The developments raised tensions in a region that has been on edge in the several months since Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez had a bitter falling out. Reyes, the nom de guerre of Luis Edgar Devia Silva, was the second-ranking commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

In a late Sunday news conference, Colombian National Police director Oscar Naranjo said that files in three laptop computers recovered in a jungle camp one mile inside Ecuador, where Reyes’ body was found, show that the rebel met January 18 and January 28 with Ecuadorean Interior Minister Gustavo Larrea to discuss several issues, including stationing army and police officers “who were not hostile to the FARC.” Naranjo also said documents show that Larrea and Reyes discussed a meeting between Reyes and President Rafael Correa in which Reyes’s “secure transport” would be guaranteed.

“The questions posed by these documents merit a response from Ecuador,” he said .

In a nationwide address late Sunday, Correa rejected Colombia’s apology for the incursion and said Uribe lied when he told him Saturday that the rebel leader and 16 other FARC members were killed in hot pursuit.

“They were massacred,” Correa told viewers.

The FARC, Colombia’s largest rebel group, has been locked in a 40-year war with that nation’s government. It holds 700 kidnapped hostages, a source of public outrage in Colombia.

Earlier Sunday, Ecuador said it was moving additional troops to defend its northeastern border with Colombia, expelled Colombia’s ambassador and recalled its own ambassador to Bogota. Saturday’s killing of Reyes was a “violation of territorial integrity and legal system of Ecuador,” a Foreign Ministry statement said.

Meanwhile, leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said he was sending 10 tank divisions and 10,000 troops to his country’s border with Colombia and mobilising fighter jets to defend against a possible incursion.

“God save us from war,” the leftist Chavez said in his weekly television address Sunday, after observing a moment of silence for Reyes.

The FARC, the nation’s largest rebel group, has always used the lightly patrolled jungle border areas of Ecuador and Venezuela to regroup and resupply. But aggressive military action ordered by Uribe in recent years has driven rebels over the borders.

The Colombian army killed Reyes in a mission that Colombia’s Defense Ministry said began on its side of the Putumayo River but ended about a mile inside Ecuador.

Experts in Venezuela and Colombia believe Chavez, a socialist, to be tolerant, even accommodating, of the Marxist FARC rebels, for whom he frequently expresses admiration. The FARC this year has released six of the hundreds of hostages it holds to Chavez representatives in Colombia.