Colombian Defense Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Wednesday that explosions at cocaine laboratories near the Ecuador border in January resulted in 14 fatalities, and that Colombian and Ecuadorean officials are jointly investigating whether any violation of sovereignty occurred.
Sanchez addressed the issue after Colombian President Gustavo Petro publicly accused Ecuador of actions that, he said, produced more than two dozen deaths in the border area. Petro earlier suggested that Ecuador had bombed Colombian territory and said 27 bodies were discovered, describing them as "charred". He did not present additional evidence or further information to support that claim.
Sanchez said a bomb recovered in Colombian territory appeared likely to belong to Ecuador's armed forces, and confirmed an ongoing collaborative review with Ecuadorean authorities into the events and circumstances surrounding the explosions.
Providing more detail on the casualties, Sanchez told journalists that 12 people in the border province of Nariño were killed on January 22. He added that two more people died under similar conditions at a second site on January 24. "The information we have at this moment is that those people died after being burned alive. The site where they died was a cocaine laboratory, and the causes and who was behind it are under investigation. Two other people died under similar conditions at another site on January 24," he said.
Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa rejected Petro's accusations. Noboa said Ecuador's forces had targeted drug traffickers inside Ecuador and that the locations struck were hideouts used by narco-terrorism groups, which he described as mostly of Colombian origin. Ecuador's defense ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
The developments follow an announcement by Ecuador of a two-week, large-scale security operation across four provinces on or near its Pacific coast, launched on Sunday to counter mounting gang violence. Quito has conducted repeated operations along its border with Colombia, a region the officials described as a significant transit area for drugs that are subsequently smuggled northward to the United States by sea.
This situation remains under investigation by authorities from both countries, with key questions focused on the provenance of the explosive device found in Colombia, the precise circumstances of the fatalities in January, and whether any cross-border actions constituted a breach of sovereignty.