Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos praised his country’s relationship with Ecuador during a visit of his Ecuadorean counterpart, Rafael Correa, to the border region on Monday. Santos specifically was positive about Correa’s support for ongoing peace talks with the country’s largest and oldest-living rebel group, the FARC.

Ecuador’s combative president is threatening to try to force the country’s newspapers to go all-digital as a way to save paper. Rafael Correa has long had a prickly relationship with Ecuador’s opposition-owned newspapers, and his Twitter statement Monday is a jab at papers backing a proposed referendum to block oil exploration in the pristine Yasuni national park.

U.S.-Ecuador relations have become tangled. In June, president Rafael Correa made headlines when he offered NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden political asylum. This was considered an attempt by Correa to demonstrate that he was not controlled by “el imperio” (the empire, as Washington is labeled by several left-leaning Latin American governments). But Quito ultimately withdrew its offer and, in baffling recent news, has hired a public relations firm, Van Scoyoc Associates (VSA), based in Washington, D.C., to improve its relations with the U.S. government.