ECUADOR FEARS U.S. FOOTHOLD AT BORDER

People Afraid Of Being Dragged Into Drug War

MANTA, Ecuador -- U.S. airmen armed with M16 assault rifles keep a close
watch on U.S. Navy spy planes parked on a runway at an airfield on the
outskirts of the port of Manta.

The Ecuadorean air base has become the new hub of U.S. surveillance flights
over the vast cocaine-producing areas of South America, and the U.S.
military guards have reason to be vigilant.

The drug-fueled violence that Ecuadoreans long feared would spill over the
Colombian border has arrived -- intensifying a debate over giving the
United States a foothold close to the troubled frontier.

Many Ecuadoreans worry that their country is being set up as a staging
ground for U.S. intervention in Colombia and could be sucked into a
regional conflict.

"We support the base being used to fight drug trafficking," Antonio Posso,
an influential congressman, said in Quito, the capital. "But the base
apparently is being used also to put together an operation to fight
Colombia's guerrillas, which involves us in a conflict that is not Ecuador's."

The United States is spending $62 million to expand and improve the Manta
runway and facilities. The number of U.S. service personnel assigned to
Manta, now 125, will reach 400 after construction work is completed in October.

At that point, giant U.S. AWACS surveillance planes and tankers to refuel
them will replace the smaller Navy aircraft, allowing the United States to
monitor air and marine activity far into the Caribbean. That will allow
full resumption of U.S. drug surveillance flights, which were cut by
two-thirds when U.S. forces evacuated Howard Air Force Base in Panama in 1999.

The United States maintains the Manta base is being used only as an
observation post.

But the anxiety level in the country has risen as Colombia's violence has
begun to affect Ecuador.

In a recent attack in a coastal village on the Colombian border, Palma
Real, Colombian drug traffickers abducted and killed a village official and
six of his relatives -- including his 14-year-old daughter, and friends.
They disfigured their victims' faces with acid and slit open their abdomens.

The motive? The official had confiscated 200 kilos of cocaine the
Colombians had tried to smuggle through Ecuador.