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In a remote corner of northeast of Colombia, where the dirt roads lead to lush hills lined with bananas, farmers and their families have become the victims of a series of violence unlike all that the country has seen in a generation.
While two rebel groups are fighting for the territory, Over 54,000 people fled their houses and around 80 people died in a few days, the number of deaths should climb.
At the origin of this conflict are old -fashioned battles on land and drug money, and the inability of agreements that have led to lasting peace. But analysts, diplomats and even the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, underline another more recent factor helping to foment chaos in Colombia: neighboring Venezuela.
In the past decade, when Venezuela has descended into the autocracy, his government has also got closer to the main aggressor in the current conflict next to it, a long -standing rebellious group called the National Army of Liberation, or Eln.
Born as a Marxist group in Santander, Colombia, in the 1960s, the ELN has used Venezuela more and more as a place of refuge, moving more deeply in the country, enriched by drug trafficking and Other illicit activities, three -sided in size to around 6,000 fighters and strengthen relations with Venezuelan officials.
In return, the Colombian authorities say that the autocratic president of the country, Nicolás Maduro, who has become more isolated on the world scene, benefited from a powerful armed group as a buffer against national and foreign threats, including the possibility of a coup.
For years, the disintegration of the democracy of Venezuela has tested neighboring Colombia, sending some three million refugees fleeing into the nation of only 50 million.
Now, some say that Mr. Maduro’s Venezuela is used as a basis to trigger something much more destabilizing: a new wave of destruction in Colombia.
Mr. Petro went to Accusing the ELN to become a “foreign force” which had invaded Colombia. “It is a problem of national sovereignty,” he said, “not just an internal conflict, which we had had for a long time.”
The Minister of Defense of Venezuela, Vladimir Padrino López, in a declaration At the end of January, said that it was “essential to declare with crystalline clarity that Venezuela does not serve, and it will never serve, as a platform for armed groups outside the law, whatever their nature, their ideology or nationality ”.
Why the ELN has decided to attack now is not clear, but the relationship between Mr. Petro and Mr. Maduro, formerly friendly, was considerably embittered in recent months.
Mr. Petro is the first president on the left of Colombia, a former guerrilla warfare himself and apparently a natural ally of Mr. Maduro, who qualifies as a socialist. Two years ago, they held a high -level meeting in Caracas, where the two promised to work together on questions of mutual interest.
This included the safety of their shared border of 1,300 miles.
Then in July, Mr. Maduro declared himself a winner of a contaminated presidential election, refusing to produce decorations to support this assertion and imprison around 2,000 people in the midst of a wave of protest.
The United Nations and other independent monitors have questioned the result. The United States has recognized the opposition candidate as winner.
Soon, Mr. Petro, one of the few leaders to be somewhat friendly with Mr. Maduro, took a more critical tone, publicly asking him to publish electoral results and to release political prisoners. Mr. Maduro replied by commanding a “point in the face“To all those who got involved in Venezuela’s affairs.
When Mr. Maduro was sworn in for a third term on January 10, Mr. Petro denied To attend the ceremony or recognize the Venezuelan as president.
Five days later, the ELN sent fighters from a point more from the south of Colombia in northern Colombia, in a strategically important region called Catatumbo, say on x that he sought to oust an armed rival group called the 33rd front.
The two groups had long divided control of the region, which houses large fields of coca, the basic product in cocaine. Now, a fragile power sharing agreement had broken.
Violence has crushed Mr. Petro’s chances to achieve one of his most important political objectives: a peace agreement with the ELN, a key element of an ambitious campaign promise – “Total peace”, it called him – that he did to put an end to all the conflicts in Colombia.
The country has suffered decades of internal violence which has won hundreds of thousands of lives.
“” Total peace “was already in a bad place,” Kyle Johnson, co-founder of Foundation Conflict Responsses, said a non-profit research group in Bogotá. “With this epidemic of violence, it looks politically like the final nail in the coffin.”
Today, tens of thousands of civilians are trapped in the midst of violence. Some families of Catatumbo sought refuge in the forest, surviving everything they managed to take with them.
Others have spread to Tibú, a small Colombian town on the Venezuelan border, sleeping in a school that has become a refuge. Still others have piled up in a Colosseum in Cúcuta, the main city of the region, queuing every morning for food and assistance.
A recent day at the Tibú school, the classrooms had become rooms and the children played while a young woman, overwhelmed with emotion, cried and whistling until she vanished on a ground of patio.
“Sow what you dream”, read a wall paint on a wall. The military helicopters burst over the head.
The powerful Minister of the Interior of Venezuela, Diosdado Cabello, had just visited the border, while a new wave of Colombian troops moved to fight the ELN.
While the sun was sleeping, Luz, 45, and her husband Francisco, 40, were seated at the door of one of the classrooms, describing the house they had abandoned: earth floor, wooden construction , a small patio, a barrel to collect rainwater.
A few days before, when the armed men had stormed the region, a man had arrived at school where Francisco worked and told him that he had five minutes to leave.
The couple and their two sons ran.
Times only publishes their first names, for the sake of their security.
That night in Tibú, Luz had a hard time understanding how they had got there.
“We all do civilians say: why are they fighting?” She said. “What are they looking for? What is the reason for this?
In his office in Cúcuta, General Mario Contreras, the regional commander of the Colombian army, said that violence had started with the murder of a single family, who has angry the ELN. The next day, he said, the ELN entered the city centers-“because they know that people are defenseless”-armed with pistols and disguised as civilians, looking for suspicious collaborators from the 33rd front.
There is a generation, the ELN was so weak that it was near the extinction, beaten by the Colombian state and the paramilitaries. In a recent academic documentTwo researchers, Jorge Mantilla and Andreas Feldmann, argued that “the support of neighboring Venezuela” was the most important factor in the “improbable resurgence of the rebels”.
Bram Ebus, consultant for the International Crisis group, said the Venezuelan government had even used last years as “an extension” of its security forces. “We know that there is a tacit alliance at the federal level in Venezuela,” he said.
The Colombian army says that ELN fighters crossed Venezuela to go to the scene of their first attacks. In A message on XSigned by the ELN central command, the group called these “false news” invented by the Colombian government to justify a possible invasion of Venezuela.
The group focused on the Colombian government, which he accused of uniting with the 33rd front to “destroy” the ELN.
The 33rd Front is a faction of the revolutionary armed forces of Colombia, or Farc, which remain in arms despite a 2016 peace agreement signed by the FARC and the Colombian government.
At the end of January, the Minister of Defense of Colombia went to Venezuela to meet his Venezuelan counterpart and later said that the two had discussed “cooperationBy capturing ELN leaders and containing the group.
While violence has been taking place in recent days, something remarkable has started to happen at the Tarra river, a muddy band dividing Colombia and Venezuela. For years, the Venezuelans flocked it, in search of a sanctuary in Colombia. Now the flow was going upside down.
On a crossing, a makeshift ferry carrying approximately nearly 3,000 people in Venezuela during the first three days of the fighting.
Jackline, 42, was one of them. Wearing a red skirt decorated with buttons and a blue blouse – more suited to the church than an escape – she was with her son, 7 years old, and her daughter, 17 years old.
Jackline had been moved once before by violence, she said. And although she was Colombian, she now planned to stay in Venezuela for good.
“It’s really nice there,” she said. “There is no war.”
Geneviève Glatsky Contributed reports from Bogotá.
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