What is the ELN: who is its leader, how many members does it have and what has it done in Colombia?

ELN expresses willingness with Petro to advance in the peace process 2:35

(CNN Spanish) --

The National Liberation Army (ELN) is the oldest active guerrilla in the American continent.

The group, with more than 50 years of history in Colombia, is accused of committing multiple war crimes and abuses against civilians that include, according to a 2021 Humans Right Watch report, murders, forced displacement and recruitment of children.

"Antonio Garcia", the leader of the ELN

The leader of the ELN is Eliécer Herlinto Chamorro, known by the alias "Antonio García".

He has held that position since June 2021, according to the Insight Crime organization, the year in which Nicolás Rodríguez Bautista, alias "Gabino", who had led the guerrilla since the 1970s, resigned.

"Antonio Garcia" joined the guerrilla group in 1975 and "rapidly rose through the hierarchy of the organization" and "is considered one of the most radical members of the organization" charged with increasing the group's military capacity, says Insight Crime.

The ELN has a Central Command made up of five members: one of them is the military commander, who also acts as commander of the entire organization, and the rest have divided areas of action: political affairs, international affairs, financial operations, and communications. between the Central Command and the "War Fronts" in which the guerrillas are organized.

There is also a National Directorate with 23 members.

advertising

How many members does the ELN have?

An Indepaz report from last year states that, for 2018, the calculations made by the public forces indicated that the ELN had 4,000 members and that with the militiamen the figure rose to 5,000.

The United States Government, in its 2019 annual report on terrorism, mentioned 3,000 armed members, almost half in Venezuela.

Insight Crime figures are similar.

“It has grown from about 5,000 soldiers in the early 1990s to a force that is currently estimated to number around 2,500-3,000 fighters,” its report updated to 2021 says.

The actions of the oldest standing guerrilla in the continent

The National Liberation Army, ELN, was founded in 1964 with the support of the Colombian Liberal Party.

This guerrilla group was sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution and therefore defines itself as Marxist-Leninist.

In the 1980s, ELN members became "kidnapping specialists" according to Insight Crime, making most of their income from ransoms.

A decade later, when it reached its "peak", "the group regularly bombed the largest oil pipelines in the country, including those that supplied oil from the areas of BP and Occidental Petroleum in the Eastern Plains," explains the organization.

They also collected so-called "war taxes" that marijuana and coca growers were forced to pay, especially in the department of Bolívar.

After the death of leader Manuel Pérez, alias "El cura", military actions became more daring, says the organization.

In 1999, for example, they kidnapped 186 people from a church in Cali, "in what remains the largest mass kidnapping in the country's history" and also hijacked an Avianca flight with more than 40 passengers.

Fighting within the guerrillas and the lack of a national strategy left the group vulnerable to attacks by paramilitaries and the armed forces.

Insight Crime also talks about his connection to the drug business.

"The rebels who believed that drug trafficking would end the country have become increasingly active in the business, from protecting large drug trafficking organizations to creating their own distribution networks."

There were several attempts to negotiate a peace agreement with the governments of Álvaro Uribe, Juan Manuel Santos and Iván Duque, but they did not come to fruition.

The final point came in 2019, after a car bomb attack on a police school in Bogotá in 2019 that left 21 dead and approximately 80 injured.

His career in the last four years

The ELN is considered allegedly responsible for about 10% of the violent actions during the Government of Iván Duque, between August 2018 and 2022, according to a report by Indepaz.

"Those materially responsible for the murders, massacres, threats and forced displacement are mostly illegal armed groups. Among the alleged perpetrators, the narco-paramilitaries or successors of paramilitarism have been pointed out in the first place, followed by dissident and residual groups. of the peace process with the FARC-EP, in third place to the ELN and in fourth place to the public force", explains the organization.

Last year the ELN committed "war crimes and other serious abuses against the civilian population, such as murders, forced displacement and recruitment of children," says the Human Rights Watch organization in a report on 2021.

The action in the state of Cauca stands out, where the actions of the ELN and FARC dissident groups "forced thousands of people to flee."

An investigation by Indepaz affirms that the ELN is now facing an "institutional decline" and that the legitimacy it had in some areas of the country "has been stagnating."

The boiling point, as they call it, were the peace talks with the FARC.

ELN vs.

the demobilized FARC: how do they compare?

The ELN "is a less centralized guerrilla", "more rhetorical" and has "some different conflicts" with respect to the FARC, León Valencia, political analyst and former head of that guerrilla, told CNN en Español in 2016.

Historically, the FARC and the ELN have been natural enemies.

According to PARES, a study center on the armed conflict, this guerrilla group had an "active confrontation" with the FARC dissidents in 2019.

"Its military capacity is much less than that of the FARC," says the PARES report.

At the time of greatest expansion of the demobilized guerrilla, the FARC perpetrated some 2,300 military actions a year.

The ELN, for its part, has reached its peak of 400.

"A good part of the actions correspond to sabotage against oil infrastructure or the Public Force, some harassment and, to a lesser extent, combat or ambushes that demonstrate low military capacity," says the PARES report.

In addition, "the ELN is not organized into large groups, but rather forms small specialized cells," says PARES, so that "decimating" this group "no greater production of violence is required."

With information from Melissa Velásquez Loaiza of CNN en Español.