Cenepa War - Aftermath

Aftermath

By the beginning of March 1995, the MOMEP observers had entered the area and began to supervise the separation of forces. In accordance with the Treaty of Itamaraty and the Declaration of Montevideo, the Ecuadorians began to withdraw all their units to the base of Coangos, while the Peruvians were to do the same to PV-1. From there, troops would be extracted according to a schedule implement by the MOMEP. All combatants were withdrawn from the disputed area by May 5, 1995. A demilitarized zone came into effect on August 4 of the same year. Ecuador and Peru went on to negotiate the final demarcation of the border, in a lengthy process marked by one crisis after another, with a total war almost erupting in August 1998. Finally, on October 26, 1998, in Brasília, Jamil Mahuad, President of Ecuador, and Alberto Fujimori, President of Peru, along with the Presidents of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile; and a personal representative of the President of the United States of America, signed a Presidential Act, which proclaimed "the definitive resolution of the border disputes between the two nations".

In a decision that certain political sectors on both sides took as a setback, the Guarantors of the Rio Protocol ruled that the border of the undelimited zone was indeed the line of the Cordillera del Cóndor, as Peru had been claiming since the 1940s. While Ecuador had to give up its decades-old territorial claims to the eastern slopes of the Cordillera, as well as to the entire western area of Cenepa headwaters, Peru was compelled to give to Ecuador, in perpetual lease but without sovereignty, one square kilometer of its territory, in the area where the Ecuadorian base of Tiwinza — focal point of the war — had been located within Peruvian soil. The final border demarcation came into effect on May 13, 1999.