August 30, 2008	Saturday	Sha'aban 27, 1429

SAN LORENZO (Ecuador): With no sign of a thaw in their frozen diplomatic relations, Ecuador this week called on Colombia to increase its military presence along their shared border to check the spillover of rebel groups, drug trafficking and war refugees.

The demand was one of several laid out by Ecuadorean officials as they argued that their nation has paid too high a price for its neighbour’s decades-long civil conflict and called on Colombia to take more responsibility for the encroaching violence. The two nations seem far from repairing the rift triggered six months ago when Colombian troops crossed the border to kill a rebel leader holed up in Ecuador. President Rafael Correa called up troops along the border with Colombia and two days later cut diplomatic ties.

Despite the intercession of the Organization of American States and the Carter Center, and a meeting this month between the two nations’ foreign ministers, relations remain icy.

In an interview this week, Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Maria Isabel Salvador said her country wanted Colombia to send an unspecified number of additional troops to the 450-mile common border area, accompanied by international observers.

Currently, Ecuador has 11,000 soldiers stationed along the border – twice as many as Colombia, Salvador said – and maintains three times as many bases.

Ecuador’s largely unpoliced border zone continues to serve as a safe haven for Colombian irregulars. Ecuadorean patrols have destroyed more than 100 clandestine bases inside its territory so far this year, twice the 47 camps destroyed in all of 2007, said Defence Minister Juan Ponce. Partly to put to rest its suspicion that Colombia acted with direct US assistance in the March raid , Ecuador has asked to see videos filmed by aircraft that flew in the March 1 operation that killed Raul Reyes, the second-ranking leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by the Spanish acronym FARC.

Ecuador also is demanding millions of dollars in reparations for 3,600 families whose farms in the border zone allegedly have been damaged by Colombia’s spraying of defoliants to kill coca shrubs from which cocaine is made. In May 2007, Colombia suspended such anti-coca spraying within a six-mile band of the border.

Colombia has offered little help in financing refugee camps for 18,000 Colombians who fled as a result of the violence, Ecuador maintains.—Dawn/LA Times-Washington Post News Service