Colombia on the brink: ELN guerrilla group prepares for return to conflict | Colombia

As the boat approached the riverbank, camouflaged figures watched from the tree line.

Behind them, within the dim understory of the jungle, a commander of the National Liberation Army (ELN) sat together with his rifle on his lap, amid the excitement and whine of bugs and the thwacks of machetes on bamboo as his troops arrange camp, hidden from enemy drones.

Colombia’s 62-year previous armed battle is on the point of a brand new chapter, with the nation’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, who takes workplace on Friday, vowing an finish to peace talks and launch a brand new navy offensive. Colombia’s final guerrilla group says it’s prepared for no matter would possibly come.

“Where we can go on the offensive, we will,” stated the commander of the group’s Western War Front, who goes by the moniker Yerson. “And if the ELN leadership says we have to carry out a military offensive at the national level, we will. Attacks in cities, in the countryside, wherever.”

Yerson and his troops have been deep within the Pacific division of Chocó, in an ELN stronghold accessible solely after hours of river journey, the place humid warmth soaks via the cloud cowl.

Occasional communities, every a line of wood shacks on stilts, broke the dense forest on the banks. Giant mining barges have been moored on the river, with diggers clawing up the riverbed to extract the particles of gold it comprises.

The ELN and rival armed teams struggle to manage the San Juan River, its assets and its inhabitants. At one level within the journey, armed males from the Gulf Clan, a violent paramilitary group, stopped the Guardian’s boat to query the passengers, earlier than promising to liberate the realm from the ELN.

Yerson was unfazed. “All of the ELN territories are being invaded by bands of mercenaries,” he stated. “They are very violent, but they are not disputing political power.”

Colombia’s battle started within the Sixties, rooted in excessive land inequality and exclusionary politics. Leftwing guerrillas emerged to problem the state, battling authorities forces later allied with rightwing paramilitaries, forerunners of the Gulf Clan. Money from cocaine trafficking fuelled all sides. The battle has killed lots of of 1000’s of individuals and displaced hundreds of thousands.

Along with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), the ELN was a very powerful of the guerrilla teams. Founded in 1964, it fused Marxism-Leninism with Che Guevara’s foco principle – the concept that a small armed band in a distant rural space can ultimately topple the state – and Liberation theology, which framed the battle towards poverty and oppression as an expression of Christian religion.

In their pursuit of revolution, the 2 teams have carried out killings and kidnappings, and compelled the confinement and displacement of civilian populations.

The Farc demobilised in 2016 after hanging a peace cope with the Colombian state, however the ELN says its members will solely lay down arms after the nation’s political and financial system has been reworked.

“The Farc surrendered in exchange for nothing,” stated Yerson, including that subsequent presidents have failed to completely implement the peace deal, whereas former Farc combatants have been killed.

Gustavo Petro, a leftist who was a guerrilla with the defunct M-19 within the Nineteen Eighties, was elected president in 2022 on a promise of “total peace”, vowing to make good on the Farcdeal and negotiate with all of Colombia’s remaining armed teams on the left and proper.

But after a number of years, nearly all of the talks – together with these with the biggest teams – the ELN, the Gulf Clan and Farc dissidents who refused to demobilise in 2016 – both stalled or collapsed.

Yerson rejected the concept that the election of Colombia’s first leftist president meant that the ELN’s targets may very well be achieved via the present political system.

“They handed out lands [to the poor]. They did a kind of pension reform. They were looking for ways to improve healthcare,” he stated. “But in the end these are small things. They don’t help with the popular awakening.”

In Yerson’s telling, Petro was allowed to take energy by the “Colombian oligarchy”, which wanted to pacify the individuals after an explosion of inequality protests in 2019 and 2021, however knew he “was never going to undertake fundamental reforms, that he could be controlled”.

Colombia’s political system “is not the democracy it claims to be”, he stated. “That is where the trap is.”

Now the ELN faces a really completely different proposition within the type of De la Espriella, a Trump-admiring millionaire who rose to prominence as a legal lawyer representing accused leaders of the AUC, a rightwing paramilitary group that fought the guerrillas and killed civilians accused of collaborating with them..

De la Espriella has given Colombia’s armed teams a month to undergo him or face the results, whereas promising to deepen safety cooperation with the US and construct mega-prisons impressed by the Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele.

Security analysts, nevertheless, say armed teams have gathered energy and assets lately. The ELN has about 6,300 members between armed fighters and unarmed assist, unfold throughout Colombia and Venezuela.

The 60 or so fighters within the camp have been evenly cut up between women and men, indigenous and Afro-Colombian members. “The majority [of the ELN] has always been the poor, the lowest down,” stated Yerson. “Here, as Chocó is more Afro-Indigenous, that’s what we are.”

Each of them had a contemporary assault rifle, both an AK-47 or an AR-15, some with “Made in USA” stamped on the physique. One additionally had a .50 calibre sniper rifle, the bullets of which might punch via automobiles, whereas one other flew a drone.

The camp was deep in ELN territory, they usually have been relaxed. When somebody took out a conveyable speaker and commenced to play vallenatos – in style Colombian folksongs – they left their rifles resting towards timber or slung them over their backs and paired as much as dance, all of a sudden wanting just like the younger Colombians they’re.

Various teams, together with the UN and Human Rights Watch, have accused the ELN of recruiting minors – however Yerson stated their guidelines solely enable individuals over 16 to hitch.

It was unattainable to confirm particulars of his troops’ backgrounds, as that they had been instructed to not talk about something delicate. Yerson offered two girls to be interviewed in his presence, who spoke concerning the hardship of their lives earlier than becoming a member of the ELN, however struggled to reply questions, apparently afraid of claiming the fallacious factor.

Yerson himself described the ELN as “a life choice” for Colombia’s poor, who’ve few choices. “Maybe that’s why they join, but once they are here they come to understand why we are fighting,” he stated.

The ELN capabilities by taxing “every commercial entity” within the territory it controls, and in Chocó which means unlawful gold mining and logging are their key sources of revenue, stated Yerson. It additionally carries out kidnappings for ransom.

“We are an embryonic state, and every state takes taxes,” he stated. “If they can strangle us economically, we will cease to exist as a rebel organisation.”

Yerson claimed coca cultivation has disappeared in ELN territory in Chocó. He denied the group was concerned within the drug trafficking, however acknowledged it taxes the enterprise like another.

The US, which has given its navy a brand new function to tackle “narcoterrorism” throughout the Americas, won’t assume a lot of that distinction.

“The question of guilt doesn’t matter to the US. What matters to them are interests,” stated Yerson. “We are the only guerrilla group with political principles left standing in Colombia and the world. We will always be something they want to destroy.”

He says the ELN won’t merely be on the defensive, however will strike again the place it could actually. A automotive bomb attributed to the group exploded exterior a police station close to the border with Venezuela final week, injuring 12 law enforcement officials and three civilians, and drone assaults have change into widespread.

“They have to be legitimate objectives. We don’t put car bombs where the civil population will die,” stated Yerson, who pointed to the 2019 suicide automotive bombing of a police academy in Bogotá that killed 22 as a mannequin. “The comrades could go and make kamikaze attacks of that impact.”

Despite the election of De la Espriella and different rightwing leaders throughout the continent, Yerson was adamant that the ELN was not dropping the ideological battle.

Voters are being deceived, he stated, earlier than quoting the South American revolutionary chief Simón Bolívar: “An ignorant people is the blind instrument of its own destruction.

“The ideological battle is not being lost,” he repeated, as if irritated by the phrase. “We are on the right side of history.”

Asked whether or not Colombia was any nearer to the ELN’s targets after a long time of battle, Yerson was uncertain: “I don’t know. But I can tell you that the only way to win things for the people is through the struggle,” he stated. “We’ve been in the struggle for 62 years, and there will be many more.”