Colombia Says Rebels in Ecuador Launch New Attack

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Colombia says rebels in Ecuador launch new attack
Wed Mar 26, 2008 5:57pm EDT

BOGOTA, March 26 (Reuters) - Marxist rebels hiding in Ecuador launched explosives at Colombian anti-cocaine workers across the border, Colombia's government said on Wednesday, increasing already high tensions between the Andean neighbors.

The guerrillas shot makeshift bombs made from cooking gas cylinders at coca eradicators last week as they pulled up the illicit plants on Colombian territory, Foreign Minister Fernando Araujo said.

"No government can stand by with its arms crossed while its citizens are being attacked from the other side of the border," Araujo said. "We ask the Ecuadorean authorities to please help us. We should each coordinate security in our own territory."

No one was killed in the incident but Colombia complains that neighbors Ecuador and Venezuela do not do enough to help combat the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which funds its four-decade-old insurgency with the cocaine trade and has set up camps inside Ecuadorean territory.

Colombia sparked as regional crisis on March 1 when it bombed a FARC camp inside Ecuador, killing a top guerrilla leader and more than 20 other rebel fighters.

The leftist governments of Ecuador and Venezuela responded to the raid by sending troops to their Colombian borders.

The crisis was quickly defused and the three countries agreed to work together, but tensions are still simmering between Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, a close U.S. ally, and his Ecuadorean and Venezuelan counterparts.

The FARC has a strong presence along Colombia's 360-mile (580-km) border with Ecuador. Colombia started paying local peasants in the area to manually destroy coca plants after Ecuador complained that the U.S.-financed spraying of herbicides was damaging the environment on Ecuador's side. (Reporting by Hugh Bronstein; Editing by Kieran Murray)



http://www.reuters.com/article/americasCrisis/idUSN26445689

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1. From Colombia's Defense Minster's Mouth to . . .

Reuters ears. Good thing the Media Terrorism conference is taking place in Caracas this weekend..