Ecuador's posture toward the FARC has always been a bit fuzzy. Their attitude has been that its not their problem, and that they are too small and weak to confront FARC. There is some truth in that, of course. Some of their police posts in the border areas often lacked even bullets for their guns, supposedly.
So FARC fighters keep their families on the Ecuadorian side of the line and visit them when they can. Some of them invest there also, buying farms and bars and hotels. The locals comment that if a FARC guy makes you an offer on your property, your negotiating room is a bit tight; how much room really do you have to refuse the offer?
The special police that patrol the borders say that, as long as the FARC don't show their weapons, they will pretend not to see them. They occasionally discover camp-sites, but they seem only to discover them when the guerrillas have gone. Their biggest problem is the occasional gunfight when paramilitaries on liberty and FARC fighers on liberty bump into each other in the same bar and can't keep their mouths shut. Both sides outgun the local cops, so there isn't much to be done about it.
The special police occasionally do combined ops with the Colombians, but they don't like doing it, because its risky, and they feel like its not their fight. Why risk getting killed over Colombia's fight?
At the same time, weapons ship through Ecuadorian ports. Customs and military men in charge of the ports are in a position to pad their income by not seeing anything they don't want to see. How high this reaches I wouldn't be able to know, I just know what I read in the papers. But its a problem already.
Some of FARC's top people have stayed in Quito, when Colombia exposed this, the Ecuadorian response was to criticize Colombia for spying inside of Ecuador.
One of Ecuador's congressmen was gunned down on the street by Colombian paramilitary hitmen a few years ago; supposedly he was involved in supporting FARC. The Ecuadorian police swept up the Ecuadorian gophers who helped set up the hit (without necessarily knowing what they were involved in) but let the hit men get away clean.
When Gutierrez was president (the Chavist officer who led the coup a couple of years before getting elected) he failed to fulfill his Chavist promises, and supposedly FARC put out a contract on his life. All of the policies that were the supposed motives for the coup, he left in place. Eventually he was overthrown by his supporters who thought he had betrayed them. Now we have Correa, an outspoken Chavist. We'll see what happens now.
You can see that FARC may evolve into a deniable weapon for the Chavists at some point. Do what you're told or you get trouble from FARC.
That's fascinating stuff marron, a little of which I had already heard, but a lot of that was still new to me. Thank you for that.