Antidrug officials say many of the smugglers have clustered around Santo Domingo de los Colorados, a town about 50 miles west of Quito that has become a sort of drug trafficking nerve center.
"There are colonies of refugee and undocumented Colombians in every corner of the country now, mostly dedicated to legal activities. But some are criminals who come here to break the law," Gen. Bolivar Cisneros Galarza, a top commander in Ecuador's anti-narcotics police, said in a telephone interview.
Correa has made no mention of ending U.S.-Ecuadorean cooperation in the drug fight, but some U.S. officials worry that he might follow Chavez's lead and do just that.
U.S. officials in Ecuador, including Ambassador Linda Jewell, have said they will try to persuade Correa to change his mind about the Manta base. The U.S. government is offering to help develop the base as a bigger commercial airport and pay for another runway -- if Correa lets the U.S. planes stay.
The U.S. Embassy has encouraged officials and businesses in Manta to tout the base's economic importance, with its 450 local jobs and $7 million in annual spending.
But the chances of changing Correa's mind appear slim, largely because he campaigned so hard on the issue and because of the anti-U.S. tide in the region.
But if he were to change his mind, the decision could be based on self-interest, and that's the tack U.S. officials are taking. Losing the drug surveillance flights, which moved to Ecuador in January 2000 from bases in the Panama Canal Zone, might make his country more vulnerable to traffickers and organized crime.
'That's a scary thing'
Those fears were sparked by the raid of a cocaine-processing lab in El Oro province near the city of Guayaquil last fall. U.S. and Ecuadorean officials said it was the biggest lab seized in that country and was capable of producing as much as 4 tons of cocaine a month.
"In the past, Ecuadorean cocaine-processing labs were Colombian border spillover situations or hidden somewhere deep in the jungle," said a U.S. anti-narcotics official.
"This one was located right along the coast and was big enough to process 4 tons of Peruvian and Colombia base a month. That's a scary thing."
Also worrisome to many was the gangland-style slaying in December of Blanca Cando, the secretary to Superior Court Judge Pavlova Guerra, who has presided over money-laundering cases involving suspected drug traffickers. Cando was gunned down while having coffee with friends.
For some, the killing was too reminiscent of the deadly efforts to intimidate judges in Colombia.
"Hit the low-level functionary so that the higher-level boss gets the message to back off," one U.S. government official here said.
Cisneros, the police commander, declined to comment on the Manta lease issue but said that U.S.-Ecuadorean cooperation was "excellent" and that the eight U.S. aircraft were a positive factor in the nation's drug fight.
U.S. officials said losing the lease on the base, apart from hurting Ecuador's antidrug efforts, would also be a strategic setback for the United States. Drug traffickers' routes already test the surveillance aircraft's range, and the planes' capabilities would probably be curtailed by their having to be relocated.
"The base here is a terribly important asset in the war on drugs," said Delucca, the U.S. Air Force officer. "The geographical position of Manta is invaluable."
chris.kraul@latimes.com
