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Over 100 people have been killed in an outbreak of guerrilla violence in Colombia, predominantly along the Venezuelan border, where thousands of people have been displaced by the worst fighting in years.
President Gustavo Petro on Monday declared a “state of emergency” in response to the violence and vowed “war” against the left-wing rebel National Liberation Army (ELN), which he blames for the breakdown of a fragile peace in the northeastern Catatumbo region.
AFP looks at the factors driving the conflict:
The mountains of the northeastern region of Catatumbo are at the center of the fast-escalating war between the ELN and breakaway members of the FARC Marxist rebel group that made peace with the state in 2016 after a half century of war.
FARC and the smaller ELN, a guerrilla group inspired by the Cuban revolution, coexisted and even cooperated for years in the region, according to Carlos Velandia, coordinator of the GISDE center for conflict studies at the National University of Colombia.
When FARC laid down its arms, ELN took advantage to expand its control over the cocaine-producing region and helped dissident FARC members, who rejected the peace deal, to rearm and regroup.
ELN commander Eliecer Erlinto Chamorro, who goes by the nom de guerre Antonio Garcia, claimed in an open letter on Telegram on Monday that the FARC dissidents betrayed that “solidarity” by threatening the ELN.
The head of the FARC dissidents, Andrey Avendano, rejected the allegation, accusing the ELN of the attempted “extermination” of his units.
Public Defender Iris Marin reported that the trigger for the outbreak in fighting was the massacre of a family last week in the Norte de Santander department of Catatumbo.
A businessman was shot dead on a highway along with his wife and six-month-old son in an attack she blamed on the ELN, but which ELN insists said was carried out by FARC dissidents in a “vile” attempt to smear his group.
So far, the ELN has taken most of the blame from public officials, with officials accusing the guerrillas of going “house to house” around the town of Tibu, killing people suspected of links to the FARC dissidents.
The group has also been accused of murdering a handful of signatories of the 2016 peace deal whom it accuses of collaborating with FARC dissidents.
Since the disbanding of FARC, a milestone in the hydra-headed war between the military, left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and drug cartels, the conflict has mutated from a “political-social armed conflict” to a turf war devoid of ideology, Velandia said.
In the near absence of state forces in the Catatumbo region, cocaine trafficking and extortion has thrived.
Gerson Arias, a researcher for the NGO Ideas for Peace, said he believed FARC dissidents had begun encroaching on areas where ELN controlled extortion rackets.
Experts also cite the dissidents’ seeming interest in signing a peace deal with Petro, at a time when peace talks between the government and ELN were sputtering, as a potential catalyst for the violence.
The ELN members “may be anticipating that there will be a disarmament” by the dissidents and are moving to try fill the void that would create, Colombian political scientist Jorge Mantilla said.
Elizabeth Dickinson, a Colombia analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank, believes that the ELN, which has rear bases in neighboring Venezuela, also wants to take control of the entire 2,200-kilometer (1,380-mile) Colombian-Venezuelan border.
Colombia’s intelligence services have for years warned that the ELN has support from the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whose disputed July re-election Petro has refused to recognize.
“Venezuela is an existential ally for the ELN,” Dickinson said.
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Publish date : 2025-01-20 10:41:00
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Author : theamericannews
Publish date : 2025-01-22 16:17:17
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