Word: farces
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Ecuador, meanwhile, says it's determined to stay neutral in the Colombian conflict, treading carefully lest it provoke terrorist attacks by the FARC on civilian targets or sensitive infrastructure like its oil pipelines. It refuses to list the FARC as a terrorist organization, as the U.S. and the European Union do; but it also won't recognize the rebels as legitimate belligerents, as left-wing Venezuelan President Chavez, a Correa ally, urges the region to do. Correa knows that Uribe, a key U.S. ally, is likely to keep his military's border pressure strong while George W. Bush is still...
...improve public services. On Thursday Correa announced that foreign lenders have agreed to forgive $30 million of Ecuador's debt if it invests that money in its border regions. Economic development, he told foreign reporters, "is the best strategy to fight the infiltration of these irregular groups" like the FARC. But he added that Ecuador will increasingly use electronic surveillance to detect both guerrillas and Colombian troops that might violate the border...
...FARC's presence in Ecuador may be shadowy, but it's no secret. Ecuador spends more than $100 million each year to patrol the area. But for about 20 years FARC units like the 48th Front have regularly slipped across the porous border into Ecuador - there are only two points 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...
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...
...Thursday meeting with foreign journalists, Correa reiterated that the lucrative coca trade is attractive among the remote and economically threadbare border communities. "A large part of the population, above all in Amazonia, on [both] the Ecuadorian and Colombian sides support the FARC," he said, "because the Colombian and Ecuadorian [governments] don't reach them, and the ones who provide jobs, in drug cultivation, etcetera, are the FARC...