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Twenty-five months after the peace agreements with the FARC and six months after the inauguration of Ivan Duque as head of the country, which augured a new era, Colombia still faces power and violence various armed groups. Cocaine continues to break historical records of production and the country is still engaged with guerrillas and national and international criminal organizations. Perspectives on this landscape in constant recomposition with the researcher Frédéric Massé, specialist of Colombia and peace processes.
On November 24, 2016, a historic peace agreement was signed between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC guerrillas, ending a half-century of bloody conflict. Yet in 2019, several armed groups are still engaged in struggles of great violence. The last attack against the National Police School of Bogota, which claimed around 20 lives, claimed by the National Liberation Army, the ELN, one of the guerrillas still active in Colombia, is the latest visible manifestation.
RFI - Frédéric Massé, do we still have armed organizations in the current Colombian landscape?
Frédéric Massé - We still have armed groups on the ground, present in different parts of the country. We can differentiate them globally into two types: those that come from the guerrillas and those who claim to be from the paramilitaries.
On the side of the guerrillas, the National Liberation Army, the ELN, is still active as we saw recently with the bombing of Bogotá?
The ELN is the second most important guerrilla in Colombia (historically after the FARC). She is of Marxist-Leninist origin with a pro-Cuban tendency and theology of liberation. The ELN was established in the early 1960s and has experienced strong development through extortions against companies in the oil sector and in particular against a German company that was building an oil pipeline on the Venezuelan border. In the late 1990s, unlike other guerrillas, the ELN and the FARC did not demobilize. The ELN, which has always been considered "the little brother of the FARC", has begun peace talks, in parallel with the negotiation process between the government and the FARC, which did not succeed for various reasons.
Since the signing of the peace agreements at the end of 2016 and the subsequent demobilization of the FARC, the ELN has been recovering territories, including areas left vacant by the FARC. But unlike the FARC, which is a very hierarchical organization, the ELN is a much more federative and decentralized organization with a much stronger hold on the population. In addition, the ELN has financial and logistical capacities that enable it to continue recruiting young people in the regions. Until two or three years ago, ELN forces were estimated to number about 1,300 combatants, plus militia whose number is difficult to assess; today it is estimated that between 2,000 and 2,500 combatants are involved.
Does the ELN have a specific territory?
No, there are strongholds of the ELN such as Arauca and Norte de Santander which are departments on the border with Venezuela, corresponding to the regions where the pipeline was built and where the ELN was reinforced by practicing extortions. This border area with Venezuela is one of the strongholds of the ELN, which is believed to be at the origin of the bombing of Bogota. But the ELN is present in other parts of the territory: in the south-west of Colombia in the department of Cauca and Nariño, border with Ecuador; in the department of Chocó on the Colombian Pacific coast, part of which is border with Panama; or in other central regions like the south of Bolivar State. In fact, the ELN is present in different regions, some are more historical, but since the demobilization of the FARC, the ELN has consolidated its presence in a number of regions and would have developed on new spaces left vacant by the demobilization FARC.
Outside the ELN, are there other actors in the armed struggle?
As for the old guerrillas, you also have FARC dissidents. The FARC officially had 7,000 to 8,000 demobilized combatants, closer to 5,000 militiamen. It is suspected that militiamen did not demobilize and would still be active or operational. Among those who have demobilized during the peace negotiations, it has always been emphasized that the FARC was a hierarchical and unified movement. I think we were a bit exaggerated about the unity of the FARC for essentially political reasons, because it was politically incorrect to suspect or expose certain end-of-term visions within the FARC during the negotiations. These divisions were accentuated at the end of the negotiations and in the implementation, once the agreements were signed. Initially, it was felt that the risk of dissent was quite low, and it is true that they were not very high, but they were not zero. In fact, a few months before the peace agreements were signed, there were first official dissenting statements by some FARC commanders. At the time, this corresponded to 200, 300 people. But there were also those who had not declared their dissent, who still did not know very well whether they were going to demobilize or not; and there were those who quickly returned to the bush because of the difficulties and delays in implementing peace agreements. And so a number of veterans joined dissidents for various reasons, for ideological convictions or especially following some disappointments and frustrations with what was implemented with the peace agreements. In the space of two years, we have gone from 200 to 300 dissidents to more than 2,000 dissidents in the FARC.
What happened to these 2,000 FARC dissidents?
Among the FARC dissidents, you do not only have veterans: between one-third and one-half are veterans and there are also new recruits, because these former dissidents in the different regions of the country have the financial and economic capabilities. logistics to recruit new fighters. But the very nature of this dissent is open to discussion. The government tends to portray them as mere criminals, viewing them as the fighters who were most involved in narco-trafficking during the FARC era, and explaining that they would not have disarmed for purely and simply reasons. criminal. So it's true that these reasons exist, but I think it's a bit schematic and a bit simplistic. Because among the leaders of these dissent, some claim a political character and even accuse the leaders of the FARC who signed the peace agreements to have betrayed the agreement and to be themselves dissent. So, there is a political speech that is worth what it is worth, which can serve as a pretext for some, but perhaps not for all.
Dissents are not unified and occupy different regions: there is a dissidence in the east of the country on the border with Venezuela and a little on the border with Brazil which is relatively politicized; another dissidence is in the south of the country in the departments Caquetá and Putumayo; and finally another dissent in the Nariño Department, which is totally dependent on big Mexican drug cartels and whose former leader was killed for murdering several journalists. So dissidents are absolutely not united and one of the questions is whether they have the capacity and the desire to reconstruct a more or less united front of the FARC, which could be called "FARC historic canal", as this happened with other guerrilla movements as with the IRA.
We also talk about the People's Liberation Army, the EPL that would rise from the ashes ?
The EPL is a former group that more or less demobilized in the 1990s. Some of its fighters did not demobilize and joined paramilitary groups especially in the Catatumbo region, not far from the border with Venezuela. Megateo, the leader of the EPL dissent, was killed in 2015, but he was replaced and you have a residual group that still claims to be the EPL. The group also reportedly tried to take advantage of FARC demobilization to extend its very limited area of influence to Catatumbo. Today, mention is made of the presence of the EPL in other parts of Colombia, particularly in Cauca and Nariño, at the other end of the country.
In addition to all this, we have a myriad of local criminal organizations more or less important?
Then you have armed criminal groups or criminal armed groups, the nuance is important, because before there were more criminal armed groups and the question now is whether we have armed criminal groups? The first nature of the group depending on the first qualifier they are given. When I talk about criminal armed groups, it is either paramilitary groups or guerrilla groups that have fallen into crime and are funded by crime. When I talk about armed criminal groups, they are criminal gangs, mafia groups, who have sufficient military capacity to be considered armed groups.
Since the incomplete demobilization of paramilitary groups between 2003 and 2006, we have had a reconsideration of its groups, a certain implosion, because we also know that a certain number of their paramilitaries have not demobilized and when they have in fact, they remobilized afterwards.
After 2006 and in the next ten years, you had implosions, reconfigurations and regroupings of a number of these paramilitary groups.
For the past five years, you have a group that has emerged from all of this, which is the Gulf Clan. An organization located mainly on the border of Panama, but which has spread on the Caribbean coast and in other parts of the country. These paramilitary groups, through several processes of reorganization, vendetta, internal struggles, have developed and become more visible. The armed forces have focused their actions on these groups and in recent years, these have greatly decreased. The problem is that these criminal groups are a little like mafia organizations: you eliminate the head and there is another that repels. Faced with all this, there is some debate as to whether the Gulf Clan is definitely diminished, even if we have not captured its last leaders. We know that there would be more or less confidential negotiations between the government and this group to benefit from some demobilization in exchange for probably reduced prison sentences. But these situations are stalling and we do not really know where they are. The Gulf Clan had up to 5,000 "fighters", it is said that today they would be less than 2,000.
Beyond that, there are also much smaller organizations, very well established locally and very often totally dependent on the big Mexican drug cartels whose presence is not new in Colombia, but who for the last five or six years, have affirmed moreover in addition to their presence, their control of certain drug routes, and their ultra-violent criminal activity.