COLOMBIA'S WAR ON DRUGS HITS ECUADOR

Border Town Has Safety, Income Fears

Nueva Loja, Ecuador --- Dr. Galo Gonzalez knows this border town has
long profited from the guerrillas and coca farmers in neighboring
Colombia, selling them food, beer, sex, medical care and chemicals to
make cocaine.

Thousands of local peasants also have profited, earning four times
their normal day wages in the coca fields of Colombia's adjoining
Putumayo province, which produces nearly half the cocaine sold on U.S.
streets.

"But now this Plan Colombia is making us suffer," Gonzalez said of the
Bogota government's counter-narcotics offensive, backed by $1.3
billion in mostly military U.S. aid, scheduled to be launched in
Putumayo next month.

Even before it has started, however, the Colombian government's plan
to strike at coca plantations and the guerrillas who tax and protect
them has begun to spill over into this Ecuadoran border region.

Commerce here is down 70 percent because of a ban on all road traffic
in Putumayo imposed since Sept. 28 by the leftist Armed Revolutionary
Forces of Colombia, FARC in Spanish, to force Bogota to call off Plan
Colombia.

Some 1,100 Putumayo farmers have fled to Nueva Loja amid battles and
executions between FARC rebels and army troops and right-wing
paramilitary units trying to dislodge the estimated 2,000 guerrillas.

"We have no food, no work, just stress and combat all around," said
Angela Bustamante, 35, from the village of La Hormiga, 13 miles to the
north, as she crossed the bridge into Ecuador last week for "a rest"
in Nueva Loja.

"There is no law over there," said Ecuadoran police Sgt. Julio
Rosales, inspecting traffic on the bridge, where no Colombian troops
have been seen for weeks. "Over there, the law is whoever can shoot
the best."

Plan Colombia has raised fears of a spillover of violence among all of
Colombia's neighbors. Brazil, Peru and Panama have reinforced army and
police units on their borders, and Venezuela has compared the U.S.
role to Vietnam.

But it is Ecuador that is most vulnerable, a poor and politically
unstable nation of 12 million people, with its steamy Amazon province
of Sucumbios bordering FARC and coca-growing enclaves in western Putumayo.

"We worry the violence will come here," said Maximo Abad, mayor of the
Sucumbios capital of Nueva Loja, 23 miles from the border, a town of
25,000 people with some 2,000 houses, 12 paved streets and five stop
lights.

Ecuador rushed 4,000 troops to the border this summer, including three
regular army battalions, a regiment trained in jungle warfare, a
special forces unit and a fleet of transport and attack
helicopters.

President Gustavo Noboa also asked Washington to finance half of a
$400 million plan to step up security, social services and economic
development along the border and "inoculate us against the Colombian
virus."

Ecuador has received $16 million in U.S. military aid since 1997 and
is to receive $20 million from the $1.3 billion U.S. package.

But officials say they need far more to buy trucks, boats and
helicopters needed to properly patrol the jungled and porous border.

Guerrillas 'no trouble'

FARC guerrillas have long used Nueva Loja as a rear guard, arriving
unarmed and in civilian clothes to buy supplies, relax, drink beer and
rent the $3 prostitutes in the town's two dozen brothels.

A 5-foot painting of Cuban revolutionary hero Che Guevara beckons
clients to the La Pantera bar. Most of its patrons are believed to be
FARC.

Nueva Loja is also a key weapons smuggling route for the FARC, with
police seizing 1,500 boxes of ammunition for assault rifles one week
this month and a truckload of rocket-propelled grenades and explosives
on Sept. 28.

"Most of the time they are here to relax and do business. They are not
offensive, no trouble," said Gonzalez, head of the town's medical
association and owner of its top private clinic.

Gonzalez said four or five wounded rebels also arrive per week for
medical treatment. His own clinic has no doubt treated several,
Gonzalez added, "but no one wants to know who they are."

"When there's combat on the other side, we get 10-15 at a time, but
normally we get a few here and there, mostly the poor ones who can't
afford a private clinic," said Dr. Edgar Reynoso, a surgeon at the
public hospital.

Ecuadorans say FARC rebels occasionally have gone beyond such passive
pursuits in the past year, killing six local men who allegedly cheated
them in business deals and two suspected of being paramilitary
sympathizers.

Colombia's paramilitaries have a similar but smaller presence in Nueva
Loja, keeping an eye on their FARC enemies and, according to
residents, recently killing two local men suspected of smuggling
weapons to the FARC.

Coca farmers also come to buy the equipment and chemicals needed to
cultivate their fields and turn leaves into coca paste ---
fertilizers, insecticides, gasoline-powered grass trimmers, cement and
sulphuric acid.

"On our side cement is a lot more expensive because the army controls
the sales," said Jesus Mosquera, who cultivates 15 acres of coca
bushes near the village of Venado, 10 miles north of the border, as he
waited for a delivery of cement on the San Miguel bridge.

Salaries for coca leaf pickers in Putumayo are also four to six times
higher than a farm worker's wage of $1 a day in Ecuador, luring an
estimated 4,000 Sucumbios peasants to the other side every year.

But the disruptions of cross-border commerce and the possible return
of farmhands are the least of the concerns wracking officials in
Quito, the nation's capital 150 miles to the southwest.

"We are worried about a flood of refugees, a shift of coca growing to
Ecuador, armed guerrillas crossing the border and somewhat less so
about local subversion," said Deputy Foreign Minister Gonzalo Salvador
Holguin.

Although U.N. officials predict that up to 30,000 Colombians could
flee to Ecuador once Plan Colombia begins, officials in Quito say they
have counted only 2,000 so far, most of whom returned to Colombia
quickly through more peaceful border crossings to the west.

Catholic church officials say some 1,100 displaced Colombians are
living with relatives or friends in Nueva Loja, but only 42 have
officially asked for refugee status and moved into a Nueva Loja day
care center.

"We can't go back because both sides say that if you left it's because
you did something wrong, and they'll kill you," said Roberto Rosero,
45, who fled La Hormiga last month with his wife, six children and two
grandchildren.

They ran because FARC rebels set up a mess hall in a school next to
his house, Rosero said, and paramilitaries were approaching. "We left
a step ahead of the bullets and took nothing, not even the chickens,"
he said.

Colombian and U.S. officials say the fear of coca growers moving into
Ecuador under pressure from Plan Colombia is not well founded, even
though Sucumbios has the same Amazonic soil and climate as Putumayo.

Ecuador has long been a key transit point for refined Colombian
cocaine, but police say they have never seen coca fields here and only
a few huts used to turn leaves into raw coca paste, along the San
Miguel river.

"Why move to a new country, when growers can just go to other parts of
Colombia, where the industry is well established and they can pay a
powerful FARC to protect them," said a U.S. military official in the
region.

More worrisome to security officials here is the prospect of FARC
efforts to create leftist guerrilla movements in Ecuador that could
support FARC units along the border or attack targets inside this country.

FARC officials and Marxist Ecuadoran groups have already condemned the
Quito government's decision to allow unarmed U.S. counter-drug
surveillance planes to operate out of an airport in the Pacific port
of Manta.

"Manta will be used to attack Colombian guerrillas and peasants
acts of war that we cannot allow," said Luis Villacis, head of the
leftist Popular Front, which has filed suit to block the 10-year lease
agreement.

Nueva Loja Bishop Gonzalo Lopez dismissed the concerns over
subversion. "This damned Plan Colombia is a plan for the annihilation
of poor Colombian peasants," he said. "But Ecuadorans are by nature
pacifists, I would say even passive."

FARC, leftist connection

National Police officials nevertheless say they already have some
inconclusive evidence of links between the FARC and leftists in this
country, where the last known guerrilla group faded away in the early
1980s.

Army troops found signs of a possible FARC effort to establish an
Ecuadoran branch in May after raiding a jungle camp near the village
of Cononanca, 60 miles east of Nueva Loja and 20 miles from the
Colombia border.

The soldiers killed two Ecuadorans and captured five others who
confessed to being members of a FARC spin-off called the Armed
Revolutionary Forces of Ecuador, FARE in Spanish and close to FARC,
police said.

Dozens of graffiti signed by FARE and the Communist Party of Ecuador
have been spray painted on walls all around Nueva Loja, saying "The
Revolution Advances" and "Death to Plan Colombia."

U.S. government and private security experts doubt that the FARC would
want to damage its cross-border relations with places like Nueva Loja
by supporting Ecuadoran subversive groups.

More likely, they say, common criminals are using names like FARE to
mislead police in cases such as the kidnappings of 10 foreign oil
workers last month, including five Americans, in eastern Sucumbios.

Two Frenchmen escaped later, and ransom negotiations are reported
going on for the others.

"We think they are looking more for lucrative kidnap targets than
really trying to influence events inside Ecuador," said Mike Ackerman,
head of the Ackerman Group, a Miami security consulting firm.