The towns in Putumayo, a Colombian department which borders Ecuador’s Sucumbíos Province, are the site of Colombia’s largest military operations against its guerrillas. It is also the scene of a frightening human drama, according to journalists and Colombian human rights organizations.

It appears that the groups, which have been at war for 50 years, blur the distinction between combatant and noncombatant, the very basis of international humanitarian law.

The atrocities committed by the military and their rightist paramilitary allies on the one side, and by the insurgent leftist on the other, are beyond human rationale. However, according to reliable sources, an exacerbating offense is the media’s inability to report the gravity of the situation and the true impact of the armed conflict.

Everything points to a media blockade surrounding the events in the region, according to a report distributed by Ila-Kol, an information service at the German magazine Informationsstelle Lateinamerika.

“There seems to be some inter-institutional agreement to keep a low profile on the events and the phenomena affecting the residents of the region,” declared a report released by the Counsel for Human Rights and Displacement, Codhes, and sent out by the IPS wire. “The media is not reporting to the public in an appropriate measure regarding this situation,” thus contributing in keeping the happenings “invisible.”

According to the Codhes report, “the government seems ill disposed to preventing or dealing with the impact of their policies on the civilian population affected by the military campaigns.”

The issue is that, in the process of trying to weaken the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombian President Alvaro Uribe launched the Patriot Plan, a military campaign [financed by the United States] in the Putumayo region, which has been under FARC control for several decades – the guerrilla picked up arms in 1964.

Another serious problem is that public authorities are focusing all their pressure on the civilian population which they view, indiscriminately, as helpers or collaborators of the guerrilla. This has resulted in massive arrests in peasant and indigenous communities. Those who are not arrested are running scared seeking refuge with their close neighbor, Ecuador.

Journalists have almost stopped visiting the region and when they do, they are detained by the authorities. Recently correspondents from Britain, Italy and Ecuador were detained there.

Meanwhile, the cultivation of coca has spread from Colombia into Ecuador and agricultural land in Ecuador is being adversely affected by the military’s fumigation of illegal crops in Colombia. This is an issue on which the government of Ecuador has been silent.

To put it bluntly, the consequences of the combat against the insurgency and drug trafficking in Colombia is felt by Ecuador. And we Ecuadorians remain calm, as if nothing were happening at our doorstep, as if we weren’t picking up the scent of the conflict.