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Colombia reactivated arrest warrants for top commanders of the ELN guerrilla group Wednesday after an outbreak of violence that has hamstrung official efforts to bring “total peace” to a country scarred by decades of armed conflict.
Renewed fighting in the country’s northeastern Catatumbo region has claimed at least 80 lives and displaced nearly 32,000 people since last Thursday, according to official data.
The mountainous area near the border with Venezuela has been at the epicenter of a surge in fighting between the leftist ELN and a rival formation comprised of ex-members of the now-defunct FARC guerrilla army who kept fighting after it disarmed under a 2016 peace deal.
Warrants for 31 ELN leaders had been suspended to allow for peace negotiations between the armed group and the government.
But President Gustavo Petro called off the talks last Friday as he deployed some 5,000 soldiers to Catatumbo to quell the violence and declared a regional state of emergency.
The warrants have now been reinstated, the prosecutor’s office said Wednesday.
The ELN and FARC dissidents vie for territory and control of lucrative coca plantations and trafficking routes in the region.
Another two dozen people were also killed in guerrilla violence in other parts of the country since last week, bringing the toll to some 100 dead.
For many Colombians, the recent bloodshed carries echoes of the worst period, in the 1990s, in a nearly six-decade civil war that killed some 450,000 people and made the country a byword for armed violence.
Petro on Tuesday described the violent upsurge as a “failure” and questioned how the ELN could have become so “strong today, when just months ago it was very weak, military speaking.”
In a speech, Petro said the situation in Catatumbo offered lessons for the future, though he did not elaborate what these were.
“One also learns from failures and there is a failure. A failure of the nation,” he said.
UN chief Antonio Guterres, meanwhile, expressed concern about the violence.
The secretary-general “calls for an immediate cessation of acts of violence against the civilian population,” his spokesman said in a statement Tuesday.
The United Nations has reported about 30 people kidnapped and a thousand trapped in their homes by the violence — on top of the tens of thousands who have fled to other villages or towns, even into neighboring Venezuela.
With a force of about 5,800 combatants, the ELN is one of the biggest armed groups still active in Colombia. It has taken part in failed peace negotiations with Colombia’s last five governments.
While professing to be driven by leftist, nationalist ideology, the ELN is deeply involved in the drug trade and has become one of the region’s most powerful organized crime groups.
Most FARC members laid down arms under a 2016 peace deal, but dissidents have continued to thrive in pockets of the country, enmeshing themselves in the drug trade and fighting with rival groups.
Experts say the ELN’s leadership has been troubled by the FARC factions’ growth in the Catatumbo region.
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Source link : https://www.barrons.com/news/colombia-reactivates-warrants-for-guerrilla-leaders-after-violence-eab62312
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Publish date : 2025-01-22 02:44:00
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