ECUADOR BRACES FOR MORE VIOLENCE FROM COLOMBIA

LAGO AGRIO, ECUADOR -- Every country bordering Colombia fears that as the
conflict there worsens and U.S. involvement grows, violence and coca
cultivation will spill across the frontier into their territory. But in the
dingy Amazon border town of Lago Agrio, that dreaded scenario has already
become a reality.

Hardly a day goes by now without right-wing paramilitary fighters and
leftist guerrillas, ostensibly in the town on leave, killing each other on
the streets or in bars.

Refugees fleeing the intensifying combat in southern Colombia are also
showing up and, as if in anticipation of the Washington-backed anti-drug
offensive the Colombian government is to begin soon, affluent Colombians
with no ties to the area are suddenly buying up land and stocking up on
chemicals used to process cocaine.

Of all of Colombia's neighbors, Ecuador is perhaps the most vulnerable,
least prepared and worst equipped to deal with such developments.

Five presidents in five years are the best indication of the political
instability in the Andean nation of 12.5 million, whose situation is
further complicated by dire poverty, the highest inflation in the Western
Hemisphere and a military better known for meddling in politics than valor
in combat.

"If Colombia is going to be another Vietnam, as everyone keeps saying, then
Ecuador is going to become the Cambodia of this war," Maximo Abad
Jaramillo, the mayor of Lago Agrio, warned. "We are not ready for this war,
we don't want to be a part of it, but we are being dragged into the
conflict against our will."

In December alone, the local police say, 20 people were killed in Lago
Agrio -- 15 of them in clashes among Colombians and five who died when a
bomb exploded in an attack on an oil pipeline that runs from Lago Agrio to
the Pacific and is the main source of Ecuador's export earnings.

In the most spectacular of the slayings, a Colombian paramilitary trooper
was shot dead in front of police headquarters by two men on a motorcycle.

Almost since its founding, Lago Agrio has been a service center for the oil
industry, whose employees have flocked to the bars, discotheques, pool
halls, karaoke parlors, cabarets and brothels that have proliferated there.

But those are now filled not with roustabouts but with wary young men whose
Colombian accents, lean bodies, close-cropped hair and expensive
military-style boots suggest that they are fighters on furlough.

Lago Agrio, whose name means sour lake in Spanish, also boasts an unusual
number of medical clinics and doctors' and dentists' offices for a town
with only 25,000 residents. Combatants from both sides are often brought
there from Colombia for treatment, along with coca plantation workers who
have been made ill by the noxious chemicals used to process their crop into
cocaine.

In an effort to minimize conflicts between guerrillas from the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and paramilitary fighters,
some of the brothels and various other establishments catering to
guerrillas are marked with the image of Che Guevara superimposed on a red star.

But residents say conditions have deteriorated sharply as a result of Plan
Colombia, the anti-drug campaign devised by Colombia and the United States.

"With all the violence, threats and even kidnappings, our situation has
become really grave in the past four or five months," said Amparo de
Cordova, president of Fuerzas Vivas, a coalition of neighborhood and
professional groups. "The Colombians have always brought their quarrels
over here with them, but now their violence is political and subversive,
and our authorities seem powerless to stop it."

Buying up land

Taking advantage of the growing tensions, Colombians from outside the
border zone are buying up ranches and farms in the area from Ecuadoreans
who fear the worst and are anxious to leave.

In some instances, the outsiders offer to pay above the market value for
properties, but in other cases, recently displaced landowners say, they
have not hesitated to threaten violence to gain control of especially
desirable pieces of property.

"I just hope to God that they aren't planning on growing coca on those
farms as a substitute for the plantations that are going to be fumigated
over on the other side," said Fernando Lucas, president of the local
chamber of commerce. "Because the moment that happens, we are going to have
a real disaster on our hands here."

The United States authorized $1.3 billion in emergency aid last year to
strengthen Colombia's ability to fight drug trafficking.

Anticipating some spillover from Colombia to Ecuador, the United States has
designated $40 million for expenditure there in the next two years, mostly
for "social infrastructure" projects, according to the U.S. Embassy in
Quito. Ecuador's foreign minister, Heinz Moeller, recently visited
Washington to plead for an aid package that could total $300 million.

Unlike Venezuela and Brazil, the Ecuadorean government has closely aligned
itself with the anti-drug offensive through such measures as setting up a
U.S. surveillance base in the coastal city of Manta, which FARC leaders
have said they consider "a declaration of war."

But Ecuador's own security forces appear eager to avoid conflict and
largely unable to defend themselves.