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ECUADOR-COLOMBIA: No Thaw in Sight
By Kintto Lucas
QUITO, Nov 19 (IPS) - The cancellation of a meeting between delegates of Ecuador and Colombia aimed at restoring diplomatic ties, which were broken off in March, shows that it will be an uphill battle - especially with the latest round of mutual recriminations this month.
What was to be a two-day meeting Tuesday and Wednesday, sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Organisation of American States (OAS), was to take place in Pasto, the capital of the southern Colombian province of Nariño.
In the cancelled meeting, "Colombia-Ecuador: Building Bridges", representatives of the two countries, including Colombian Foreign Minister Jaime Bermúdez and the governors of border provinces, planned to attempt to smooth things out in the areas of politics and cooperation.
Advisers to Nariño Governor Antonio Navarro Wolf told the Ecuadorean newspaper El Comercio that the meeting was cancelled because of the rioting and chaos caused in his province by the collapse of fraudulent pyramid scheme operations.
A state of emergency was declared Monday in Colombia to clamp down on the illegal investment schemes that preyed mainly on low-income people, who have taken to the streets over the last few days after payments by the companies were halted.
But government sources from both countries have stated that the conditions are not yet in place for a rapprochement.
One clear sign of that were remarks by centre-left Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, who once again complained in his Saturday radio programme that Colombia was failing to control its territory and that the country’s nearly five-decade armed conflict was leaking over the southern border into Ecuador.
He warned that the Ecuadorean military would not tolerate incursions by foreign forces, and that they have orders to mount an "all-out response" to any aggression from Colombia’s leftist guerrillas, far-right paramilitaries or armed forces.
Ecuador broke off relations with its neighbour to the north following a Colombian cross-border raid that bombed a FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) camp in Ecuador, killing nearly two dozen rebels, including the insurgent group’s international spokesman, Raúl Reyes.
In his radio address, Correa said the U.S.-financed anti-drug and counterinsurgency Plan Colombia was "a total failure," because Colombia "has more helicopters than pilots, and the drug crops are still there, while vast parts of the territory are still uncontrolled by the state."
"There is no military solution to the Colombian conflict, the only possible solution is political, but the usual hawks will never accept that," said Correa, clearly referring to right-wing Colombian President Álvaro Uribe.
The head of the Latin American Human Rights Association (ALDHU), Juan de Dios Parra, concurred with Correa’s warning about the danger posed to Ecuador’s northern frontier region by the civil war in neighbouring Colombia.
In a conversation with IPS, the activist predicted that fighting would heat up in the southern Colombian province of Putumayo, on the Ecuadorean border, in December as part of stepped-up Plan Colombia military actions.
That, in turn, would aggravate the spilling over of the conflict into Ecuador, he said.
"One of Plan Colombia’s aims is to eliminate the FARC’s military presence in Putumayo," he said.
"To achieve that, a policy of extermination of the civilian population was implemented between 1998 and 2004 in Putumayo, to put an end to any support that the FARC may receive from the civilian population. That led to the appalling slaughter of more than 10,000 people," said Parra.
"Later, to cut off the guerrilla group’s supplies of water and food, coca crops were sprayed with the toxic glyphosate herbicide," to force peasant farmers to abandon their farms, he maintained.
Parra said a new phase has now begun, aimed at "expelling the FARC from Putumayo, for which an attempt is being made to depopulate the border region along the Ecuadorean side, by means of "collective killings, incursions among the civilian population, threats, and ‘false positives’."
This term refers to the corpses of civilians presented by the Colombian military as guerrillas killed in action, as part of a system that rewards soldiers and officers for showing "results" in terms of battlefield casualties.
On the Ecuadorean side there have already been 16 cases of "false positives" in the space of just one year, he said.
In Colombia, the scandal over "false positives" led to the removal of 27 military officers - including three generals - and noncommissioned officers, as well as the resignation of army chief General Mario Montoya, one of the military commanders closest to Uribe.
In December, a fierce offensive will be launched by the Colombian armed forces and paramilitaries along the entire border separating Putumayo from Ecuador, to force FARC Front 48 out of the area, said Parra.
"That will trigger the displacement of civilians into Ecuador and incursions by the Colombian military beyond the border," he said.
He also said the offensive would prompt incursions into Ecuadorean territory by guerrillas fleeing the Colombian armed forces. "And there will be bombing," he predicted.
The day before the cancelled meeting in Pasto, one of the planned participants, Putumayo Governor Felipe Guzmán, accused the Ecuadorean government of being "permissive" towards the FARC, saying that the rebels were "very comfortable" because they could easily cross into Ecuador.
"All of this posturing by Correa is just a strategy to draw the attention of the international media," said Guzmán. "It would be great if the Ecuadorean authorities were deployed along the border to keep the Colombian criminals from crossing over, not to be permissive towards terrorism."
But over the last year, it has been reported that confrontations between the Ecuadorean army and the guerrillas have reached unprecedented levels.
Since relations were cut off, Colombia has continually asserted that Ecuador is not cooperating in fighting the FARC, a claim that is vehemently denied by the Correa administration.
In recent months, clashes between the Ecuadorean army and the insurgents have increased, leaving people injured on both sides. Last week, an Ecuadorean soldier lost his leg after he was wounded in combat.
In its Monday editorial, the Bogotá newspaper El Tiempo stated that relations between the two governments are going from bad to worse, and that there are more elements pointing to a further distancing than to the restoration of ties any time soon.
Ecuadorean Foreign Minister María Isabel Salvador said in a newspaper interview that "Without a doubt the situation with Colombia is very, very difficult. Something happens every day or every week along the border, which is extremely serious.
"Ecuador is making its best effort. We are reinforcing our armed forces to obtain increasingly effective control along the border. But what is Colombia doing to control its southern border?" asked Salvador.
"The theory that any state can just go and attack its enemies in another state is unacceptable, and is the same policy that has been used by the U.S. government of (George W.) Bush to attack Iraq and Afghanistan," she said.
(END/2008)
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