COLOMBIA'S CREEPING WAR

Guerrillas and drug traffickers from Colombia have long crossed into
Ecuador's frontier jungle for time off and to buy guns or drug-processing
chemicals. But as the Colombian government, backed by a $1.3 billion U.S.
aid package, prepares an offensive against the traffickers and their
allies, Colombia's civil war is seeping into neighboring countries, and
things here have suddenly taken a violent turn.

This remote area now lives by the law of the gun. Residents say about 15
armed Colombians took over three farmhouses in August. Pushed across the
border by escalating clashes among guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary
forces and the Colombian army, the newcomers drove Ecuadoran farmers from
their land, threatening them with "revenge, Colombian-style" if they
refused to get out of the way.

Ecuadoran soldiers have uncovered and destroyed four small
cocaine-processing labs on this side of the border in the past six months.
Fighters from Colombia's right-wing militia groups have been arrested here
for running extortion rings. Colombia's largest rebel group, the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), crosses the porous border
with increasing impunity. Another rebel group, the National Liberation
Army, has also increased activity on the Ecuadoran side, where one woman
was arrested recently after she was found with documents linking her to the
group, local police officials said.

"We've always had problems in these parts, but never like this," said Galo
Murillo, a soft-spoken 37-year old coffee grower who called a town meeting
to discuss the swelling tide of violence in this poor village 150 miles
east of Quito, four miles from the border and half an hour by car from the
nearest military checkpoint.

On the road that leads here, police say, the FARC ambushed three Ecuadoran
merchants in August in a business dispute, then stripped and buried their
tractor-trailer truck after killing them. The truck's unearthed skeleton
lies in front of the police station in the nearby provincial capital, Lago
Agrio, a stark reminder of how Colombia's four-decade guerrilla war is
reaching into neighboring countries.

"This is not our war, but it is now here, and we are helpless against it,"
said Murillo, a father of two. "We've always been a peaceful people in
Ecuador. We don't know what to do."

As the United States has pushed the Colombian government's Plan Colombia as
essential to the war on drugs, Latin American countries have criticized its
potential for making Colombia's conflict regional. In Venezuela, the United
Nations estimates that more than 500 Colombians are seeking refuge from
violence in their homeland, while Panamanian authorities last month
uncovered a smuggling ring channeling arms to the FARC. In Brazil, the
armed forces last week launched Operation Cobra, a $10 million campaign to
reinforce the border with Colombia.

As the poorest of Colombia's neighbors and the one with the fewest
resources to protect its borders, Ecuador is perhaps the most vulnerable to
the conflict's spread. And here along the northeastern border, the
spillover has become a reality.

In Lago Agrio, local authorities reported an alarming increase in
kidnappings and extortion that they blame largely on dissident factions or
deserters from Colombian guerrilla and paramilitary units. And officials
fear more trouble because Ecuador has agreed to let the United States set
up a new drug surveillance operation at a base in the port city of Manta,
an act FARC leaders have described as a "declaration of war."

Two new leftist youth groups--including one called the FARE, or
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Ecuador, an echo of Colombia's FARC--have
launched propaganda campaigns in northern Ecuador against Plan Colombia.
Meanwhile, five camps for up to 5,000 refugees are being planned near the
600-mile-long border. Officials said refugees could be a serious burden in
this economically troubled country of 12 million, while some fear the
encampments could be used as rear bases for guerrillas.

The alert in Ecuador has sparked criticism of the way the Clinton
administration has handled the logistics of Plan Colombia. "We have
target-lock in Washington on Colombia, thinking we can solve the problem
simply by throwing money at Bogota," said one U.S. government source
familiar with the region. "But we are ignoring the fact that this needs to
be solved in a regional context. Countries like Ecuador can't afford to
handle this war that is already in their back yards."

As part of Plan Colombia, Ecuador is to receive $20 million, but anxious
officials here contend that is not enough. They are calling for assistance
for economic development along the border, where many of the largest cities
have elected Marxist mayors who support the philosophy, if not the tactics,
of the FARC.

The mayors of the four largest cities in the region are demanding a neutral
zone to prevent a military buildup. The reasons are not only ideological,
but also financial. In some border cities, as much as 80 percent of the
commerce is based on dealings with the FARC, Colombian paramilitary groups
and drug traffickers, business leaders say.

"There is not only an economic and political, but an ideological
infiltration of the border," Foreign Minister Heinz Moeller said. "We
simply don't have the means to cover it completely. We are doing the best
with what we have, but we know it is not enough."

In the past three months, Ecuador's military has deployed more troops to
the border, but it is still easy to cross. The back-and-forth has turned
Lago Agrio, a seedy frontier town of 25,000, into the Casablanca of the
Colombian conflict--a watering hole for the FARC, whose members walk freely
in civilian clothing alongside their paramilitary enemies, Colombian drug
runners, government informants and Ecuadoran police and soldiers.

On the city's steamy streets, the facades of two brothels sport large
painted faces of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Argentine-born icon of Fidel
Castro's Cuban revolution, as welcome signs for their guerrilla clients
from Colombia.

Inside the Panther, a grimy house of prostitution, beefy Colombian men with
the trademark flattop haircuts of the FARC and crew cuts of the
paramilitaries sit on opposite sides of the room, drinking beer and paying
$2 to have sex with Ecuadoran women.

"You can tell the Colombian jungle fighters from their boots," said one
police official in the club. "They are thick, black and more expensive than
any Ecuadoran in these parts could afford. . . . And they can also afford a
lot more beer."

Late at night, when gunshots can be heard around town, the other hot sound
is Colombian corridos prohibidos--or "forbidden rhythms"--a sort of Latin
American country music about narco-guerrilla life. In one bar on Colombia
Avenue, a deejay plays a tribute to fallen Colombian drug kingpin Pablo
Escobar. As the song plays, a burly Colombian man struts in wearing a large
bandanna embroidered with the words "I am a cocaine producer and Colombia
is my fatherland" in Spanish.

The FARC and members of the paramilitary groups also come here for medical
treatment, as do workers from Colombian coca plantations. "They come in
with hands as big as boxers' gloves from working with the
cocaine-processing chemicals," said Medardo Sanchez, a local surgeon who
said exposure to the chemicals causes workers' hands to swell. "I just fix
them up. They haven't usually come to make trouble. They don't show their
guns in public. This is their supermarket; they like to keep things clean
here."

There has been an uneasy truce between the Colombians--the paramilitaries
and the rebels--and Ecuadoran authorities, largely because of border
commerce, but also because the FARC does not appear to be looking for a
two-front war. Also, the Ecuadoran military is not interested in, nor
equipped for, a fight with the better-armed guerrillas. Ecuador's main oil
pipeline--its largest source of foreign revenue--is an easy target, being
just a 20-minute drive from the border.

In any case, serious action against the FARC would be highly unpopular
among local left-leaning people. "I don't condone violence, but I must
understand fighting for justice and freedom," said Maximo Abad, Lago
Agrio's popular mayor, adding that the FARC's "message is universal, and it
resonates here and elsewhere."

In the past, guerrillas crossed the border to "help out"--lynching
Colombian bandits they had driven into Ecuador and sometimes even dropping
off suspects at police stations. But recently, local police say,
Colombians--including common thugs as well as men and women with direct
links to the guerrillas and paramilitary militias--are infecting this area
with their quarrels.

In one failed extortion attempt in August, Jorge Washington Cox Carvajal,
owner of a surveying company, was held briefly at gunpoint in his Lago
Agrio home by Colombian militia members. Two of the suspects later caught
by police had expired Colombian military IDs, and police records show they
admitted to being members of a paramilitary group. They said they had come
into Ecuador to shake down Cox because they believed he was helping the
FARC. Police said two of their accomplices who escaped were killed by the
FARC in Lago Agrio soon afterward.

"We are living in the middle of the everybody else's war--the U.S., the
Colombian military, the guerrillas, the paramilitaries," said Lt. Col.
Geraldo Zapata, chief of the Lago Agrio police. "All we're doing is trying
to keep out of it."