Colombia’s Border Crisis

In response to attacks by warring guerrilla factions that have killed dozens of people and displaced tens of thousands in north-east Colombia, President Gustavo Petro has declared an ‘estado de conmoción interior’ for the country, as well as an ‘emergencia económica’ in the Caribbean department of the Guajira. (The last Colombian president to have declared a ‘state of internal commotion’ was Petro’s nemesis, Álvaro Uribe, leader from 2002 to 2010 and now facing trial on charges of bribery and witness tampering.) Petro will call on the armed forces to resolve the conflict by force rather than negotiation.

The Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army (ELN) is fighting the ‘dissident’ remnants of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) for control of the cocaine business in the Andean Catatumbo region, in Northern Santander, and across the border in Táchira, Venezuela. With its fertile valleys for growing coca, mountain fastnesses, and links by river and overland to smuggling routes, Catatumbo is the heart of the cocaine trade. It saw fifteen massacres between 1999 and 2006. The latest round of warfare was triggered by a disputed cocaine shipment.

Peace talks with the ELN began in Havana when Petro was elected in 2022, but achieved no concrete results beyond an eighteen-month ceasefire, which lasted until August 2024. Petro suspended negotiations in September.

In recent days, in an attempt to take control of Catatumbo, the ELN has forced 32,000 people from their homes – they have fled to Venezuela in the backs of trucks, in cars and buses, by donkey or on foot – and murdered more than eighty social movement leaders and human rights activists allegedly associated with the FARC. Forty-six thousand children are unable to go to school, while the Bari and Yukpa Indigenous peoples are unable to move safely through their own territory.

Petro – himself a former member of the guerrilla movement M-19, which demobilised in 1990 – has staked political capital on making peace. Beyond the immediate human catastrophe, the situation in Catatumbo is disastrous for Petro’s re-election prospects in 2026 – not especially bright to begin with, given the failure of his health, education, labour, tax and other reforms.

In 2002, following President Andrés Pastrana’s failed peace process, which emboldened the FARC and the ELN as well as the paramilitary right, Uribe was elected with paramilitary support by promising to extend the state’s monopoly of violence throughout the national territory. He would defeat the guerrillas on the battlefield, which he understood to be the whole of Colombian society, and – like many other counterinsurgent leaders – did not distinguish between civilians and guerrillas.

With support, funding and training from the US, and no regard for international humanitarian law, Uribe landed consistent military blows against the command, control and communications of the FARC and ELN. He also oversaw the forced disappearance and murder of 6400 impoverished young men, subsequently labelled as FARC guerrillas. (Police in the US call this ‘juking the stats’.)

Uribe’s implacable opposition to diplomacy opened the way for his successor and former defence secretary, President Juan Manuel Santos, to begin peace negotiations with the FARC in 2012 after he, too, had hammered their command structure and communications. This led to the Havana Accords of 2016 and the FARC’s dissolution.

More deeply immersed in banditry and the trafficking of cocaine, weapons and people than they had been before, rump FARC columns remained in the borderland regions of the Amazon, the Andes and the Pacific. (They were as different from the genuine article as the designer brand knock-offs that come into Colombia through Panama from China.) Petro has sought peace with them, to minimal effect. Most have ties to Mexican criminal organisations. So does the ELN.

The deadly violence over control of coca fields, laboratories, warehouses and transport routes is not confined to the north-east. In the Amazonian department of Guaviare, long the FARC’s heartlands, two opposing ‘dissident’ factions – one of them negotiating with Petro – have been at war over the cocaine business, as well as illegal gold and cobalt mining. Forensics teams couldn’t handle the number of corpses coming in and had to call on colleagues from neighbouring Meta for help. Yet so far, the national government has remained mute. In the oil-rich eastern plains of Arauca, the ELN has carried out kidnappings, car bombings and other attacks; some of the ELN soldiers on the war path against civilians in Catatumbo came from Arauca. Most of the Pacific region, too, is under the control of the ELN, ex-FARC groups – one of them in negotiations with the government – or right-wing neo-paramilitary organisations.

In next year’s elections, the far right will campaign on a programme whose central, hallucinatory plank is that Petro is turning Colombia into Venezuela. And yet the only way to solve the violence on the border is through close co-operation and collaboration between the two countries. Much of Venezuela’s cocaine trade is controlled by the Guardia Nacional Bolivariana and the military (with the connivance of state governors). They do business with the ELN and FARC dissidents, whose coca crops spread across the border into Venezuela. Without the co-operation, support and commitment of President Nicolás Maduro and his state governors, Petro has no way to resolve the situation, not even through military force. Only diplomacy has any chance, however small, of bringing peace and stability to the region.