Ecuadoreans Verbally Assault U.S., Saying Washington Sides With Peru : South America: Some charges prove false. Public rallies round the flag with telethon, marches and special war taxes.

As Ecuador and Peru fight on their border, the United States is catching a shower of verbal flak here. Politicians and pundits of various stripes charge that Washington is not doing enough to stop Peruvian aggression, or that it has been pressuring Ecuador to accept cease-fire terms that would undermine the country’s territorial claims.

Leading a demonstration this week outside the U.S. Embassy here, two leftist members of Congress loudly accused the United States of favoring Peru in the bloody dispute. Then, the legislators later claimed indignantly, American diplomats refused to let them into the embassy to talk things over.

A U.S. spokesman gave a different version.

“We were all waiting to receive them, and security was told to let them in,” he said. “They didn’t attempt to come in.”

Earlier in the week, Ecuadorean media reported that Alexander Watson, undersecretary of state for inter-American affairs, was under the negative influence of a Peruvian wife. Responding to the reports, the U.S. Embassy circulated Watson’s resume, which included the information that his wife, Judith Dawson Tuttle, was born in Boston.

Watson, a career diplomat, has been the chief U.S. mediator in so-far-unsuccessful peace negotiations between Ecuador and Peru. The fact that he is a former ambassador to Peru has also been cited by Ecuadoreans who question U.S. neutrality.

*

Demonstrations in front of the U.S. Embassy are only a small part of the public outpouring over the border conflict.

Ecuadorean civic groups, business federations and other organizations have lined up squarely against the Peruvian “aggressors.” Daily rallies and marches cheer on Ecuador’s fighting forces.

A telethon last weekend to collect money for the war effort raised nearly $2 million. And few have openly complained about newly imposed war taxes, including a 2% levy on motor vehicles and the deduction of two days’ pay from the checks of government employees.

The Ecuadorean news media have lent enthusiastic support to the Quito government. Though no war has been declared, and the fighting countries maintain full diplomatic relations, radio stations frequently refer to Peru as “the enemy.” Television stations run spots with songs calling for national unity.

“To the invaders, we are saying ‘No,’ ” say the proud lyrics of one TV song.

But Peruvian military authorities are not letting television cameras into the combat zones. One American TV producer complained that crews taken near the fighting find themselves stuck there for three days or more but get no combat footage. “No one’s getting in,” he said.

U.S. involvement in the dispute goes back 53 years. The United States was one of four “guarantors” of the 1942 Protocol of Rio de Janeiro, a pact that outlined boundaries between Ecuador and Peru after a 1941 territorial war.

In the protocol negotiations, U.S. pressure helped persuade Ecuador to renounce huge territorial claims in the Amazon Basin, according to many historians and diplomatic observers.

*

Ironically, it was a U.S. aerial survey in 1947 that confirmed the existence of the Cenepa River, a previously unmapped Amazon tributary that is now at the heart of the dispute.

Ecuador says that, because the Rio Protocol was based on maps that did not show the Cenepa, the borderline cannot be executed as the document prescribed.

The two countries are fighting over a small patch of forested hills, a few hundred square miles at the most. But on an official 1992 map of Ecuador, more than 100,000 square miles of Peru’s territory in the Amazon Basin is colored green, as if it belonged to Ecuador. The green meets the yellow of Peru at the Upper Amazon River.

It is a fantasy map. In reality, Ecuadorean territory is far removed from the Amazon.

Starting in grade school, Ecuadoreans are taught that Peru dismembered their country and that Ecuador is “an Amazon country” and always will be.

“They tell them about the lost territory, about their Amazon rights and about the enemy to the south,” a South American diplomat said. “This is Ecuador’s great cause.”

Even forest natives in the remote hinterlands, previously at odds with the government, have caught the nationalist spirit. A Shuar leader, wearing a feather headband at a Quito news conference the other day, said native warriors were prepared to shrink Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori’s head in a ritual called tsuntsa.

“I want to warn Fujimori that the Shuar people are able to rise up and go in, infiltrating, to do tsuntsa to him as our forefathers used to do,” said Guillermo Tsensu, vice president of the Shuar federation.