Posted on 03/09/2008 1:53:29 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
The combat fatigues dangled from a branch 100 feet above the jungle floor - a testament to the ferocity of the bombardment that turned this remote, mosquito-ridden corner of the Amazon rainforest in northern Ecuador into an international flashpoint last week.
The same missiles that blasted the uniform high into the jungle canopy gouged deep craters out of the rust-red earth and cut a wide swath through the vegetation.
They also claimed the lives of at least 24 rebels and supporters of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), including Raul Reyes, deputy commander and public face of the guerrilla army.
The Sunday Telegraph was among the first group of journalists to reach the former lair of the Farc commandante, a sprawling encampment hidden in terrain that had seemed like the perfect refuge for the fighters.
The strike on Reyes was a huge coup for the pro-US Colombian government in its bloody war against the far-Left rebel movement. Farc has funded its 44-year insurgency by trafficking much of the cocaine that reaches Britain, and by kidnappings for ransom.
But the cross-border hit also unleashed the spectre of a regional war.
Hugo Chavez, the firebrand Venezuelan president and champion of Farc, dispatched troops and tanks to the border with Colombia even though the incident occurred on the other side of the Andes, while his Leftist Ecuadorian ally Rafael Correa toured the region winning condemnation of the incursion.
The threat of conflict eased on Friday after a testy summit of Latin American leaders ended with handshakes and an apology by Colombian president Alvaro Uribe.
But the stand-off was a stark reminder of the volatility in America's backyard, where Mr Chavez is the self-appointed ringleader of a grouping of Leftist anti-US governments.
As we flew in low to the scene of the raid in an Ecuadorian air force Puma helicopter, it was clear why Reyes would have felt no danger here - it was impossible to see the ground through the thick rainforest.
The unsuspecting Reyes, 59, went to sleep last weekend after supervising a Marxist propaganda seminar attended by several Mexican sympathisers who died in the onslaught.
He would doubtless have been further comforted that his redoubt was a mile inside Ecuador, south of the muddy waters of the Putumayo river, a tributary of the mighty Amazon that forms this stretch of the border with Colombia.
The inaccessible frontier region has long been treated by the Farc as a haven where its fighters can rest, regroup and re-supply outside the reach of the US-backed Colombian military.
The rebels often shed their fatigues to visit nearby towns to shop, drink and visit brothels as a distinctly decadent respite from the travails of waging the revolutionary struggle.
But to the fury of its neighbours, Colombian commanders ignored the usual niceties of international borders after they pinpointed the location of Reyes.
The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that they had been tipped off by a paid informant that he was in the area and then lured him into making calls about a hostage release plan on a satellite phone that they were tracking using US-supplied expertise.
President Alvaro Uribe had already authorised a take-no-prisoners strike force to stand by. In the early hours of Saturday, the camp was subjected to two aerial bombardments by Colombian planes, followed by a ground assault by troops lowered from helicopters.
As we approached the scene in the Puma, the clearing now slashed into the virgin rainforest illustrated the ferocity of the attack. On the ground, Lt Col Jose Nunez of Ecuador's 54th Special Jungle Operations Battalion showed us what was once an extensive network of training zones, sleeping quarters, supply depots and cooking areas - much of it now obliterated.
Local peasants, thought to be paid collaborators, had dug timber poles into the jungle soil to provide walkways over the fallen leaves, branches and mud. And in a stream next to the camp, they had lined a small dam with black plastic to filter water for washing, cleaning and cooking.
The air was sticky and the incessant chorus of birds and cicadas provided a cacophonous backdrop.
Incongruously, a flat-screen television, satellite dish, DVD player and stereo system and speakers were also scattered in the rubble, close to the generators that once powered them.
Cables for the satellite phone, which may have been Reyes's downfall, were tied to branches with vines as part of a makeshift antenna. But missing from the site were the most valuable pieces of modern equipment, if subsequent Colombian accounts are accurate.
For when their commandos swept through the scene after the attack, they said they removed three laptops along with the corpse of Reyes and another suspected rebel leader.
Mr Uribe's administration has since announced that the laptops contained a series of explosive secrets - most notably, that the rebels were trying to buy uranium to make so-called "dirty bombs" and that President Chavez (under the codename of Angel) had channelled $300 million into Farc coffers.
Chavez has denied the accusations, although he makes no secret of his support for Farc and declared a minute's silence for Reyes during his weekly TV show last week.
Lt Col Nunez and his men were the first Ecuadorian forces to reach the scene of the attack. "We found the bodies of 17 men and five women, most stripped to their underwear," he said.
"They had been brought together in one place as if the Colombians were planning to come back to fetch them too before we got here. Most had been killed by the missiles but two men and a woman had been finished off with shots in the back."
There were three female survivors - including a Mexican student - who are now under armed guard in a military hospital in Quito. Five of the dead were also Mexicans, thought to be attending a revolutionary meeting overseen by Reyes (the Ecuadorians have retrieved a programme).
The site was strewn with propaganda, including Che Guevara stickers, brightly embroidered tributes to Simón Bolívar, the South American liberation hero, and handwritten expressions of political fervour.
In one notebook, in childish scrawl and poor grammar, a young fighter interlaced pledges of love for an unidentified sweetheart with outpourings of rebel doctrine.
"The Farc is fighting to free from exploitation a Colombia that the paramilitary [Uribe] government is handing over to the US and that is suffering the consequences of a war that has nothing to do with our rights or health or education, a war like the one in Iraq that was sought out by imperialism and is being paid for by the innocent people of our continent," he declared.
Elsewhere, insects and ants were swarming through the detritus of camp life - camouflage uniforms mixed with civilian clothes; toiletries and cosmetics; husks of corn and bags of rice.
Hoops, bars and posts made of wood and vines marked a training area and a few bed frames had also survived. Next to the stream, the Ecuadorians found four pigs in pens and a full chicken coop.
Lt Col Nunez is an expert on such camps - his men found 18 of the 54 detected by Ecuadorian forces in the jungle along the border last year. The bases, however, were nearly always already empty.
"The Farc have a very good informant system with local people," he said. "They are tipped off when we're approaching and they disappear into the jungle or get back across the river by boat. The border is very porous here."
But this record also explains why Mr Uribe, whose father was murdered by the Farc, decided to strike first and apologise later.
"What does one do when bandits are shooting from the other side and the government doesn't do anything?" he asked journalists during the week. "It's my job to defend 43 million Colombians."
That cuts no ice with Lt Col Nunez. "Their intentions were reasonable but the way they carried out the action was completely wrong," he said. "They should have informed us and asked us to act. It is our country."
Nor, as The Sunday Telegraph found, is the traffic one-way across the border. While rebels often hide out in Ecuador, many Ecuadorians head in the other direction to make a living from Farc's major financial operation - the cocaine trade.
"We can earn three times as much working on the coca farms over there as we make in Ecuador and they also provide us with a bed and meals. A lot of people do it," said a resident of the border town of Farfan.
Another Ecuadorian, now a taxi driver, said that he used to be a coca farmer in Colombia, but spraying operations had driven him out of business. "The Farc were very good for us," he said. "They paid us well and protected us. Those were good days."
At a riverside brothel in the border town, a prostitute - herself Colombian - laughed when asked if any of her customers were Farc soldiers. "Well, they don't wear their uniforms but let's just say that we see everyone here," she said.
A refugee driven from her home by Colombia's Right-wing paramilitaries, it was clear that she too had sympathies for the Farc.
The nearby provincial capital of Lago Agrio, a squat oil town carved abruptly out of the forest 40 years ago, is a hub for the Ecuadorian military, off-duty Colombian fighters from both political extremes, narco-traffickers and informants.
Their presence has turned the dusty town into a jungle Casablanca - only without glamour or romance - and provides thriving trade for brothels, short-time hotels and a slew of discos that pump out Latin beats into the early hours.
This Amazonian backwater was the focus for a week of wildly fluctuating tensions.
Mr Chavez drove the showdown as he identified a chance to step into the boots of his mentor, Fidel Castro, as Latin America's chief anti-US troublemaker and to deflect attention from his domestic woes - he recently lost a referendum to expand his powers and food shortages caused by his price controls are worsening.
He won the backing of several fellow regional leaders in his onslaught against Mr Uribe, who he denounced as an American "poodle" and "lackey".
The Colombian president countered by threatening to take Mr Chavez to the International Criminal Court for genocide over his backing for Farc, and dismissed Mr Correa as a "liar".
But on Friday, the mood eased at a summit of Latin American leaders. Under an accord accompanied by alternating handshakes and finger-pointing, Mr Uribe apologised to Mr Correa and promised that Colombia would not make similar raids if Ecuador cooperated in the fight against the Farc.
Mr Chavez and Mr Correa responded by declaring the crisis over.
For Mr Uribe, the apology was a small price to pay at the end of a week of major setbacks for Farc that began with the death of Reyes, a grey-bearded ideologue whose polite demeanour belied his ruthless reputation and the $5 million US bounty on his head.
On Thursday, Viktor Bout, the world's most notorious arms dealer, was arrested in Thailand after being lured into a sting by US undercover agents to supply missiles to Farc.
And there were fresh celebrations in Bogota on Friday when Ivan Rios, another Farc leader, was gunned down by his own bodyguard, who then defected with the severed right hand of his late boss as proof he was dead. Even by Colombian standards, it was a grisly twist.
Yet as the threat of war faded this weekend, the region breathed only a limited sigh of relief. For the unpredictable Mr Chavez had served notice that he is willing to shift his visceral hostility to the US and its allies from angry invective to military showdown. It might not stop at sabre-rattling next time.
Leftist rebels are camped out in the rain forest conducting military operations and terrorism? Where’re the eco-tree-huggers now?
Oh yeah, forgot, they’re excused because they’re both “down” with the struggle against evil capitalism so it’s OK.
What will it take to make the tree-huggers realize that those they cozy up to would jail or kill them just as quick as the rest of us?
Nunez then gets on the phone and FARC disappears, get real.
It's better to geter done and then call.
Viva Colombia!!!
As I have mentioned before, FARC has always used Ecuador as its safe rear zone, with full knowledge of Ecuadorian police and military.
Ecuador’s attitude has always been that it was Colombia’s problem, that there was nothing they could do to prevent it, and therefore better to ignore it as long as FARC didn’t make trouble for them. Border businesses do a lot of business with FARC, who do there shopping on the Ecuadorian side of the line, and often leave there families there, crossing to visit them when they can.
FARC with money invest in on the Ecuadorian side as well, buying up farms and businesses.
That was prior to Correa, of course, who is Chavist, and as such supports FARC.
Actually, this is common all over the jungle. The tribes build these, tribe members are expected to turn out one day a week to do this kind of thing. As you fly over the jungle, in areas you might think are devoid of people, you'll see these snaking all over, up and down hills, throughout the forest. If they didn't, foot traffic would destroy the trails.
Exactly. They’re so blinded with hatred for capitalism, they don’t realize that they are being as stupid as one can get. And that applies to all leftist causes. Capitalism is what made us great and allows them the luxury of driving around in Lexus and fly in corporate jets.
I hate to say this but I think my brother is falling into that camp. He was talking about companies making too much profit these days. I was shocked. I think he is starting to fall into the redistribution of wealth trap.
Many do fall into that way of thinking. But the way I see it, I always ask this question: Has a poor guy ever offer you a job? ;-)
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