O E Watch Mobile Edition Colombian-Venezuelan Border Ills

Colombian-Venezuelan Border Ills

OE Watch Commentary: The accompanying references are exemplary among many reports that seem to indicate that armed conflict in Colombia is intensifying, especially in border areas. Many of the reports are about Colombian Army confrontations with units of the People’s Liberation Army (ELN). The reports suggest that the ELN apparently expanded in some border areas at the expense of FARC formations that had been dismantled or had lost territorial control in the context of the power sharing agreement with the Colombian government. However, as the reference from Radio La FM suggests, some of the FARC dissident groups are apparently now openly reorganizing and reasserting themselves as guerilla. In any case, it may be that the border areas under dispute are the same as those that had been fought over for decades. They are the contraband corridors where the preferred clandestine lines of communication are maintained. End OE Watch Commentary (Demarest)

“…they are armed and would be collecting what they call ‘taxes’…”

Source: Editors, “Con secuestros y control territorial, arrecia el conflict armado (With kidnappings and territorial control, the armed conflict worsens),” El Mundo 5 April 2018. http://www.elmundo.com/noticia/Consecuestros-y-control-territorialarreciael-conflicto-armado/369245

“Decisions of the governments of Rafael Correa, in Ecuador, and Juan Manuel Santos, in Colombia have facilitated the growth and penetration of the residual group of the FARC in the border zone that the two chief executives agreed to leave unattended. …The crimes occur in territories where illicit cultivations, illegal mining and drug trafficking routes have grown in the shadow of the limitations that the State self imposed.”

Source: Ricardo Monsalve Gaviria, “El Eln y su actividad en frontera (The ELN and its border activity),” El Colombiano, 30 March 2018. http://www.elcolombiano.com/colombia/el-eln-y-su-actividad-en-frontera-YJ8469551

“While in Quito Ecuador the fifth cycle of conversations advances between the government and the ELN with the intention of arriving at a new bilateral cease-fire, the armed conflict between those parties is still felt, although with less intensity, in this country [Colombia], especially in the areas bordering other countries where the ELN apparently feels much more comfortable.… Drug trafficking routes and other illicit economic activities are the principal reasons why the illegal groups try to appropriate dozens of border kilometers that did not have state control, and the ELN is no exception.”

Source: Radio La FM, “Grupo disidente de las Farc se habría reactivado como cuadrilla guerrillera (Dissident Group of the FARC reactivates itself as a guerilla unit),” Radio La FM, 2 April 2018. https://www.lafm.com.co/orden-publico/grupo-disidentede-las-farc-se-habria-reactivado-como-cuadrillaguerrillera/

“…part of the reasons given by the chiefs for returning to arms is that the reincorporation was not done in accordance with what was stipulated; neither the freeing of political prisoners nor respect for the lives of social leaders…...he [a spokesperson] said that other groups that had formed in the sector of the Colombian Pacific and in other zones of Cauca [Department], to which campesinos are also attaching themselves, and he added that the situation is complex given that they are armed and would be collecting what they call ‘taxes’ in places where coca and cattle ranching is the base of the economy.”

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