Soon after rebels from neighboring Colombia arrived in this Venezuelan village, they started choosing students from the local high school to harvest coca, the plant used to make cocaine, the school’s principal told Reuters.
By Reuters – Sarah Kinosian
Sep 2, 2021
Four years later, these foreigners from the National Liberation Party, or ELN, function as both a local government and a major employer in this town in the northwestern state of Zulia, according to the educator and 14 other residents. All spoke on condition of anonymity and asked that their community not be named because they feared retaliation.
The guerrillas pay villagers, including children, to staff narcotics operations, extortion rackets and wildcat gold mines in both countries, the people said. Colombian security officials say the criminal proceeds are financing the guerrillas’ long-running insurrection against the Colombian government. The group’s recruiting, the residents said, has intensified over the past year as the coronavirus pandemic has deepened misery in Venezuela, where the economy was already reeling from years of hyperinflation and shortages.
When the armed Colombians first arrived, the villagers said, they were flanked by local Socialist Party community leaders and proclaimed they were there to bring security with the blessing of President Nicolas Maduro.
But their brand of law and order, the people said, quickly morphed into tyranny. The Colombians forbade residents from sharing information about the group’s activities, set a strict 6 p.m. curfew, outlawed firearms and controlled who entered the town, the villagers said.
The rebels also brought money. As they tapped pupils to work the coca fields, they offered to “paint the school, fix the lights or whatever we needed,” the principal said in an interview. In 2020, with school enrollment already declining as hungry families fled the country, more than half the remaining 170 students left with the ELN, leaving just 80 kids in class, she said.
The Colombian government has long claimed Venezuela’s leadership grants safe harbor to anti-government Colombian rebels, and that Caracas allows cocaine to move through its territory for a cut of the profits. Maduro has denied the drug-trafficking accusations but expressed sympathy for the rebels’ leftist ideology and openly welcomed some guerilla leaders.
Venezuela’s Information Ministry did not respond to requests for comment about the guerrilla group’s activities in the country.
Beltran said the ELN does cross into Venezuelan territory, but the group’s policy was not to have a permanent presence there. He also denied the ELN was present in Venezuela with the blessing of Maduro.
“I hope we have his moral support,” Beltran said. “But the day they perceive there is a force like ours stationed there, they are not only losing sovereignty, but they are violating their constitution.”
This account is based on interviews with more than 60 Venezuelans – including pastors, ranchers and teachers – living in six states near the Colombian border. Reuters also spoke with lawmakers, human-rights activists, indigenous leaders, former Venezuelan military officers, two rebel defectors, and U.S. and Colombian authorities familiar with the rebels’ growing control of the region.
The interviews reveal a portrait of areas being transformed by armed Colombians taking advantage of Venezuela’s decline. Rebels who once hid from Colombia’s military in Venezuela’s jungles have moved into population centers, ruling alongside Maduro’s government in some places, supplanting it in others, residents of these areas said.
They are mainly ELN guerrillas and former fighters from another rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, according to residents and internal Venezuelan intelligence documents viewed by Reuters. These combatants reject the landmark 2016 peace deal reached between the FARC and the Colombian government. The FARC dissident groups could not be reached for comment.
More than 1,000 members of the ELN alone are operating in Venezuela, Colombia’s then-Foreign Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo told the Organization of American States in 2019.
Many said the rebels’ presence had reduced street crime. But all the locals who spoke to Reuters said they feared these armed combatants. A villager in a different Zulia town likened living under ELN rule to “living in a prison with eyes always watching.”
One 16-year-old high-school dropout from outside the once-prosperous oil city of Maracaibo, Zulia’s capital, said he worked 12-hour shifts at an ELN coca farm, picking leaves until his hands bled. Still, the boy said, he gets three meals a day and makes the equivalent of $200 USD a month, a fortune in much of Venezuela.
OLD ALLIANCE
What began as an alliance of like-minded revolutionaries, with common foes in the Colombian and U.S. governments, has morphed into a criminal partnership centered on drug and gold trafficking and other illicit schemes, according to Bram Ebus, who has reported on guerilla activities in Venezuela for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. These enterprises have become financial lifelines for the guerrillas and for Venezuelans stretching from small villages to the corridors of power in Caracas, Ebus, eight former Venezuelan military officers and two former members of FARC dissident groups told Reuters.
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Read More: Reuters – Guns, drugs, jobs. In these Venezuelan towns, Colombian rebels call the shots
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