Off the Reuters wire, the following story:
Brazil's foreign minister on Monday condemned a Colombian military strike on rebels inside Ecuador and called on Bogota to offer an explicit apology.
"The territorial violation is very serious and needs to be condemned," Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said in Brasilia. "Brazil condemns any territorial violation."
Amorim also said the Colombian government should offer an "explicit" apology to contain the growing crisis prompted by the weekend raid, in which Colombian forces struck at a FARC rebel camp inside Ecuador.
More on the flip
I'm still thinking Colombia's raid was part of a broader Bushie strategy to clean up outstanding issues before they have to leave office, but Brazil's reaction makes it look like yet another foreign policy failure for the wizards in Washington.
Look at expert opinion cited in the WaPo this morning:
"This is a political, not a military reaction," said Adrian Bonilla, a professor of international relations at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, a university in Quito, Ecuador. "What is clear is that military, police, intelligence, and security cooperation between Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela are completely fractured at this moment"....
Myles Frechette, a former ambassador to Colombia who works as a consultant in Washington, said the Colombians probably weighed the strike on Devia against the potential fallout from going into Ecuador. But he said repairing the diplomatic damage would be a challenge.
"Uribe has got to go down there, meet with Correa, calm him down, and he's going to have Chávez fuming at the border," Frechette said. Uribe is "in a pickle, in the sense that diplomatically he's got to get himself out of this corner that he's got himself in."
Update 21:23
The crisis deepens, as Reuters now reports that Venezuela and Ecuador have moved to break diplomatic relations with Colombia.