Ecuador, Peru Agree to Meet With Mediators : South America: Quito reports cease-fire reached to end violent clashes in disputed border area.

LIMA, Peru —  Peru and Ecuador agreed Monday to discuss their bloody border dispute with mediators from the United States and three other countries.

The Ecuadorean Foreign Ministry reported early today that both sides had agreed to a cease-fire, beginning at 8 a.m., but there was no confirmation from Peru, which had officially ignored Ecuador’s calls for a cease-fire on Monday.

A Peruvian Foreign Ministry source said Monday that Peru would not agree to a cease-fire unless Ecuador pulled out of the disputed territory, a remote and heavily forested strip of land believed to contain oil and mineral wealth.

“Ecuador claims the fighting is in its territory, and Peru says, ‘On the contrary, it’s our territory,’ ” the source said. Peru is trying to expel Ecuadorean troops from the area, which has been a subject of dispute since a 1941 war between the two countries.

The 1942 Rio de Janeiro Protocol officially ended the war, but the boundary between the two countries has never been accepted by Ecuador, despite the urging of the protocol’s guarantors, or mediators--Argentina, Brazil, Chile and the United States.

Peru and Ecuador accepted an invitation to send Foreign Ministry officials to a meeting of the four guarantor countries today in Rio de Janeiro. The Ecuadorean statement announcing the cease-fire agreement credited it to mediation from the guarantor countries.

Peru had proposed a meeting of the Ecuadorean and Peruvian deputy foreign ministers. The Foreign Ministry source said Monday that Ecuador did not respond officially but that Ecuadorean President Sixto Duran Ballen’s call for a cease-fire was “a way of responding.”

On Monday, speaking to students outside the presidential palace in Quito, Duran Ballen repeated that Ecuador is ready to accept an “unconditional” cease-fire, and he demanded that Peru do the same. The students chanted, “We want arms.”

The Vatican said Monday that Pope John Paul II has sent telegrams to both countries asking them to stop fighting. The Pope’s mediation in a border dispute between Chile and Argentina is credited with keeping those two countries from going to war in 1978.

Hostilities between Peru and Ecuador broke out Thursday when, according to Peru, Ecuadorean troops attacked four Peruvian border posts with helicopters, planes and mortars. The four posts are scattered along a 50-mile stretch of disputed borderland in the Cordillera del Condor, an Andean range nearly 600 miles northeast of Lima.

Ecuador says the fighting started after repeated incursions by Peruvian troops into Ecuadorean lands near the Cenepa River.

Ecuador called Peru’s operations in the area over the weekend a “massive offensive.” Peruvian television reporters in the jungle town of Bagua, a staging area for Peru’s troops, said they saw helicopters ferrying about 600 soldiers to the border and ambulances rushing wounded combatants to an airstrip.

On Monday, radio stations reported a lull in the fighting.

A Peruvian military communique distributed Monday confirmed that Ecuador had shot down one of Peru’s Russian-made MI-8 helicopters, killing five crew members. There was no Peruvian confirmation of Ecuador’s claim that it had downed a second Peruvian helicopter.

The communique also said Peruvian soldiers had expelled Ecuadorean troops from a border post called Cueva de los Tallos on Sunday.

The Peruvian military, however, neither confirmed nor denied official Ecuadorean reports that at least 27 Peruvian soldiers and four Ecuadoreans had been killed in the hostilities by Monday.

The Associated Press said that unofficial reports from the battle area put the death toll at more than 20 Peruvians and 30 Ecuadoreans.

Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori spent Monday huddled with his Joint Chiefs of Staff after traveling to military staging areas in northern Peru over the weekend. Fujimori, who is running for reelection in April, earlier had described the fighting as “skirmishes.”

The U.S. Embassy in Lima denied an official Ecuadorean statement saying that Peru had been using American helicopters supplied for Peruvian anti-drug operations.

Few Peruvian analysts predict that the clashes will escalate into war. The anniversary of the Rio Protocol signing was Jan. 29.

“Every January this problem flares up,” Obando said.