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Colombian-Venezuelan guerrillas: how the Colombian migrated to Venezuela
President Gustavo Petro has presented Colombia with a tantalizing vision of “total peace”: a negotiated end to all the armed conflicts that have plagued the country for generations. The most sensible on his list is the National Liberation Army (ELN). ).
The prospect of a demobilized former guerrilla (Petro who was once a member of the M19 insurgent organization) who rose to the presidency by winning the polls by convincing Colombia’s last primary insurgency to lay down its arms and peacefully pursue its political goals is appealing. And it is a vision to which the ELN leaders have publicly adhered.
“We also feel for the execution of this mandate of adjustments in Colombia, adding that there is peace,” ELN negotiating leader Israel Ramirez, alias “Pablo Beltran,” told EFE in September in an interview republished by Colombia’s El Tiempo.
But the obstacles Petro faces are many. And among the important highs, there is one that may escape its control: Colombia’s troubled neighbor, Venezuela.
SEE ALSO: ELN as Colombian-Venezuelan Army
The ELN is no longer just a Colombian group. Today, it is a binational group, and the security, criminal wealth, military, and political alliances that the Venezuelan regime gives to the guerrillas are a waste for peace in Colombia. And while the Venezuelan government has so far expressed itself for a renewed peace process, the role it will play is far from clear, as links between the guerrillas and the Venezuelan state have also helped the autocratic regime of President Nicolás Maduro consolidate its power.
“For the next Colombian government, any peace agreement will have to go through Venezuela, and this will have an effect on binational and diplomatic relations,” said Charles Larratt-Smith, an educator and co-author of the study “Why Is It So Complicated to Negotiate with the ELN?
“As long as the ELN is allowed to function in Venezuelan territory, there will be no peace. “
In the six decades since the ELN revolution began, seven other Colombian presidents have tried to negotiate with the insurgent group, but none have reached an agreement with the guerrillas. While every failure is unique, in each case, negotiators struggled to triumph over many of the same obstacles Petro faces today.
The rebels’ demands are complex and, in the past, have expanded beyond express problems such as poverty and underdevelopment and even major political adjustments in Colombia’s political and economic model.
The negotiations are also confusing due to the nature of the ELN. The organization is not a rigidly hierarchical and centrally commanded insurgency, but a federation of semi-autonomous regional networks known as the War Fronts. The ELN’s decision-making procedure demands that these fractured fronts succeed in reaching consensus for primary decisions.
In addition to those long-standing obstacles, Petro will also have to triumph over the legacy of the failed 2016 peace accords with the ELN’s rebel cousins, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC).
The failure of the State to deliver on its promises of rural progress and assistance to demobilized combatants to reintegrate safely into society has eroded the Colombian State’s acceptance of reality and promise.
“One of the difficult situations now is why would the ELN do everything the Colombian state proposes when it has realized how it has largely failed to make significant progress with the demobilized communities [FARC]?” said Mathew Charles, a journalist and educator at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá who studies the dynamics of crime in Colombia.
The state’s inability to occupy territories left by the FARC in the demobilization process has also created a vacuum in the underworld, which the ELN has filled in many places, taking control of ex-FARC territories and corrupt economies. This strengthening has replaced the balance of power for any negotiation.
“The FARC arrived at the negotiating table in Havana at a time of military and political decline, while the ELN is on the rise,” said Luis Trejos, a professor at the University of the North of Barranquilla and an expert on the confrontation in Colombia.
Perhaps the maximum detail of this building did not happen at all in Colombia but in Venezuela.
Two of the ELN’s toughest and most bellicose fronts, the Eastern War Front (Eastern War Front) and the Northeastern War Front (Northeastern War Front), have long used Venezuela as a safe haven and source of income. The expansion has seen them take the final steps toward binational groups.
With the help of their relationships with local political leaders and the military in Venezuela, the fronts now operate with near-total impunity along much of the Colombian-Venezuelan border and beyond. smuggling, while creating socio-political networks within communities and alliances of the army with Venezuelan security forces.
“As long as they continue to consolidate their strength and expand into Venezuela, the eastern war front, at least, will have even less incentive to negotiate,” said Sebastian Zuleta, an expert on peace negotiations and the Colombian conflict, who has the Colombian government’s government in talks with the ELN.
Both the eastern and northeastern war fronts hesitated beyond attempts at peace negotiations with the ELN. Both fronts voted against peace talks at the ELN’s 50th anniversary convention in 2015. And the Eastern War Front’s top vital commander, Gustavo Aníbal Giraldo, alias “Pablito,” dealt the mortal blow to a peace process that began in 2017 when he allegedly ordered a bomb attack on a police academy in Bogotá that killed 22 cadets and wounded 70 others in January 2019. without the wisdom of other ELN national leaders.
Since the FARC’s demobilization, its developing strength along the Venezuelan border has turned these radical fronts into the richest and most ideologically influential factions within the ELN. They now have little explanation of why they submit as they develop, regardless of the agreement reached through the leaders.
“There are many hardcore commanders, especially Pablito, who will never settle for the situations that the Colombian government suggests or applies because they now have their assignment on the border with Venezuela,” Larratt-Smith said.
If the ELN is now a binational group, it is not a binational insurgency. Far from attempting to overthrow the Venezuelan state, the guerrillas have acted as a paramilitary force supporting the Maduro government. So any new peace procedure will have to involve the Venezuelan government.
Petro turns out to recognize this. On September 13, he sent an official letter to Maduro that was not easy for Venezuela to endorse peace talks with the ELN. Maduro agreed within hours, noting on a television program that “the peace of Colombia is the peace of Venezuela. “
Petro’s resolve to involve Venezuela in the procedure mirrors FARC procedure when former President Hugo Chavez was a key player in bringing the insurgents to the negotiating table in 2012. And Chavez died less than a year after the talks, Maduro continued to help peace.
This was due, at least in part, to shrewd political calculation. For years, the Chávez government had maintained relations with the FARC not only out of ideological sympathy, but also as a strategy to undermine a hostile Colombia and its partisan military, the United States. In 2012, a change of government in Colombia led to a thaw in relations and a change in priorities. At the same time, Venezuela was willing to dispel any foreign accusations of international terrorism.
SEE ALSO: How Many Colombian Fighters Are There in Venezuela?
There are striking similarities today. In recent years, relations between Colombia and Venezuela have reached new lows, as the Venezuelan government has harbored serious fears of a US invasion introduced from Colombia to remove Maduro from power.
Once again, the Venezuelan government had strategic merit in allowing the guerrillas to operate in the border region. This was laid bare in Colombian intelligence reports published through Noticias RCN in July 2022, which InSight Crime could not independently verify, which reported how the ELN had drawn up plans to deploy as a paramilitary force to protect the Maduro regime in the event of a paramilitary force from a foreign invasion.
However, with the arrival of Petro, diplomatic relations between the two countries were repaired for the first time since 2019. There have even been reparation efforts with the United States, which although timid and limited, are at least a sign that army action is no longer underway. The table.
“Once Colombia convinces Venezuela that it does not put its sovereignty at risk, Venezuelan cooperation with the ELN will come,” Trejos said.
With these geopolitical changes, the existing climate may favor Venezuela for a peace process. However, Maduro’s internal political calculations are very different from those of Chávez in 2012.
“Now it’s much more confusing because the government of Venezuela and those armed teams want others,” Zuleta said.
This mutual desire stems from the way guerrillas have helped Maduro cling to power, through economic, social and political crises. Today, the guerrillas continue to help the state.
The Venezuelan military continues to cooperate with the ELN. The guerrillas partnered with security forces to attack enemies who represented security or impeded regime targets, such as Colombia’s corrupt defense force, the Rastrojos, renegade FARC dissidents from the 10th Front, and Bolivar’s mining gangs. .
The threats opposed to Maduro have been political and military. The guerrillas have also helped in this area, especially in the border region, which is a classic hotbed of aid for Venezuela’s political opposition. There, the guerrillas interfered in the elections, according to various sources. InSight Crime media and resources on the ground. In spaces where the opposition won elections, the ELN’s presence is strong enough to prevent opposition administrations from governing freely.
“The municipal government has to paint with the guerrillas. If you are from the opposition, you have to conform and respect their regulations and norms,” said a local government official from a border municipality in Tachira, who asked to remain anonymous for security. reasons, he told InSight Crime.
Venezuela’s economic decline poses a more pernicious but ultimately even more complicated risk than direct political and military risks to Maduro’s government.
Venezuela’s economy still suffers from years of hyperinflation, endemic corruption and punitive foreign sanctions. This has left the government on the verge of bankruptcy, hungry for hard currency and unable to pay decent salaries to the security forces and branches of the state.
Once again, the ELN’s criminal activities have represented a respite from these challenges.
Guerrilla territories in the mineral-rich states of Amazonas and Bolivar are helping the state reclaim a percentage of the gold produced in illegal mining operations. The foreign gold industry helped the government circumvent U. S. sanctions. revenue.
The guerrillas also share profits from mining, as well as other corrupt economies, such as contraband, fuel smuggling and drug trafficking, with Venezuelan security forces, according to several existing and former security force officials, local and national political resources, experts, investigators and network resources. in the border region, who spoke to InSight Crime on condition of anonymity.
Since the government has the resources to pay decent salaries to the security forces, it allows the police and army of all ranks to increase their income with this dirty money to retain them.
“[The army and the guerrillas] have an agreement, almost a corrupt business that they run together on the border,” said Romel Guzamana, an indigenous representative of the National Assembly of Amazonas state.
The state’s alliances with the ELN have helped Maduro weather the storms of Venezuela’s political and economic crisis and he has now reached what is arguably his highest position of solid strength in years. The opposition is weakened and divided, foreign relations are thawing and Venezuela’s economy has stabilized and experienced limited growth. For Maduro, keeping an ELN active would likely outweigh the benefits of facilitating a peace process.
“There is a parasitic and symbiotic courtship between the Maduro government and the ELN, and that is going to be very difficult to undo,” Zuleta said.
For now, it is increasingly likely that a new ELN process will be initiated and that Venezuela is offering its audience to Colombian President Petro.
The doubts that weigh maximum are the sincerity of Maduro’s participation in the upcoming peace process, and how the mutual dependence of the Venezuelan State and the now binational eastern and northeastern war fronts of the ELN will affect the fronts and the will of participation of the Venezuelan government. completely.
While Maduro might be convinced that negotiating peace is again politically more favorable than allowing war, he might realize that the ELN is now too entrenched in Venezuela and has too much difficulty for him to control.
“If for some reason the time comes when they [the ELN and the Venezuelan regime] no longer want others, then I don’t see the ELN raising its tents and its weapons and returning to Colombia. He’s going to stay there, Zuleta said.
The Venezuelan military has already learned painful classes about fighting entrenched guerrilla groups. When the army drove the FARC’s tenth dissident front out of Apure in early 2021, the crusade ended with a humiliating retreat. And the ELN, much larger and more powerful, would make a much more formidable opponent.
“What would happen with the 10th Front would be child’s play to what would happen if they confronted the ELN,” Zuleta said.
That alone could be enough to dissuade Maduro from backing Petro’s peace plans with the ELN, or at least hedge his bets by betting on both sides. For Petro and Maduro, as well as Colombia and Venezuela, the stakes are high.
“I that Venezuela is going to be at a crossroads, if it supports Colombia in the search for a negotiated solution to the confrontation with the ELN and the procedure does not prosper, then perhaps it will pay the value of an armed confrontation in Venezuela,” he said. Trejos, who has extensively studied the procedures of armed shock and peace in Colombia.
The ELN’s internal divisions, the rise of Colombian elements in Venezuela, and its developing Venezuelan electorate, combined with the symbiotic relationship with the Maduro regime, mean that a quick solution to peace negotiations remains a remote prospect.
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