Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa may have received as much as $400,000 from Colombian guerrillas and their drug trafficking allies for his 2006 presidential campaign, a U.K. think tank concluded in a report released Tuesday.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies based its conclusion on a two-year study of a treasure trove of information found in the computers of the late Raul Reyes, a top leader of Colombia’s communist FARC guerrillas. Mr. Reyes was killed when his camp in Ecuador was attacked in a controversial cross border raid by Colombian soldiers in 2008.

Much of the information released Tuesday was previously known, including indications that the FARC had contributed $100,000 to Mr. Correa’s 2006 campaign. At the time of the initial release, Mr. Correa heatedly denied any involvement with the FARC, as did Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez, who according to the documents released shortly after Mr. Reyes was killed, had a close relationship with the FARC.

On Tuesday, Kintto Lucas, Ecuador’s deputy foreign minister, rejected the institute’s report, which adds new details to the alleged relationship between the guerrillas, Mr. Correa and Mr. Chávez.

“We reject as false the alleged involvement of the president…with the FARC,” Mr. Lucas said in an interview. “We don’t know to what extent the computers are an invention of interested parties, of Colombian or U.S. intelligence. Who can tell us that those computers weren’t planted?”

In London, the Venezuelan embassy issued a communiqué Tuesday saying the report was a “dodgy dossier.”

‘If somebody in the the name of the Rafael Correa campaign asked the FARC for money, then they were defrauded, because we have never received Money from the FARC,” said Mr. Correa at a news conference in Guayaquil. “This citizen—Rafael Correa—has never in his life known anybody from the FARC.”

The 2008 attack on Mr. Reyes’ camp led Venezuela and Ecuador to break relations with Colombia amidst talk of war. At the time, the Colombian government released a number of the documents found in Mr. Reyes’ computers which showed a close alliance between Mr. Chávez and the guerrillas. Among other things, the emails showed that Mr. Chávez and some of his top military and intelligence officials had promised to provide $300 million to the FARC fighters, political support as well as help in obtaining weapons including shoulder-fired missiles. Based on the Reyes documents, the U.S. put two top Venezuelan military officials and the just resigned interior minister on a blacklist for dealing in arms and cocaine with the FARC, considered by the U.S. and the European Union to be a terrorist organization.

On Tuesday, the report said it did not know whether Mr. Chávez ever delivered the money or the missiles.

The documents released in 2008 also showed a surprisingly close relationship between the FARC and Mr. Correa, who had been elected president two years earlier. One email sent to Mr. Reyes from the FARC’s legendary founder and leader, Manuel Marulanda, said the guerrilla’s ruling secretariat had agreed that commanders of several FARC fronts would pool resources to provide Mr. Correa’s emissaries with $100,000 in campaign funds.

The report released Tuesday cites another email written the next day by Mr. Reyes to the secretariat informing them that friends of the FARC’s 48th front, which operates in Colombia just across from Ecuador’s border, had collected another $300,000 for “the same campaign.”

Based on the electronic documents and other evidence, the institute believes the “friends” referred to in the email are three alleged Ecuadorian drug-dealing brothers, Jefferson, Miguel and Edison Ostaiza, who it says worked closely with the FARC. Jefferson is a fugitive. Miguel and Edison were convicted of money laundering in 2010.

The release of the report come as Colombia’s new president Juan Manuel Santos, is working hard to rebuild Colombia’s often stormy relationships with Ecuador and Venezuela.

As part of this continuing diplomatic rapprochement, Mr. Santos on Monday extradited Walid Makled, a Venezuelan who allegedly was once one of the world’s top drug traffickers, to Caracas. The extradition to Venezuela was a disappointment to Washington which hoped that Mr. Makled would be extradited to the U.S. The alleged drug trafficker is believed to have a trove of first-hand information about the relationships between a score of Venezuelan generals, the FARC and drug traffickers.

Interviewed on a Bogota radio station, Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin said she had discussed the report with her Venezuelan counterpart and both had agreed “it was time to turn the page.”

She also said she hoped the report would not harm newly Colombia’s newly revived relations with its two neighbors.

Source: Wall Street Journal