Reply #15: OK. I understand your point

[Zorro]

However I think it's stretching things.

It's an obvious fact that FARC has camps within Ecuador's borders. FARC is allowed to do so because they pay off/threaten local officials to leave them alone, and there's a profit to be made to "accommodate" them; it's no secret that there's a high degree of corruption throughout South American institutions -- it's not an exclusively Colombian trait. And this Ecuadorean "accommodation" was dramatically revealed when the Reyes camp was bombed and the laptops were grabbed.

Correa ran and was elected on a platform to eliminate institutional corruption (which frankly is a challenging task); the Colombian strike forced Correa to do something public to counter the accusations that his government was not interested in removing FARC camps from Ecuador, and implicitly was not doing anything to eliminate the corruption he ran against. So he replaced his military leadership and has increased military presence along the border.

So yes, I would say there was a correlation between recovering the laptops (or more appropriately, the Colombian incursion) and Correa's actions shortly afterward.

Regarding the lack of specificity regarding "several prominent Ecuadorean leftists". This has been openly reported months ago, and includes Maria Calle (a prominent member of the Ecuadorean assembly, who also heads Venezuela's TV network Telesur in Ecuador) and Interior Minister Gustavo Larrea, who admitted meeting with Reyes a couple of months before the attack. The nature of their "close connections" have also been widely reported.

So I would assert that, despite your disinclination to accept what's reported in the article, it is an accurate representation of the situation along the border and not "propaganda". YMMV.