The Ecudor connection to Colombia narco terrorist

Washington Post:

The townspeople in this tiny frontier outpost, deep in the rain forest hugging Colombia's border, say theirs is a quiet, law-abiding community of shopkeepers, subsistence farmers and fishermen.

Authorities in neighboring Colombia, though, contend that Puerto Nuevo is the thriving nerve center for an elite Colombian rebel unit that helps keep a 44-year-old insurgency alive by trafficking cocaine through Ecuador's ports. That unit, the 48th Front, has moved operations here, Colombian officials say, eluding Colombia's U.S.-backed military and creating a nettlesome problem for President Álvaro Uribe's government.

The man behind the strategy, according to Colombian intelligence officers and former guerrillas, is a rebel operative named Oliver "The Fatman" Solarte. He is not a ranking commander, but those who have worked for him say he has become an indispensable cog in the moneymaking apparatus of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, as the rebel group is known.

Colombian authorities call Solarte the FARC's merchant of cocaine in this region and say he has forged ties to drug traffickers from Colombia and beyond, including buyers from two of Mexico's drug cartels. The result is steady financing for the fighting units of the FARC, an insurgency that has learned over its long struggle how to remake itself in the face of adversity, bedeviling Colombian policymakers and U.S. governments.

...

Senior Colombian government officials say Solarte has built an intricate cocaine-trafficking web in Ecuador, operating labs where cocaine is produced, corrupting policemen and soldiers who man roadblocks, and building links with drug-trafficking groups.

The 48th Front, along with other drug-trafficking units on the borders of Venezuela and Panama, has become more vital than ever for the FARC after a disastrous year in which top commanders were killed in military strikes and thousands of experienced fighters deserted. The Uribe administration's success has in part been due to $7.5 billion in U.S. aid that, since 2000, has helped transform Colombia's military capabilities.

"The FARC sets up cocaine-producing labs on the border areas and takes advantage of the lax and sometimes nonexistent controls in some of our neighboring countries to supply those labs," said Sergio Jaramillo, Colombia's vice minister for defense. "That means that the FARC fronts that are on border areas have become the cash cows of the FARC."

...

Ecuador and Venezuela both have leaders sympathetic to the commie narco terrorist. Allowing Colombia's enemies to establish bases within their borders is an act of war. Colombia could probably take these guys out as it did not too long ago, or it could embarrass the Ecuador and Venezuela governments by presenting the evidence to the Organization of American States or the UN. The latter would probably be a futile forum for justice in this matter.

The corruption of Ecuador's socialist government is getting harder to ignore.