By Marisol Gómez Giraldo, CAMBIOColombia, May 4, 2025
https://cambiocolombia.com/conflicto/la-extincion-de-la-guerrilla-en-colombia
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
President Gustavo Petro, who had recognized the ELN and the FARC Dissidents as political groups, said that these two groups have now made the transfer to being mafia organizations, subject to the Mexican drug cartels. The ELN, at its conference last year, even renounced its intention to seize central political power.
On at least three occasions so far in 2025, President Gustavo Petro has referred to the ELN as a “narco-troop”, like a group of “mafiosos”, “bandits” who obey the orders that come from transnational criminals. And he’s been talking about the FARC Dissidents in similar terms.
These references would not seem strange if it hadn’t been the President himself who, through different resolutions, had recognized them as political organizations at the beginning of his term when he was accentuating his project of “total peace”.
If the ELN is now not an insurgency struggling for political and social vindication and has turned into a narco-criminal organization as Petro suggests, the guerrillas in Colombia are over and done, or at least they are on a path to extinction. That’s if we consider that this armed group that arose 60 years ago is the only survivor of the groups that surged with the intention of taking power by the use of their weapons.
The President’s new view of the ELN and the Dissidents began to be explicit after the escalation of the violence that exploded in the Catatumbo region right after the beginning of January because of war between the armed group that Antonio García directs from Venezuela and the 33rd Front of the Dissidents that were formerly FARC guerrillas.
The loss of a shipment of cocaine and the interest of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro in maintaining a “cushion of security” against an eventual invasion by the United States must have started those battles, according to later military intelligence sources and sources in the Colombian government.
The combat in the area has not ceased. Up to last March, they had caused 100 deaths and the displacement of at least 61,000 people, according to the Ombudsman’s Office.
“What happened in Catatumbo is nothing but a demonstration of the insurgent guerrillas’ turning into narco-armed organizations,” is exactly what President Petro said last January 20.
Then in February the President was much more emphatic and he said, “The Sinaloa cartel is the current boss of the ELN.” And in March, after the attack in Cauca by the Dissidents led by alias Iván Mordisco against a military patrol that was carrying material for building a bridge at the Micay Canyon, he said that those Dissidents were a “private army of the Mexican drug trafficking cartels”. Five soldiers had been killed in the attack.
It’s possible that these statements by Petro were influenced by the profound disappointment that he must have felt when the groups slammed the door on the dialogs he offered. However, the fights to the death between the ELN and the FARC Dissidents for control of the areas where the coca crop stretches for miles are absolutely real.
Tibú for example, where there has been fierce combat between the ELN and the Dissidents, is the municipality with the most extensive coca crops in the world: 23,000 hectares according to the most recent report of the United Nations Office for the Control of Drugs and Crime (UNODC in Spanish).
The ELN renounces its intention to take power
The struggle for revenue from crime, besides the relationship with the Mexican cocaine cartels that Petro now imputes to the ELN and the FARC Dissidents, are putting on the table the debate about whether guerrillas still exist in Colombia, or whether these organizations that claim to be political are nothing more than armed groups that are fighting for control of the drug trafficking business, illegal mining, and extortion.
Eduardo Pizarro, one of the experts on conflict who has dug the deepest in his writings on the guerrillas and armed groups in this country, states that in spite of the fact that, “the ELN and small segments of the FARC Dissidents are retaining their political discourse, we can now talk about the guerrillas in the sense that they have ended the guerrilla projects that were trying to gain central power.”
In the case of the ELN, that refers to the strategic reassessment that this group made of itself in its sixth and most recent conference, which took place in mid-2024.
At that meeting, explains Pizarro, it ruled out turning itself into a political party, and redefined itself as one more component of the struggle of the “global South” against domination, and as a binational group for the defense of the perspective of Nicolás Maduro.
That has remained in evidence with the expansion of the group at the border between Colombia and Venezuela, especially its most recent deployment toward Vichada.
“The main motivation of a guerrilla group that signs a peace agreement is to exchange its weapons for politics, as in El Salvador, as in Guatemala, as with M-19, as with the FARC and so many others. But in their strategic redesign, the ELN made clear that it had no desire to turn into a political party,” Pizarro pointed out.
In practice, the ELN, considered to be the last guerrillas in the hemisphere, renounced the main characteristic of a group of that nature: the struggle to take central political power.
The ELN has even criticized the decision by the FARC to lay down their weapons and become the political party, Commons, and be part of the Congress, with five seats in the Senate and five seats in the Chamber of Representatives in the two most recent sessions.
With respect to the FARC Dissidents, it’s taken for granted that they lack a political project. Not just because they have no single centralized command, but also because they’ve turned into an aggregate of regional chieftains whose objective is to maintain control of the territories where they are present and to increase their ill-gotten gains.
To be or not to be a revolutionary
The Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of the Andes, Angélica Rettberg, agrees that the single armed group about which there remains any debate about whether they are still guerillas with a political agenda or not, is the ELN.
For this political scientist, “it’s one thing that that organization has renounced the taking of central power, seizing Bogotá, which was kind of a dream of the FARC; it’s another thing that they no longer have a political character, because in fact, they propose taking power, but taking it through social organizations.”
With respect to the Dissidents, she says she sees no political agenda that seeks transformations. “That means they aren’t revolutionary groups,” concludes Rettberg.
She thinks that, although the ELN “has gone whole hog into the drug trafficking business, they’re using it to expand their capabilities, and in some cases, they have diminished their ideological motivations,” that’s not the case for the whole organization.
But, specifically, the growing participation of various factions of the ELN in drug trafficking is at the heart of the new way in which Petro talks about this armed group.
Nobody could argue that producing and selling cocaine, as the FARC Dissidents are also doing, places the ELN in the category of a drug trafficking group.
The FARC themselves, who never renounced taking power using weapons, admitted their connections to drug trafficking in the 2016 Peace Agreement. They did it implicitly by committing, in Point 4 of the Agreement, to “put an end to all relationships that, in the functioning of the rebellion, had included the phenomenon (of illegal drugs).”
Ever since the beginning of the ‘80’s when the drug cartels in Medellín and Cali started bringing the seeds for the coca plants into areas controlled by the FARC, drug trafficking has been a fundamental component of the financing of Colombia’s armed groups, including the old paramilitaries and the current purely criminal gangs like the Clan del Golfo.
The power of this reality that exists together with the existence of an ELN that is still talking political talk, leads the Director of the Ideas for Peace Foundation (FIP in Spanish), María Victoria Llorente, to conclude that, “we have a hybrid conflict that is not exclusive to Colombia.”
“One thing is what’s actually happening, and the legal reality is something else—emphasizes Llorente—the ELN can keep on being considered political criminals, or that they’re taking arms to overthrow the government. As long as the Central Command (COCE in Spanish) survives, they will be in that category. The Dissidents won’t.
COCE actually survives, but it’s a fact that it has less and less control over the different structures in the ELN that are operating in the countryside.
It’s also a fact that the strong man in that centralized command is not Antonio García, but the Commander of the Eastern Battle Front, Aníbal Giraldo Quinchía, alias “Pablito”, who is known for the control he exercises over the criminal revenues in a very broad area over the border with Venezuela, and not for his revolutionary agenda.
García’s indignation
Antonio García, who is formally the maximum chieftain of the ELN, reacted indignantly to the new verbal treatment of the ELN from Petro. This was evidenced in a column written in the publication Voces.
“The ELN has never had any room for bandits or narcos. The dream of the DEA and of Colombian government intelligence has been to try and introduce a Trojan horse that is connected with the drug trafficking businesses to show the ‘evidence’,” he argued.
The greatest irony in this new argument is that there has been a leftist President, who had also been an M-19 guerrilla, which had produced him.
As if it were obvious, García attacked Petro for accusing the ELN of “abandoning revolutionary ideas” to “get rich in the illegal economy” and “turn it into a group of mafiosos.”
“What Petro’s saying is near to lying. The reality is different,” he claimed.
But just as the head of the ELN proposed an International Commission to verify whether the group is involved in drug trafficking, he also claimed that when they attacked the FARC Dissidents in Catatumbo, the Dissidents were occupied in that task of processing “12,000 kilos of cocaine for the Mexican narcos.”
That means that Antonio García says the ELN is out of the business, but what happened to the 12 tons of cocaine?
He and the majority of the members of the COCE have been out of the country for a long time, and they have no way to keep up with what’s going on in the areas where the Fronts are taking refuge in the ELN symbol.
Eduardo Pizarro says that although “the ELN still talks politics, the problem is that a group of guerrillas out in the campo without their commanders will break up, and a good share of the Fronts are breaking up.”
To the same point, María Victoria Llorente, Director of the FIP, calls attention to the similarity between the way the ELN is behaving in Arauca, and the way the Clan del Golfo behaves in Urabá. Both armed groups are exercising fierce territorial control in those areas to keep their criminal revenues safe.
Antonio García’s denial of the relationship of several ELN factions with drug trafficking just means that he doesn’t want to admit it, because that admission would belie the political character of the ELN, or he is completely disconnected with what’s going on with those Fronts in Colombia.
In the best cases, the ELN, whose political origin is unquestionable, is today a mixture of ideology, very concentrated in the COCE, with a crowd that is more and more involved in cocaine trafficking.
Even though this fact, with which several analysts are in agreement, doesn’t strip them completely of their political attire. It does suggest challenges for future negotiations, since after the peace process with the FARC there was a change in the Constitution by which drug trafficking ceased to be a crime with relation to politics.
And regardless of what Petro said, which according to Llorente and Rettberg, was nothing but political talk, Pizarro thinks that the ELN’s decision not to become a political party makes dialog more difficult. That’s because the main offer to the guerrillas was that they would turn to politics because from there, they could continue struggling for their ideals, but for the ELN now, that’s not an incentive.
“The dialogs are becoming impossible because what the ELN and the Dissidents demand is that they be permitted to control what they call their historic areas, but that is impossible because the countryside can’t just be turned over to them,” concluded Pizarro.
That would mean that the guerrillas, who emerged in the ‘70’s to seize political power by using violence, are in a process of extinction. And that what exists in the country today, says María Victoria Llorente, is “a hybrid conflict”, in which the cause, a social revolution that prevailed for decades, has been diluted in an accelerated manner by the criminal rationale that’s hiding behind the armed struggle in the countryside.