U.S. STEPS UP DRUG WAR, AND ECUADOR QUAKES

Officials Fear Influx Of Drugs, Refugees As Aid To Colombia Increases

WASHINGTON - Throughout two decades of revolt, murder and drug production
along the Andean spine, Ecuador has remained a surprising haven of peace
and relative order.

Its indigenous tribes are as poor and disenfranchised as those of its
neighbors. Its high yunga valleys are just as friendly to the coca shrub
that produces cocaine. Its government is as precarious and prone to
corruption. But somehow Ecuador has avoided the coups, insurgencies and
extensive cocaine production that have racked Colombia, Bolivia and Peru.

But the Ecuadorean government, U.S. officials and Latin American
specialists fear that a multibillion-dollar, Washington-backed plan to root
out drug production in Colombia could destabilize Ecuador and possibly set
it up as the next major narcotics source in South America.

"Ecuador justifies the most concern and demands the most attention" of all
countries bordering Colombia, said Michael Shifter, a democracy specialist
at Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank focused on Latin
America. "Ecuadoreans are deeply concerned about the prospect of growing
violence and refugee flows from Colombia."

Shifter noted that Ecuador would face threats from Colombian turmoil even
without the coming anti-drug initiative, called Plan Colombia. But U.S.
officials and Ecuadoreans believe that Plan Colombia raises the risks of
disruption for Quito, although they disagree on the degree of threat.

U.S. intelligence reports confirm local accounts of recent incursions into
Ecuador by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the rebel group that
finances itself by extorting money from the coca industry. The guerrillas
evade border security, store weapons and exact taxes on local oil wells,
according to humanitarian groups and Ecuadorean officials.

Three weeks ago, Colombian Economics Minister Augusto Ramirez Ocampo said
coca cultivation was spreading into Ecuador and that Ecuadorean factories
were supplying the dynamite used in FARC terror attacks. Colombian refugees
have also been passing into Ecuador, according to United Nations officials,
although the officials dispute accounts putting the number as high as 5,000.

Governments and agencies have mobilized to reduce the threat to Ecuador,
but independent Andean experts are skeptical that the measures will be
sufficient.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has opened an office in Colombia's
Putumayo province in case of population displacement.

Ecuador intends to create a special military unit to guard its border. A
month ago, the government announced plans to designate the border an
emergency zone before reversing course, deciding that an emergency decree
might create panic.

Much of the recent instability and precautionary measures along the border
stem from Congress' approval last month of $1.3 billion in extra U.S. aid
to battle Colombian drug production.

On top of the $300 million annually that Washington already gives Bogota,
the money will put deadly teeth into Colombia's drug war by bolstering
military training and providing 60 armed helicopters. As evidence of
Washington's concern for spillover effects, the appropriation contains $20
million for Ecuadorean crop substitution and military development.

Colombia has promised to devote $4 billion to Plan Colombia.

The initiative will hatch in coming months, when a powerful force of
Blackhawk and Huey helicopters, fumigation planes and jungle patrols will
descend on the lush Putumayo region. The force, staffed by Colombians and
trained by several hundred Americans, will poison coca fields, fight
guerrillas protecting the farms and try to persuade peasants to switch crops.

U.S. and Colombian officials hope the offensive will cut cocaine shipments
to the United States, stanch the flow of revenue to local revolutionaries
and reduce the lawlessness and violence that have convulsed Colombian society.

But many in Washington and Quito worry about side effects.

They fear that an established pattern is about to repeat itself, that the
coca lords will evade the latest crackdown by slipping across a border and
spread havoc to a country that lacks the means to fight them.

It happened in Colombia, when anti-drug efforts in Bolivia and Peru led
directly to a sharp rise in Colombian cocaine production and to the
heightened anarchy that grips much of that nation. That might happen in
Ecuador.

Besides worrying about the foreign political consequences of spreading drug
production, U.S. officials are concerned about the $1.3 billion American
investment. Transplantation of Colombian cocaine sources into Ecuador or
elsewhere would undercut U.S. eradication efforts and refill the narcotics
pipeline to American cities.

By many accounts, Ecuador is in the greatest danger of such a transfer.

"Ecuadoreans are worried, and they have good reason to be," said Donald
Schulz, a Latin American security specialist at Cleveland State University
in Ohio, who has testified before Congress on the threat posed to
Colombia's neighbors by escalated drug fighting.

"You already have a spillover, and I think it's going to be accelerated. I
don't think this has adequately been accounted for by the folks who put
together Plan Colombia, including the United States."

With Peru and Bolivia continuing to pressure drug growers and Brazil
providing mediocre conditions for coca, the road to Ecuador could be the
line of least resistance for Colombian cocaine producers.

Crippled by a deep recession, Colorado-sized Ecuador lacks the funds and,
many believe, the political stability to mount a stiff defense of its
border. Its indigenous tribes are starting to assert themselves
politically, incited, Ecuadorean officials believe, by Colombian FARC
guerrillas.

Ecuador has operated as a democracy since the 1970s and is listed by travel
guides as one of the safest countries in South America for Americans. But
in January, Indians joined the Ecuadorean military in mounting a briefly
successful coup before the military yielded authority to Gustavo Noboa, who
had been vice president.

While U.S. officials acknowledged the threat posed to Ecuador, they argued
that it has been exaggerated by some, particularly the Ecuadorean press.

"Certainly we are not walking into this with rose-colored glasses," said
the Clinton administration official. "We know there is the potential for a
number of problems. But we are trying to help the Colombians and the
Ecuadoreans, if the problems occur, to confront them."

Pressure on Putumayo coca growers and any resulting spillover will be
gradual, the official said, because the Colombian back country is vast and
the eradication force, despite its multibillion-dollar price tag, is
limited in comparison.

Plan Colombia "is going to be real, but it's going to be slow and gradual,"
he said. "This isn't like the German army meeting Russia in 1941."

According to U.S. sources, a U.N. official told Ecuador to prepare for an
influx of up to 30,000 refugees once Plan Colombia begins. The prediction
was widely quoted in the Ecuadorean media, but U.N. officials are
disavowing it.

"This number of 30,000 people ... is totally over the top and is not from
us," said Panos Moumtzis, spokesman in the Washington office of UNHCR.
Refugee flows into Ecuador in recent months have been "insigificant," he
said, disputing a report by Spanish news agency EFE last month that said
Ecuadorean religious officials were estimating that 5,000 Colombians had
fled to Ecuador this year.

Even so, UNHCR is concerned about the potential for population disruption.
Along with its recently opened Putumayo office, the agency has drawn up a
confidential contingency plan for dealing with the humanitarian effects of
the offensive, Moumtzis said.

The most pessimistic analogy for Ecuador is to Cambodia, where secret U.S.
attacks on Vietnamese insurgents in the 1970s preceded a government
collapse and mass murder on a horrific scale.

Colombia's leftist FARC guerrillas are inextricably tied to the cocaine
trade. As Plan Colombia steps up the pressure, FARC will "strategically or
tactically withdraw into Ecuador, and the [Colombian] army will go looking
for guerrillas," argued Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric
Affairs in Washington. "You're going to witness a secret war there, a la
Indochina."