CAMBIO, September 22, 2024
https://cambiocolombia.com/poder/que-es-realmente-y-que-quiere-el-eln
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
In an analysis exclusively for CAMBIO, the political scientist Eduardo Pizarro Leongómez picks apart the current crisis in the peace negotiations with the ELN. He states that they are starting to see themselves not as a national actor, but rather as a binational armed organization destined to defend “the Bolivarian revolution”.
In a famous phrase attributed to Albert Einstein, which in reality appeared in a novel by Rica Mae Brown, “Sudden Death” (1983), the Nobel Prize winner had said, “we can’t expect things to change if we’re always doing the same thing”.
This phrase fits like a ring on the finger of the ELN, who made their “introduction to society” by taking over the little rural town of Simacota (Santander Department) on a now far distant January 7, 1965. For the better part of 60 years, they’ve been immersed in a useless armed confrontation, and equally immersed in a long succession of frustrated peace negotiations with administration after administration ever since 1991.
Administration Negotiation Location Negotiator
Gaviria 3 Locations Jesús Bejarano
Horacio Serpa
Samper 2 locations Carlos Holmes T.
D. Garcia-Peña
Pastrana 3 locations Jorge Eastman R.
Victor Ricardo
Camilo Gómez
Uribe Havana Luis C. Restrepo
Santos 2 locations Juan C. Restrepo
Gustavo Bell
Duque Sessions dissolved Miguel Ceballos
Petro 2 locations Otty Patiño
Vera Grave
As a noted journalist told me once, “The problem with the ELN is that they just love to negotiate; what they don’t care for is peace.” Really, it’s striking to point out how the ELN—unlike the rest of the guerrilla groups in this country (M-19, EPL, MAQL, PRT, FARC), who took advantage of the peace negotiations to make the transfer to “political weapons”, have used them instead as a resource for the war. That’s to say, they’ve utilized the peace dialogs to paralyze the Armed Forces in their areas of influence, reorganize guerrilla units, introduce new weapons and munitions, and most of all, to make themselves visible in the national and international press. And then later on, they try to go back with greater vigor to their guerrilla activities.
Nevertheless, Gustavo Petro’s election victory awakened an illusion of reaching peace, finally, with this insurgent group. In March of 2021, the then-candidate for President had spoken, full of confidence, in an interview with the news magazine SEMANA, “The ELN will be gone in three months, because they’ll have signed a peace agreement.” I imagine that Petro was thinking to himself, “What’s the sense of the ELN continuing the armed struggle and weakening the first leftist administration in the history of the country?” How could they not board the train of social change if it was social change that they had been fighting for since the ‘60’s?”
But, to general astonishment, the ELN didn’t push for peace, but rather, on the contrary, they turned into one of the most efficient motors of their own weakening. So that Petro’s star program, “total peace”, is now taking on water on all sides and the principal responsibility for that is not so much the right, but the ELN themselves.
How can we explain the ELN’s persistence in the use (useless) of weapons?
Some analysts suggest that the basic root of this attitude has been the absence of an attractive offer to the ELN by the government to get them to lay down their weapons. I don’t agree with that theory. Ever since 1991 there have been all kinds of proposals that seemed attractive to all five of the six guerrilla groups that made up the Simon Bolívar Guerrilla Coordination (M-19, MAQL, PRT, EPL, and FARC). The only exception was the ELN.
There’s more. Contrary to what the members of the team that’s negotiating with them are saying now (Vera Grave and Iván Cepeda), the closest they got to a peace agreement with the ELN was not with the current administration, but, paradoxically, with the Uribe administration. Sure enough, after eight cycles of conversations in Havana, and when the peace agreement was ready to put forward a demobilization process, with laying down of arms and reintegration into civilian life by the combatants (DDR), the COCE surprisingly made the decision to abandon the negotiation at its most crucial moment.
As Luis Carlos Restrepo once said, with the ELN “just at the point that the bread is ready to take out of the oven, some objection arises.” How to explain that intransigent attitude?
The ELN’s contempt for liberal democracy
The transit from weapons to politics, with complete guarantees, which has been the strongest incentive in all the peace processes in the Western world since 1990, doesn’t have much favor in the ELN. In spite of the success obtained by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) with the Sinn Fein party, or the ETA in Spain’s Basque Country with the BILDU coalition, not to mention M-19, now in power with Gustavo Petro, the ELN doesn’t see itself transiting from weapons to ballot boxes.
I’ve asked the peace negotiators on multiple occasions, “How does the ELN see itself after a peace agreement?” and an uncomfortable silence immediately reigns. They only break the silence with a very disconcerting statement: “We don’t know.” That means that one of the golden rules of negotiation knowing the expectations of all the parties involved, whether it be a nation working on a commercial agreement, or a labor union with a list of petitions, is absent in the case of the ELN. Nobody knows what their expectations are.
With respect to this, there are several hypotheses.
- From the war for power to armed resistance, and local power
Some analysts say that, given their rejection of liberal democracy, and their recognition of the impossibility of gaining power by using weapons, the ELN, realistically, have reduced their expectations to the achievement—through negotiation with the government—to recognition of their “historic zones of influence”.
However, those who know the ELN maintain that even this not very ambitious objective has been diluted over time because with the multiplication of nongovernmental armed actors that are fighting for territorial control and control of illegal revenue, it would be difficult for the ELN to survive without weapons. You have only to notice that for years and years now, they have been fighting with the FARC, or what’s left of them, for control of oil revenue in Arauca, their strategic area.
- The urban insurrection
Others claim that the ELN experienced a moment of enthusiasm with the social explosion of 2021, and they saw their potential to reach a broader mobilization of an insurrectional character, combining citizen protest with militant groups. Urban and rural mobilization that, after the triumph of the Historic Pact Party in the Presidential election of 2022, would permit them to think about radical reforms in which the ELN’s urban nuclei could play an activating role.
Those expectations went for naught, however, fading away with time because of the growing reduction of their popularity and of popular mobilization by the current administration, as well as with the risks of a movement of the political pendulum to the right in 2026.
- Toward Worldwide Insurrection
The 6th ELN Congress, which took place a few months ago, apparently brought about a profound change in its strategic perspective. Given the impossibility of taking power by the use of weapons, the difficulty of conserving their historic territories now openly disputed with other nongovernmental armed actors, and the drop in the insurrectionist climate in the country, the ELN is now beginning to see itself not like a national actor, but rather as one more Global South component in the revolutionary reconfiguration of the world order. And in that framework, as a binational armed organization destined for the defense of the “Bolivarian revolution”.
In conclusion, I think that the dream of a successful peace process with the ELN, in which many of us cloaked ourselves, is now sadly fading away. The ultra-radical leadership selected at the 6th Congress, headed by Eliécer Herlinto Chamorro (Antonio García) as No. 1, and Gustavo Anibal Giraldo (Pablito or Pablo Arauca) as No. 2, relegating Israel Ramírez (Pablo Beltrán) to being one more negotiator, No. 3, is not a good sign.