the United States."

With Peru and Bolivia continuing to pressure drug growers and Brazil 
providing mediocre conditions for coca, the road to Ecuador could be the 
line of least resistance for Colombian cocaine producers.

Crippled by a deep recession, Colorado-sized Ecuador lacks the funds and, 
many believe, the political stability to mount a stiff defense of its 
border. Its indigenous tribes are starting to assert themselves 
politically, incited, Ecuadorean officials believe, by Colombian FARC 
guerrillas.

Ecuador has operated as a democracy since the 1970s and is listed by travel 
guides as one of the safest countries in South America for Americans. But 
in January, Indians joined the Ecuadorean military in mounting a briefly 
successful coup before the military yielded authority to Gustavo Noboa, who 
had been vice president.

While U.S. officials acknowledged the threat posed to Ecuador, they argued 
that it has been exaggerated by some, particularly the Ecuadorean press.

"Certainly we are not walking into this with rose-colored glasses," said 
the Clinton administration official. "We know there is the potential for a 
number of problems. But we are trying to help the Colombians and the 
Ecuadoreans, if the problems occur, to confront them."

Pressure on Putumayo coca growers and any resulting spillover will be 
gradual, the official said, because the Colombian back country is vast and 
the eradication force, despite its multibillion-dollar price tag, is 
limited in comparison.

Plan Colombia "is going to be real, but it's going to be slow and gradual," 
he said. "This isn't like the German army meeting Russia in 1941."

According to U.S. sources, a U.N. official told Ecuador to prepare for an 
influx of up to 30,000 refugees once Plan Colombia begins. The prediction 
was widely quoted in the Ecuadorean media, but U.N. officials are 
disavowing it.

"This number of 30,000 people ... is totally over the top and is not from 
us," said Panos Moumtzis, spokesman in the Washington office of UNHCR. 
Refugee flows into Ecuador in recent months have been "insigificant," he 
said, disputing a report by Spanish news agency EFE last month that said 
Ecuadorean religious officials were estimating that 5,000 Colombians had 
fled to Ecuador this year.

Even so, UNHCR is concerned about the potential for population disruption. 
Along with its recently opened Putumayo office, the agency has drawn up a 
confidential contingency plan for dealing with the humanitarian effects of 
the offensive, Moumtzis said.

The most pessimistic analogy for Ecuador is to Cambodia, where secret U.S. 
attacks on Vietnamese insurgents in the 1970s preceded a government 
collapse and mass murder on a horrific scale.

Colombia's leftist FARC guerrillas are inextricably tied to the cocaine 
trade. As Plan Colombia steps up the pressure, FARC will "strategically or 
tactically withdraw into Ecuador, and the [Colombian] army will go looking 
for guerrillas," argued Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric 
Affairs in Washington. "You're going to witness a secret war there, a la 
Indochina."
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens