Ecuador

Ecuador and Venezuela said Sunday that they were moving thousands of troops to Colombia's borders, a day after Colombian forces killed a leftist rebel leader in Ecuadorean territory. Bogota later charged that high officials in Ecuador met recently with the slain rebel, Raul Reyes, to accommodate the guerrillas' presence there.

President Alvaro Uribe appears to have taken a calculated risk in ordering his armed forces to invade Ecuador to kill a top rebel leader, deciding to risk the ire of his southern neighbor to inflict a major loss in a decades-long war. Tensions continued to mount Monday after the clandestine operation in which Colombian soldiers and aircraft entered Ecuador to kill Raul Reyes, the nom de guerre of the No. 2 commander in Colombia's largest rebel group, known by its Spanish initials, FARC.

Even as relations remained tense between Colombia and Venezuela, there were signs Wednesday that the Andean region's most serious crisis in recent years might be easing. In Washington, the Organization of American States passed a consensus resolution that used mutually acceptable language to rebuke Colombia for having violated Ecuadorean sovereignty Saturday in a raid that killed a high-ranking rebel leader and 16 others.

Even at a rally where the placards, chants and speeches carried a distinctly anti-government flavor, Colombians on Thursday backed President Alvaro Uribe after his soldiers' risky incursion into Ecuador to kill a leftist rebel leader. The incursion Saturday brought reproval from the Organization of American States and prompted neighbors Ecuador and Venezuela to mass troops at their borders and cut diplomatic ties.

A Latin American border crisis triggered by the Colombian military's incursion into Ecuador to kill a rebel leader was apparently resolved Friday when Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa accepted his Colombian counterpart's apology and promise not to repeat the transgression.

Two Ecuadoreans who have waged a 14-year fight to bring a U.S. energy giant to account for what they allege is massive oil contamination in the Amazon are among the winners of an international environmental prize. Pablo Fajardo Mendoza and Luis Yanza each will receive $150,000 today from the San Francisco-based Goldman Environmental Prize for organizing half a dozen indigenous communities to pursue legal action against Texaco and then Chevron Corp. after the two companies merged in 2001.

Voters overwhelmingly approved a new constitution Sunday that will concentrate power in the hands of socialist President Rafael Correa, advance his reformist agenda and enable him to remain in office until 2017, exit polls indicated. The constitution was drafted last summer by a special congress convened by Correa, who was elected in a 2006 landslide by voters exasperated by this country's chronic corruption, political instability and ineffectual lawmakers.

A few weeks ago, 19 Ecuadorean citizens detained on these world-renowned islands were marched onto a plane and sent back to the continent under armed guard. Their crime? Illegal migration. So far this year, the government has expelled 1,000 of its citizens from the Galapagos -- a living laboratory of unique animal and plant species -- who were there without residency and work permits. It has also "normalized" 2,000 others, in effect giving most of them a year to leave.

Abel Garrido has just struck oil and he's not happy about it. Using a tree branch, the weathered farmer probed the edge of a pond that his cattle use for drinking water and soon turned up the smelly black sludge that he says has killed much of his livestock and sickened his family. "I've lost 30 cows," Garrido said. "I cut them open and their insides are black." Paying the medical bills to treat his three children for skin cancer has cost him his meager savings.

The United States is battling a dangerous new front in its South American drug war -- just as a protege of anti-American leader Hugo Chavez comes to power in Ecuador vowing to shut down a U.S. base dedicated to narcotics surveillance. Officials have expressed growing concern that this Andean nation is being "Colombianized," illustrated by record cocaine seizures in the last two years, the destruction of a major cocaine-processing lab and a recent gangland-style killing. In recent months, U.S.