Sebastian Eslava was stuck at his small farm for several days, as fighting between rebel groups broke out in Colombia’s Catatumbo region.
Neighbors told him landmines had been placed along the roads that led out of his village. And in WhatsApp messages, one of the rebel groups operating in the Catatumbo region told villagers not to go into nearby towns.
Then, on Jan. 22, Eslava and his family decided to risk it. They grabbed what they could fit in a couple of backpacks, got on their motorcycle and joined a caravan of about 20 other families leaving for Cúcuta, a city about 80 miles south of the Catatumbo region.
“It’s hard to know when we will be able to return,” Eslava said after arriving in Cúcuta. “I fear I will lose my animals and all the investments I’ve made on my farm.”
More than 40,000 people were displaced in Colombia’s Catatumbo region in January, as the South American nation faces its worst security crisis in a decade.
A series of attacks against civilians in the region has forced Colombia’s government to break off peace talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN), one of Colombia’s largest rebel groups.
Analysts say that fighting in the Catatumbo could also spread to other rural areas — where guerrilla armies, gangs and paramilitary groups are vying for control of drug trafficking routes and natural resources.
“Groups will take advantage of the fact that the state is distracted,” said Elizabeth Dickinson, a Colombia analyst at the International Crisis Group.
Fighting in the Catatumbo region started in mid-January when the ELN, a guerrilla group that has been around since the 1960s, launched a series of surprise attacks on a rival group known as the FARC-EMC (Estado Mayor Central) — whose leaders are former members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
Videos posted on social media show ELN fighters going house to house to hunt down civilians who they accused of collaborating with their rivals. Local officials said that 80 people were killed in the span of a week.
FARC-EMC responded by waging attacks on ELN fighters, and as the violence intensified, thousands of people were forced to flee their homes.
Like the Eslava family, many displaced people have gone to Cúcuta, located along Colombia’s border with Venezuela. A local soccer stadium there has become a welcome center for refugees.
Humanitarian workers at the stadium register the new arrivals so they can be eligible for government aid. Volunteers hand them secondhand clothes and mattresses in scenes that are reminiscent of the early 2000s when Colombia was overrun by violence.
“I was able to make it out,” said Aide Carillo, one of the displaced people lined up outside the stadium to get help. “But my husband and son are still stuck on a farm.”
Years ago, in 2016, Colombia’s government made a peace deal with the FARC, Latin America’s largest guerrilla army. It was seen as a crucial step toward ending violence in rural parts of Colombia.
But the peace deal also left a power vacuum in remote areas like the Catatumbo, where smaller groups like the ELN and remnants of the FARC began to fight over drug trafficking routes and other natural resources.
President Gustavo Petro started peace talks with most of Colombia’s remaining rebel groups after he was elected into office in 2022, through a strategy he called “total peace.”
But those talks yielded few results, and rebel groups used ceasefires to regroup, rearm and recruit more fighters.
Colombia analyst Dickinson said the recent wave of attacks in the Catatumbo region demonstrates that the ELN “has prioritized its access to the illicit economy” over negotiating an end to the conflict.
The border region “is a trafficking route for drugs, for gold and all sorts of contraband that is fundamental” for the ELN’s finances, Dickinson explained.
“But another group, known as the 33rd front (of the FARC-EMC) had been growing in the region, recruiting, expanding and gaining a political base in areas that the ELN believed to be their sovereign territory,” she said.
Colombia’s government has now launched military offensives against the ELN, with Petro — who was a member of another rebel group during his youth — accusing the rebels of “switching their revolutionary ideals for greed.”
Heavily armed soldiers and police officers with machine guns now patrol towns in the Catatumbo region.
But many villagers who fled to the towns are still afraid to return to their farms and hundreds stay in schools that have been turned into temporary shelters.
“I haven’t been personally threatened,” said Luis Albeiro Chona, a coal miner from the village of Campo Seis, who was staying in a school in the town of Tibu. “But I’m afraid of being targeted by mistake.”
With 5,000 fighters and multiple sources of funding, the ELN has become one of Colombia’s most powerful armed groups.
And its leaders move around freely in neighboring Venezuela, where they’re beyond the reach of Colombia’s military.
The relationship between Colombia and Venezuela has worsened recently, as Petro casts doubts on the results of last year’s election in Venezuela — a vote that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has been widely accused of stealing.
And that makes it even harder for Colombia to defeat the ELN.
“The ELN is aligned with the government in Caracas,” Dickison said. “And as tensions between Colombia and Venezuela escalate, the ELN has become more aggressive in Colombia.”
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