ECUADOR FEELS FALLOUT FROM COLOMBIA'S NARCOTICS WAR

Border region suffers economic downturn

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
controversial plan to strike at coca plantations and the guerrillas who tax
and protect them has begun to spill over into this Ecuadoran border region.

Ecuador's leaders rushed some 4,000 troops to the frontier this summer.
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.

FARC leaders are also threatening to blow up the 500-foot bridge over the
muddy San Miguel river, which marks the border, if Putumayo farmers continue
to smuggle in supplies from Ecuador.

"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 some 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."

Comparing the situation to Vietnam, one analyst in Quito called the plan "a
hearts and minds campaign" designed "to keep the FARC from using Ecuador
like the Viet Cong used Cambodia."

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.

FARC guerrillas have indeed long used Nueva Loja as a circumspect 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 five-foot painting of Cuban revolutionary hero Ernesto "Che" Guevara
beckons clients to the La Pantera bar. Most of its patrons are "probably
FARC," said a security guard outside, "but we don't ask for I.D. cards."

Nueva Loja is also a key weapons smuggling route for the FARC, with police
seizing 1,500 boxes of ammunition for assault rifles last week 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 Dr. 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.

BORDER VIOLENCE FARC rebels have killed six local men, Ecuadorans say

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.

FARC gunmen also took justice into their own hands in February, ordering an
Ecuadoran man who had allegedly bribed his way out of a triple murder charge
to leave Nueva Loja within 15 days "or else," residents said.

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.

Mayor Abad, apparently concerned about scaring away the trickle of foreign
eco-tourists, said the FARC and paramilitary presence here "no me consta,"
an evasive Spanish phrase for "I have no proof of it."

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 farm
hands 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.

REBEL EFFORTS Officials worry that FARC will create leftist groups in
Ecuador

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."

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."

Ecuadorans say protesters armed with pistols, a rarity in this country, have
joined several recent marches against Noboa's free-market policies and the
U.S. facility in Manta.

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.

Sucumbios has a long history of lawlessness, with bandit gangs assaulting
buses on the highways, kidnappers taking local businessmen for ransom and
several bar-room killings per weekend.

The latest U.S. State Department travel warning on Ecuador notes that U.S.
government personnel have been restricted from traveling to the province
since 1996 because of the "significant incidence of common crime, extortion,
and kidnapping."

"We don't need more problems," said Gonzalez. "We have enough, without
adding poor refugees to an already poor area, without adding guerrillas to
an already violent area . . . We need business, not a war in our backyard."