PENPIX: Profiles of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador presidents

(Reuters) - Venezuela and Ecuador ordered troops to close in on neighboring Colombia after Colombian soldiers entered Ecuadorean territory on Saturday and killed a leftist rebel leader.

The death of the Colombian guerrilla commander sparked a crisis that Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez said could end in war. Ecuador President Rafael Correa, a Chavez ally, accused his conservative Colombian counterpart Alvaro Uribe of violating Ecuador's sovereignty.

Here are short profiles of the three leaders.

ALVARO URIBE

Uribe, 55, is Washington's chief ally in a left-tilting region where the Bush administration is not popular. He won reelection in 2006 after cutting crime and boosting economic growth with his U.S.-backed crackdown on communist insurgents.

The bespectacled lawyer is popular for insisting Colombia must militarily defeat the four-decade-old Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, rather than negotiating with it.

But his international standing has been hurt by a scandal in which some of his closest congressional allies are being investigated for links to right-wing paramilitary death squads.

Uribe's father was killed in a botched FARC kidnapping in the 1980s.

RAFAEL CORREA