Gustavo Petro enjoys reading French authors. His daughters have studied at the French Lyceum. On his first visit to Paris as president of Colombia, he was amazed by the pomp and ceremony with which he was received. He discovered the grandeur with your own eyes. He has had the philosopher Jacques Derrida on a pedestal ever since he read his theory of forgiveness—only the unforgivable can be forgiven; Forgiving what is forgivable has no greater mystery. So much so that this was the starting point of a policy that he wanted to impose upon his arrival to power, “total peace.” It consisted of sitting down to negotiate with all the armed groups in multiple and simultaneous peace processes, instead of one by one, as had been done historically. It was an idea that has Petro’s seal, a combination of ambition and recklessness. Intuition has failed him this time. Where he sought peace he has found war.
This week, the president declared a state of emergency and deployed more than 1,000 military personnel in the Catatumbo region, on the border with Venezuela. It is trying to stop the brutal offensive that the National Liberation Army (ELN), a guerrilla of Catholic origin and Castro inspiration, has launched against the FARC dissidents, one of its main enemies. Reigning in that territory means controlling one of the places with the highest concentration of coca leaves on the planet. The ELN has fought with war weapons in the open field, but has also committed selective assassinations in towns. Neighbors are prohibited from going outside. The guerrillas have kidnapped people who are being held in the mountains. The dead have been transported in trucks that have been unloaded in the middle of a road. In view of everyone.
Negotiating with this guerrilla was one of the first decisions Petro made as president. During the campaign he said that he would reach a peace agreement with them in a maximum of three months. Two and a half years later, that possibility seems further away than ever. The ELN commits war crimes due to the impotence of the Government, which has not yet given the order to its army to enter combat. However, that will happen soon, if the president’s words are taken into account. “The ELN took the path of war and they will have war,” he said. The conflict, so far, has left dozens dead and more than 25,000 displaced. The man who arrived at the Casa de Nariño, the presidential residence, waving a white flag has now adjusted his cap as commander in chief of the armed forces.
The matter has further strained relations with Venezuela. The ELN moves from one side of the border to the other, as it sees fit. And that is one of the main difficulties in combating it. Based on information from its intelligence service, the Colombian Government knows that the regrouping of troops carried out by the guerrilla to carry out this offensive was carried out on Venezuelan soil. Chavismo has responded offended, despite the evidence that this was the case. The Defense Ministers of one country and another, Iván Velásquez and Vladimir Padrino, met this Friday on the Venezuelan side – on the Colombian side, Padrino should have been detained due to the United States arrest warrant against him. They agreed to collaborate to pacify the border, a wild territory that neither of the two States is capable of controlling.
This cooperation will not be easy at all. First of all, Nicolás Maduro, self-proclaimed president of Venezuela, is focused on creating defense shields against the risk of an invasion in response to the fraud he committed in the presidential elections. Chavismo claims that it has distributed 150,000 combatants throughout the country. This is their main concern at the moment, not the ELN. To which we must add that the guerrillas and the Venezuelan army have forged alliances in the past. “In 2021, Maduro and the ELN reached an agreement to clean the border of other groups. They jointly attacked the FARC dissidents and were left alone,” explains León Valencia, political scientist, writer and former guerrilla. That offensive responded, according to Valencia, to the Chavista obsession with being attacked across the border by Colombian paramilitary forces, a fear inherited since Álvaro Uribe was president.
Petro, upon being named president, asked Senator Iván Cepeda, one of his trusted people, to take care of achieving total peace. His father, a left-wing politician, was murdered by paramilitaries in the 1990s. Instead of revenge, Cepeda has dedicated his political life to forgiveness and reconciliation. “The worst thing is that the ELN has dealt a lethal blow to its lack of legitimacy,” he explains by phone, “how from now on will it say that it fights for the people and for the people?” Are we facing the end of the Government’s peace policy? “No way,” he replies. “Our position is to defend peace in all circumstances, despite problems and adversities. “To think that our security policy is going to focus on military coups is to not understand what we represent.” Petro’s is the first left-wing government in the country’s modern history. In fact, Petro himself was a member of a guerrilla group, the M-19, as a young man.
Not only the ELN was negotiating with Petro, but also the 33rd Front of the dissidents, which have been attacked. The irony is not lost on Elizabeth Dickinson, senior analyst for Colombia at Crisis Group, an independent organization that analyzes armed conflicts. “The ELN’s priority is no longer negotiation or a solution to the historical conflict. What they prioritize now are two issues. Their unity as an organization, which was questioned, and their tactical position in the conflict,” explains Dickinson. The guerrillas felt that they had lost ground to their enemies and regrouped around a single commander, alias Pablitothe person responsible for this fire that has put the Government in check. Pablito does not necessarily respond to the interests of the old guerrillas sitting at the negotiating table with Petro’s special envoys.
The danger now lies in the conflict spreading to other parts of the country. The information that the Government handles is that the Clan del Golfo, a paramilitary and drug trafficking group, wants to take advantage of the fact that the ELN has been neglected in some regions to attack it frontally. The same happens with other guerrillas and criminal gangs who want to take revenge on them. With his military operation, Petro tries to avoid a major catastrophe. The president of peace now deals with death and destruction.
