Military Politics and Democracy in the Andes

5. Mission Overload and Neglect of Border Defense: Ecuador since 2000

Like the Peruvian army from 2000 through 2007, since 2000, the Ecuadorian army has minimally performed its only salient sovereignty mission: in this case, to defend the country’s northern border against incursions by Colombian guerrillas. Chapter 3 analyzed how the army’s limited northern border patrols date to the mid-1980s, when Colombian guerrillas first staged attacks on Ecuadorian army border detachments. For the period preceding the 1998 EcuadorPeru peace treaty, this neglect can be explained by the overload that resulted from the army’s preference for and prior commitment to defending the southern border from Peru, combined with the newer threat in the north: that overload resulted in a contradiction in the army’s northern border mission. In contrast, the 1998 treaty left Ecuador’s army with the sole sovereignty mission of defending the northern border, a mission that grew in significance when a major Colombian counterinsurgency offensive, set loose by the 2000 implementation of Plan Colombia, pushed more Colombian insurgents into Ecuador. Yet the army still has resisted this sovereignty mission. In place of northern border defense, it has enthusiastically conducted policing missions. A chapter 5 B Mission Overload and Neglect of Border Defense Ecuador since 2000 116 Military Politics and Democracy in the Andes The first part of this chapter describes the army’s mission performance from 2000 onward and rules out the legitimacy, professionalism, and resource maximization hypotheses as effective explanations for army behavior. The second part applies the predictability framework to the case.1 neglecting a porous border while policing the interior Amid the heightened insecurity that has existed on the northern border and in Ecuador’s northern provinces since 2000, the legitimacy, professionalism, and resource maximization hypotheses all predict that the army would actively defend the northern border. As I will show, however, the army has performed little border defense, instead occupying itself with police work. Insecurity in Northern Ecuador This analysis of Colombia’s internal conflict and its implications for security in Ecuador’s north—especially the three northern border provinces of Sucumb íos, Carchi, and Esmeraldas—distinguishes between the Ecuadorian and Colombian sides of the international border, and between Ecuadorians and Colombians . Yet, as a preliminary note, these distinctions are somewhat artificial. In many cases, Ecuadorians living in the north do not perceive the atrocities they have seen in nearby, Colombian towns as harm against the “other,” given the renowned close friendship and familial ties among Ecuadorians and Colombians on the border (e.g., P. Andrade 2002, 220–25). In fact, in some Ecuadorian border towns, the majority of the population is Colombian.2 Colombia’s conflict has involved several insurgencies during the post-2000 period: the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), and paramilitaries. In the 1990s, membership in these groups grew by 60 percent (Moser and McIlwaine 2004, 42), and as of the early 2000s, the insurgencies controlled approximately 50 percent of Colombian territory (Rochlin 2003, 3; Sweig and McCarthy 2005, 18). Conflict has continued in spite of the aggressive policy of the Álvaro Uribe government (2002–10) to eliminate the FARC and a 2005 demobilization agreement between the government and the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), which had united many paramilitary groups at the national level. By the early 2000s, there were between seventeen and twenty-two thousand FARC combatants, with the number dropping by between 25 and 50 percent by 2008. The ELN numbered approximately five thousand in the early 2000s and was roughly one-half that size in 2008 (Ramírez Mission Overload and Neglect of Border Defense in Ecuador 117 Lemus et al. 2005, 102; Sweig and McCarthy 2005, 17; Gutiérrez Sanín 2008, 12). The trajectory of the paramilitaries is more difficult to determine. Although estimates of the size of the AUC before the demobilization (including estimates by official government sources) ranged between seven and fifteen thousand, the Colombian press reported that up to thirty thousand AUC combatants were demobilized by the program, suggesting that many individuals misrepresented themselves as combatants during the demobilization process (Gutiérrez Sanín 2008, 7). Furthermore, since the demobilization, successor groups have continued their same violent tactics (Human Rights Watch 2009; C. Rojas 2009, 242). These armed insurgencies have contributed to insecurity in neighboring countries , especially Venezuela and Ecuador, because their shared borders with Colombia are well-populated; border towns serve as...