QUITO—Ecuador said it captured five Colombian guerrillas as Latin American leaders gathered on Thursday for a summit that will be dominated by a regional crisis over a cross-border military raid by Colombia.
"In an operation by the armed forces, five presumed guerrillas were found. FARC guerrillas," Security Minister Gustavo Larrea told reporters.
The capture was made by a patrol in the Amazonian Sucumbios province on Ecuador's side of the border with Colombia, he said.
Colombia ignited regional tensions when it raided Ecuador's territory last weekend and killed more than 20 Marxist rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
Venezuela and Ecuador have moved troops to their borders with Colombia, and Venezuela has threatened to limit trade and investment ties with Bogota. Nicaragua joined Venezuela and Ecuador on Thursday in cutting off diplomatic relations with Colombia.
Colombia complains that its neighbors Ecuador and Venezuela -- both oil exporting nations run by leftists -- have protected FARC guerrillas whose group has killed thousands of Colombians over four decades.
Anti-U.S. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has led the left-tilting region in general condemnation of Colombia's violation of Ecuador's sovereignty.
The United States has backed Colombia, its closest South American ally and recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. aid for fighting guerrillas and the cocaine trade.
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, an ex-guerrilla whose country is in a territorial dispute with Colombia over small islands, said he was breaking off relations "in solidarity" with Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, who visited Nicaragua on Thursday before heading for Panama.
Ortega's move strengthened the leftist alliance that has formed around Ecuador and Venezuela and left their neighbor, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, increasingly isolated and under pressure to apologize.
"We are breaking with the terrorist politics that Alvaro Uribe's government is employing," Ortega said.
Mexico has been relatively quiet about the crisis but may be drawn into the fray as Ecuador's government said it was investigating whether Mexicans were among the more than 20 dead in the FARC camp.
The leaders of Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Venezuela and other Latin American countries were arriving on Thursday in the Dominican Republic for a Rio Group summit that had been planned long before the crisis.
Ecuador's Correa hopes to win an explicit condemnation there against Colombia.
"We want clear answers tomorrow," Correa said in Panama on Thursday, his sixth stop on a tour of the region to lobby against Uribe.
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