Pubdate: Sun, 01 Oct 2000
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Section: Front Page
Copyright: 2000 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  1150 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20071
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Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Author: Anthony Faiola, Washington Post Foreign Service

COLOMBIA'S CREEPING WAR

Guerrillas and drug traffickers from Colombia have long crossed into 
Ecuador's frontier jungle for time off and to buy guns or drug-processing 
chemicals. But as the Colombian government, backed by a $1.3 billion U.S. 
aid package, prepares an offensive against the traffickers and their 
allies, Colombia's civil war is seeping into neighboring countries, and 
things here have suddenly taken a violent turn.

This remote area now lives by the law of the gun. Residents say about 15 
armed Colombians took over three farmhouses in August. Pushed across the 
border by escalating clashes among guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary 
forces and the Colombian army, the newcomers drove Ecuadoran farmers from 
their land, threatening them with "revenge, Colombian-style" if they 
refused to get out of the way.

Ecuadoran soldiers have uncovered and destroyed four small 
cocaine-processing labs on this side of the border in the past six months. 
Fighters from Colombia's right-wing militia groups have been arrested here 
for running extortion rings. Colombia's largest rebel group, the 
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), crosses the porous border 
with increasing impunity. Another rebel group, the National Liberation 
Army, has also increased activity on the Ecuadoran side, where one woman 
was arrested recently after she was found with documents linking her to the 
group, local police officials said.

"We've always had problems in these parts, but never like this," said Galo 
Murillo, a soft-spoken 37-year old coffee grower who called a town meeting 
to discuss the swelling tide of violence in this poor village 150 miles 
east of Quito, four miles from the border and half an hour by car from the 
nearest military checkpoint.

On the road that leads here, police say, the FARC ambushed three Ecuadoran 
merchants in August in a business dispute, then stripped and buried their 
tractor-trailer truck after killing them. The truck's unearthed skeleton 
lies in front of the police station in the nearby provincial capital, Lago 
Agrio, a stark reminder of how Colombia's four-decade guerrilla war is 
reaching into neighboring countries.

"This is not our war, but it is now here, and we are helpless against it," 
said Murillo, a father of two. "We've always been a peaceful people in 
Ecuador. We don't know what to do."

As the United States has pushed the Colombian government's Plan Colombia as 
essential to the war on drugs, Latin American countries have criticized its 
potential for making Colombia's conflict regional. In Venezuela, the United 
Nations estimates that more than 500 Colombians are seeking refuge from 
violence in their homeland, while Panamanian authorities last month 
uncovered a smuggling ring channeling arms to the FARC. In Brazil, the 
armed forces last week launched Operation Cobra, a $10 million campaign to 
reinforce the border with Colombia.

As the poorest of Colombia's neighbors and the one with the fewest 
resources to protect its borders, Ecuador is perhaps the most vulnerable to 
the conflict's spread. And here along the northeastern border, the 
spillover has become a reality.

In Lago Agrio, local authorities reported an alarming increase in 
kidnappings and extortion that they blame largely on dissident factions or 
deserters from Colombian guerrilla and paramilitary units. And officials 
fear more trouble because Ecuador has agreed to let the United States set 
up a new drug surveillance operation at a base in the port city of Manta, 
an act FARC leaders have described as a "declaration of war."

Two new leftist youth groups--including one called the FARE, or 
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Ecuador, an echo of Colombia's FARC--have 
launched propaganda campaigns in northern Ecuador against Plan Colombia. 
Meanwhile, five camps for up to 5,000 refugees are being planned near the 
600-mile-long border. Officials said refugees could be a serious burden in 
this economically troubled country of 12 million, while some fear the 
encampments could be used as rear bases for guerrillas.

The alert in Ecuador has sparked criticism of the way the Clinton 
administration has handled the logistics of Plan Colombia. "We have 
target-lock in Washington on Colombia, thinking we can solve the problem 
simply by throwing money at Bogota," said one U.S. government source 
familiar with the region. "But we are ignoring the fact that this needs to 
be solved in a regional context. Countries like Ecuador can't afford to 
handle this war that is already in their back yards."

As part of Plan Colombia, Ecuador is to receive $20 million, but anxious 
officials here contend that is not enough. They are calling for assistance 
for economic development along the border, where many of the largest cities 
have elected Marxist mayors who support the philosophy, if not the tactics, 
of the FARC.

The mayors of the four largest cities in the region are demanding a neutral 
zone to prevent a military buildup. The reasons are not only ideological, 
but also financial. In some border cities, as much as 80 percent of the 
commerce is based on dealings with the FARC, Colombian paramilitary groups 
and drug traffickers, business leaders say.

"There is not only an economic and political, but an ideological 
infiltration of the border," Foreign Minister Heinz Moeller said. "We 
simply don't have the means to cover it completely. We are doing the best 
with what we have, but we know it is not enough."

In the past three months, Ecuador's military has deployed more troops to 
the border, but it is still easy to cross. The back-and-forth has turned 
Lago Agrio, a seedy frontier town of 25,000, into the Casablanca of the 
Colombian conflict--a watering hole for the FARC, whose members walk freely 
in civilian clothing alongside their paramilitary enemies, Colombian drug 
runners, government informants and Ecuadoran police and soldiers.

On the city's steamy streets, the facades of two brothels sport large 
painted faces of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Argentine-born icon of Fidel 
Castro's Cuban revolution, as welcome signs for their guerrilla clients 
from Colombia.

Inside the Panther, a grimy house of prostitution, beefy Colombian men with 
the trademark flattop haircuts of the FARC and crew cuts of the 
paramilitaries sit on opposite sides of the room, drinking beer and paying 
$2 to have sex with Ecuadoran women.

"You can tell the Colombian jungle fighters from their boots," said one 
police official in the club. "They are thick, black and more expensive than 
any Ecuadoran in these parts could afford. . . . And they can also afford a 
lot more beer."

Late at night, when gunshots can be heard around town, the other hot sound 
is Colombian corridos prohibidos--or "forbidden rhythms"--a sort of Latin 
American country music about narco-guerrilla life. In one bar on Colombia 
Avenue, a deejay plays a tribute to fallen Colombian drug kingpin Pablo 
Escobar. As the song plays, a burly Colombian man struts in wearing a large 
bandanna embroidered with the words "I am a cocaine producer and Colombia 
is my fatherland" in Spanish.

The FARC and members of the paramilitary groups also come here for medical 
treatment, as do workers from Colombian coca plantations. "They come in 
with hands as big as boxers' gloves from working with the 
cocaine-processing chemicals," said Medardo Sanchez, a local surgeon who 
said exposure to the chemicals causes workers' hands to swell. "I just fix 
them up. They haven't usually come to make trouble. They don't show their 
guns in public. This is their supermarket; they like to keep things clean 
here."

There has been an uneasy truce between the Colombians--the paramilitaries 
and the rebels--and Ecuadoran authorities, largely because of border 
commerce, but also because the FARC does not appear to be looking for a 
two-front war. Also, the Ecuadoran military is not interested in, nor 
equipped for, a fight with the better-armed guerrillas. Ecuador's main oil 
pipeline--its largest source of foreign revenue--is an easy target, being 
just a 20-minute drive from the border.

In any case, serious action against the FARC would be highly unpopular 
among local left-leaning people. "I don't condone violence, but I must 
understand fighting for justice and freedom," said Maximo Abad, Lago 
Agrio's popular mayor, adding that the FARC's "message is universal, and it 
resonates here and elsewhere."

In the past, guerrillas crossed the border to "help out"--lynching 
Colombian bandits they had driven into Ecuador and sometimes even dropping 
off suspects at police stations. But recently, local police say, 
Colombians--including common thugs as well as men and women with direct 
links to the guerrillas and paramilitary militias--are infecting this area 
with their quarrels.

In one failed extortion attempt in August, Jorge Washington Cox Carvajal, 
owner of a surveying company, was held briefly at gunpoint in his Lago 
Agrio home by Colombian militia members. Two of the suspects later caught 
by police had expired Colombian military IDs, and police records show they 
admitted to being members of a paramilitary group. They said they had come 
into Ecuador to shake down Cox because they believed he was helping the 
FARC. Police said two of their accomplices who escaped were killed by the 
FARC in Lago Agrio soon afterward.

"We are living in the middle of the everybody else's war--the U.S., the 
Colombian military, the guerrillas, the paramilitaries," said Lt. Col. 
Geraldo Zapata, chief of the Lago Agrio police. "All we're doing is trying 
to keep out of it."
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