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.