Camaraderie may be the key to military morale, but the 24 Ecuadorian troops traveling towards the Colombian border by helicopter maintain an eerie quiet. The Amazonian jungle stretches out below, apparently undisturbed but for the odd small farm or oil well. But appearances in the jungle can be deceiving. Under the foliage, invisible from the air, are FARC guerrilla bases and cocaine laboratories. The soldiers' mission over a five-day patrol covering around 25 kilometers will be to find and destroy them.
"It's a reality," says Gen. Fabián Narváez, the commander of Ecuadorian forces in the border region, referring matter-of-factly to what Colombia's long-running conflict means for its smaller neighbor. Since 2008, Narváez's forces have engaged FARC fighters on 14 occasions, most recently in February, when a female FARC guerrilla was shot and killed.
This relatively low figure belies a larger presence. "The illegal armed groups of Colombia avoid combat with our units. Our soldiers have said to us many times, 'We feel as if we're being watched'!" says Gen. Narváez. "[For the guerrillas], time is not a problem. If they detect military presence, they simply freeze. But we have the urgency to achieve results."
That urgency dates to a little over a year ago, when Colombian forces raided the FARC camp of Angostura, just over a mile into Ecuadorian territory, killing the guerrillas' second-in-command, Raúl Reyes. It had long been speculated that the FARC were using Ecuador to evade Colombian military pressure. Only after the attack on Angostura did Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa take a serious interest in the issue, though, breaking off diplomatic relations with Colombia and furiously vowing to defend Ecuadorian territory against "any regular or irregular foreign force." The implication was that the Ecuadorian military should take control of the area before Colombian forces tried to do it for them.
