Word: ecuadorians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Wisps of evaporating water rise from the dark green Amazon rainforest as an Ecuadorian military helicopter swerves along the San Miguel River. Each day, slim boats with outboard motors ferry dozens of people between the hamlets of Puerto Nuevo, Ecuador, and Teteye, Colombia, across the brown and winding border waterway. Most are doing business or visiting relatives. But this year boatmen are increasingly carrying Ecuadorian mourners to retrieve the bodies of loved ones. Most, they say, were killed by Colombian troops because they were suspected of aiding the Marxist guerrillas known as the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC...
That incursion spurred an Andean diplomatic crisis: an angry Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa severed relations with Colombia, and the Organization of American States called the attack a violation of sovereignty. But conservative Colombian President Alvaro Uribe accused Ecuador and its left-wing government of harboring the FARC, which has fought the Colombian government in a bloody civil war for 44 years. Uribe claims that data on Reyes' laptop computer reveals ties between the FARC and Ecuadorian Security Minister Gustavo Larrea. Correa vehemently denies it, insisting his military has removed FARC camps inside Ecuador and that Colombia - whose own military...
...along the 250-mile (400 km) frontier where passports are even checked - under cover of the rainforest's lush vegetation to retreat, rest or replenish supplies. Half a million Colombians are estimated to have moved into Ecuador with them. (Ecuador has recognized about 60,000 as war refugees.) Muddy Ecuadorian border villages like Puerto Nuevo are growing and are now overwhelmingly Colombian, says Fabian Narvaez, head of the Ecuadorian Army's 4th Division, which defends that turf. Most, he says, are poor and hard-working; but "some of these settlers are probably tied to illegal activities," he says, adding that...
More than a dozen Ecuadorian policemen and soldiers have died in clashes with the FARC since 1993; in the 1980s the FARC even attacked Ecuadorian military bases. And whereas elsewhere in Ecuador there is little if any cultivation of coca, the raw material of cocaine, "we estimate that there are more than 10 clandestine [cocaine] laboratories operating in Ecuadorian territory along the border with Colombia," says Ecuador's drug czar, Domingo Paredes. That's hardly a surprise given that at least half of the FARC's more than $500 million annual revenues is made via cocaine trafficking...
...punish and modify the behavior of U.S. companies abroad. More than three dozen cases targeting companies have followed the first case, filed in 1993, against Texaco (now Chevron). That class-action suit, which alleged that a subsidiary of Texaco had improperly disposed of waste while extracting oil from the Ecuadorian Amazon, was eventually referred to Ecuadorian courts. The majority of other suits have been dismissed on jurisdictional grounds or are still pending, though at least one has been settled out of court...