Report ties president, rebel cash

LIMA, Peru – Campaign officials for Ecuador’s then-presidential candidate Rafael Correa sought financial backing from Latin America’s last remaining leftist rebel army in 2006, and there is evidence Correa was aware of such solicitations, according to a report released Tuesday.

Allegations have previously been made linking Rafael Correa to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, but this is the first time a claim has been made publicly that he was directly involved. The report also says evidence strongly suggests the FARC made a $100,000 payment to Correa’s campaign.

Correa, who has been president since 2007, denied the allegations Tuesday.

Speaking with reporters in Ecuador’s coastal city of Guayaquil, he said he had never known anyone from the FARC. If someone asked the Colombian rebels for money on behalf of his campaign, he added, “the FARC was cheated because we never received any money from the FARC.”

The 240-page report, released by the London-based think tank International Institute for Strategic Studies, also says the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, after a failed 2002 coup, enlisted FARC rebels to train loyalists to “attack, neutralize, or liquidate” opponents in the event of another attempt to overthrow the government.

The report’s authors based that conclusion on information gleaned from 8,382 electronic documents found on computers belonging to Raul Reyes, a top FARC commander. Reyes was killed in March 2008 in a Colombian bombardment of a FARC camp across the border in Ecuador.

IISS was provided access to the documents by Colombia in 2008 when hardliner Alvaro Uribe was president, Jose Obdulio Gaviria, a former Uribe adviser, told the Associated Press on Tuesday. Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia’s current president, was defense minister at the time.

The authors plumbed those documents – and others provided by Colombia – for details on ties between the FARC and the governments of Ecuador and Venezuela. They released a CD containing the documents along with the report.

There is no evidence FARC-trained forces ever carried out any attacks on Chavez opponents. The Venezuelan Embassy in London issued a statement describing Tuesday’s report as “dodgy” and calling the Reyes files “unverified.”

The investigators based their conclusions about Correa on documentation that was not from the Reyes files.

They said they saw testimony from a FARC operative in Ecuador in 2006 “that appears to detail Correa’s personal interest in and knowledge of illegal FARC contributions to his campaign.” They did not say who provided the testimony.

In it, the report said, the operative, who later defected, “reported being lobbied by Correa’s campaign team before the presidential elections, speaking first with an intermediary; then by telephone and in person with Ricardo Patino (currently Ecuador’s foreign minister) and finally with Correa himself in a series of three telephone conversations in which Correa clearly showed an awareness of ongoing negotiations between his subordinates and FARC.”

“Both circumstantial and direct evidence exist indicating that Correa may have been personally aware of and involved in the decision to solicit financial support from FARC for the runoff campaign,” the report added.