Friday January 12
By Amy Taxin
QUITO, Ecuador (Reuters) - Colombian rebels and right-wing paramilitary forces battled outside a small town in Ecuador's Amazon jungle, the first clash between the two in Ecuadorean territory, the country's defense ministry sources said on Friday.
The incident heightens fears that Colombia's 40-year-old conflict is spilling across the border. It also left two Colombians dead, but Ecuador's military did not say which side they were on.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and paramilitary fighters clashed at 2:15 p.m. on Thursday, the military high command said in a statement.
Ecuadorean troops were not involved in the clash, according to the military high command, which declined to provide details beyond a two-paragraph statement. Neither Ecuadorean government officials, nor Colombia's embassy in Quito would comment on the statement.
The fighting occurred one day after Ecuadorean officers discovered an abandoned guerilla camp about five miles over the border from Colombia, with a hut, trenches, military uniforms and backpacks, that several local officials said belonged to the FARC, Colombia's biggest rebel group.
Ecuador's armed forces also discovered and destroyed a FARC-owned factory that was manufacturing military uniforms and equipment, an Ecuadorean military source told Reuters.
There are widespread fears that Colombia's U.S.-backed plan to combat drug trafficking may push rebels and paramilitary groups, believed to finance their activities through the narcotics trade, across the roughly 370-mile-long border.
Some local officials have accused Ecuador's government of pushing the country into Colombia's internal conflict — which involves security forces, rebels, paramilitary groups and drug traffickers — by allowing U.S. drug surveillance planes to use a coastal air force base in the city of Manta.
Colombia's other neighbors, Venezuela, Peru and Panama have all expressed concern about spillover from “Plan Colombia,” an effort to battle drug trafficking and violence. The plan is supported by $1.3 billion in U.S. aid.
According to political analyst Patricio Falconi, the close economic ties between Ecuadoreans living along the border and Colombian guerilla members who travel through the region make events of this kind inevitable.
“Plan Colombia is not the cause of this problem. Plan Colombia is more like a medicine, applied to a problem that has existed for a long time. The medicine could be good, regular, bad or worse than the sickness, but the problem existed before,” he told Reuters.
In October, Ecuador's government accused the FARC, which controls a Switzerland-sized territory in southern Colombia, of kidnapping 10 foreign oil workers from Ecuador's Amazon jungle region. The FARC denied responsibility.
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