Two armies in talks with the government of Gustavo Petro to reach a peace agreement, the dissidents of the FARC and the ELN, staged a violent confrontation on Tuesday in which at least ten combatants have died, according to local media.
The soldiers themselves have recorded videos and have taken photos of the corpses lying in the middle of the savannah that have been disseminated on social networks.
The fighting has taken place in Arauca, a border region with Venezuela that the FARC and the ELN have disputed since the beginning of 2022. The two armed groups lived together for a while, but at the beginning of last year the peace between them broke down.
The dispute was brutal.
In Arauca, the coca leaf is not grown, but tons of cocaine pass through it every year, ending up on the other side of the border.
From there it is distributed to the rest of the world.
Saravena, an oil city that is key for the groups to keep under control, became one of the cities with the highest homicide rate in the world.
The dissidents controlled the prostitution and gambling venues of Saravena.
They extorted merchants from very specific neighborhoods.
The two groups shared the border crossings through which cocaine passes.
The ELN, an ideologized guerrilla, has wanted to put an end to all these practices
The ELN, according to Colombian military sources, is wiping the ex-FARC off the map, who have taken refuge in the savannah to gain time.
The third actor in the conflict is the Colombian Army, which fights the two with helicopters, tanks, US weapons and more than 8,000 soldiers, a force far superior to that of the insurgents.
But the ELN is so deeply rooted in society that it is not easy to eradicate it: it administers justice by punishing criminals, mediates divorces, establishes paternity pensions and resolves conflicting inheritances.
If someone in Saravena has a problem, he does not call the emergency number.
The confrontation occurred in the villages of El Paisaje, where at least 80 combatants clashed at night.
The Ombudsman confirmed the confrontation to the newspaper El Tiempo.
Its officials are heading to the scene, where some witnesses said that the shots lasted several hours.
The FARC dissidence -combatants who did not take advantage of the 2016 peace process- in this area where the fighting took place a month and a half ago spread a public message of peace.
President Petro has tried to promote a ceasefire with all armed groups to avoid deaths like these.
In many cases the violence reaches the civilian population.
The ELN has not yet accepted the truce, waiting for it to be agreed at the dialogue table it has with a team of government negotiators.
However, this does not solve the underlying problem, what happens if these groups continue to fight each other, regardless of what they agree with the Colombian army.
Subscribe here
to the EL PAÍS newsletter on Colombia and receive all the latest information on the country.
