Who exactly ARE the armed groups in ceasefires with the Colombian government?
What do they want? Where did they come from? How powerful are they? We break it all down in this two-part series
This week we’re back with part two of a two-part series on the criminal armed groups currently in peace negotiations with the Colombian government. It’s important to point out again that no group has any formal ceasefire deal, as we explained last week, and that the legalities around how that would work are murky.
But nonetheless, communication between the groups is ongoing, as are informal ceasefires.
Last week we focused on the “paracos”, the criminal offspring of paramilitary forces that fought on the side of the government during Colombia’s 52-year civil war.
This week, we take a look at the rebel groups: where they come from, what they want, and what the current sitrep is.
Read on for the juicy details! Welcome to the PWS “Big damn explainer on guerilla country!”
Who exactly ARE the armed groups in ceasefires with the Colombian government?
What do they want? Where did they come from? How powerful are they? We break it all down in this two-part series
If you’ve been following Pirate Wire Services closely, you already know that Colombian President Gustavo Petro won elections last year partly on promises to move away from the failed military strategies of previous administrations and negotiate directly with criminal armed groups to bring what he calls “Total Peace” to the country.
So far, the process has involved more than a few hiccups, such as Petro’s false claims of a “historic” ceasefire that seemingly only ever existed in his imagination.
But since then, four other armed groups have agreed to come to the negotiating table, and a second round of official talks between the largest remaining rebel group in the country, the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the government are set to resume in Mexico City February 18.
In addition, two dissident groups from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), have expressed interest in peacemaking: El Estado Mayor, led by Gentil Duarte, officially founded in 2017, and La Segunda Marquetalia, led by Iván Mordisco and founded in 2019.
El Estado Mayor, the OG Dissidents
In 2016, then-president Juan Manuel Santos reached an agreement with the FARC, which at the time was by far the largest rebel group in the country. The vast majority of FARC fighters disarmed and rejoined civil society.
During the process, and immediately after however, some “fronts” of FARC rejected the peace deal and splintered off from FARC’s hierarchical command structure to become independent organizations.
The Colombian government classifies them as criminal groups rather than political structures, and they do not all share the same goals, nor are they necessarily allied with one another.
Though funded by extortion, illegal mining, as well as cocaine and gold smuggling, most of these groups still maintain political objectives as well.
The first of these groups, El Estado Mayor, formed during the peace negotiations, when the commander of the 1st Front, Néstor Gregorio Vera Fernández, alias “Iván Mordisco”, withdrew from the process, refusing to disarm.
In response, FARC commanders, currently in Havana at the negotiating table with the Colombian government, dispatched Miguel Botache Santillana, alias “Gentil Duarte,” to take command of Mordiscos group and bring them back into the fold.
However, upon his arrival to Guaviare from Cuba, Gentil Duarte was recruited by 1st Front leadership instead, and agreed to assume a command position within the group, which maintained considerable drug trafficking operations in the south of the country.
For five years, Duarte attempted to reunite splintered ex-FARC forces, inviting all former fighters to join his “Estado Mayor”. And an unknown number, but likely thousands, did indeed abandon the peace, especially following the election of Iván Duque to the Colombian presidency.
Duque dismantled aspects of the peace accord and stonewalled government promises of investment and infrastructure in formerly controlled FARC areas and ramped up military actions against remaining rebel groups, both strategies which the FARC viewed as violations of their 2016 treaty.
Gentil Duarte was killed in Venezuela on May 4, 2022. The circumstances of his death remain shrouded in mystery, but it likely occurred during fighting with another armed group for territorial control.
Some Colombian media have issued reports saying ELN was responsible, who have long been at war with 10th Front, a FARC dissident group closely allied with Estado Mayor.
FARC dissident forces in the years since the peace accord have fought amongst themselves, against ELN, and clashed with “paraco” forces like AGC as well as state forces in both Colombia and Venezuela.
Iván Mordisco assumed leadership of Estado Mayor after Duarte’s death. The group is currently engaged in a war with ELN in eastern Colombia as well as within Venezuela itself, where both groups maintain a sizable presence.
Segunda Marquetalia, the other rebels with a cause
The second-largest FARC dissident group in Colombia, Segunda Marquetalia was formed in 2019 when Luciano Marín Arango, alias “Iván Márquez,”, Hernán Darío Velásquez, alias “El Paisa and Seuxis Pausias Hernández, alias “Jesús Santrich, released a video declaring war once again on the Colombian state, citing “high treason, and the intentional destruction of the peace process” as their motive.
Santrich’s story is especially crazy, and merits an entire article. But, the short version is he was one of the principal FARC delegates and negotiators during the peace deal. Though he was awarded a Congressional seat as part of the truce, he was never sworn in.
The Colombian prosecutor’s office, with backing from the DEA, accused him of cocaine trafficking. Santrich has always insisted the charges were fake, and meant to derail the peace process
Since then, the chief Colombian prosecutor in the case, Nestor Humberto Martinez, has been credibly accused of corruption and fraud during his time in office, and Colombia’s peace court has said they have seen no real evidence to support the charges.
PWS cannot report with certainty whether criminal charges were warranted, but evidence continues to emerge that at the very least, the charges were intentionally used to railroad Santrich and remove him from a position in government.
Santrich fled Bogota immediately afterwards in a dramatic escape, only to later resurface as part of Segunda Marquetalia.
He was reportedly killed May 18, 2021 in Venezuela. No confirmed details have emerged as to who was responsible.
The National Liberation Army (ELN)
PWS has devoted considerable time reporting on ELN in the past. You can find some of that work here. And the rebel group, which is the largest remaining guerilla movement in Latin America, receives considerable attention from the international press, especially since they entered into formal talks with the government.
So we promise to keep this brief.
ELN was founded at the tail end of “La Violencia”, a series of bloody sectarian conflicts that preceded Colombia’s official civil war. Its early members featured a large number of Catholic priests who subscribed Marxist-Leninist “Liberation Theology” political philosophies and were inspired by the Cuban revolution.
Originally from Santander, the group launched their first military operation in 1964, a battle that resulted in the death of one of their most outspoken members, Camillo Torres, a popular Colombian priest who often made public statements against the government, who he viewed as a corrupt oligarchy that could only be uprooted by force.
In 1973, the group was nearly annihilated after a series of disastrous battles with Colombian state forces reduced their number to just over 100.
By the 1980’s, the philosophy and tactics of the ELN had changed considerably. Rather than adopt a posture of open warfare against the state, as the FARC did, ELN’s strategy for rebellion became highly localized— focused on controlling rural areas, increasing their numbers via indoctrination, and infiltrating local governments, bulwarked by an increasingly large number of “auxiliaries”, often drawn from student groups, who helped secure financial and political support for the organization.
They had also by this time turned to kidnapping as a source of income, as well as imposing “war taxes” on the communities where they maintained a presence, especially on coca and marijuana growers.
By the mid 90’s the group boasted 5,000 fighters, and perhaps three times as many auxiliaries, though that number would drop by the early 2000’s after a series of military operations killed a sizable portion of their leadership.
The group is structured more like a federation than a clearly vertical military command structure, with each “front” enjoying a degree of independence. National decisions are made via dialogue between commanders rather than issued “top down” from any central command.
These groups have rapidly expanded in territory since the 2016 peace deal, mostly into power vacuums left behind when the FARC disarmed, but also into Venezuela, where they are believed to have presence in nearly a third of the country.
Previous peace negotiations between ELN and the government have failed three times, most recently in 2019, when they bombed a police station in Bogotá, killing 22 people.
ELN fronts finance their activities currently through a host of illegal activities: cocaine smuggling, extortion, cross-border smuggling of gold and narcotics, as well as proceed from oil thefts, particularly in Arauca, in eastern Colombia.
ELN is set to resume a second round of peace negotiations with the government on February 13 in Mexico City.
*All black and white images were made by an open-source AI generator*
The Big headlines in LATAM:
In Colombia, the parliamentary coalition together with members of President Petro's administration presented another of the numerous reforms that the president has promoted. This one in particular is particularly ambitious and seeks to "humanize the country's criminal and penitentiary policy", according to government statements. In the bill the Ministry of Justice proposes to eliminate crimes such as slander, libel and incest.
The measure intends to reform the Penal Code and proposes to create a Human Rights office in each prison in order to follow up on the guarantees of the persons deprived of liberty who have been strongly affected by a human crisis due to the overpopulation in the country's prisons. The bill also contemplates that the prisoners can go to work or study during the day and return to the penitentiary centers at night.
Nicaragua, Thursday morning released 222 political prisoners, some of whom have been held by the Ortega government for decades. They were deported as political exiles to the United States on an early flight this morning. Though Ortega has not commented publicly on the release, he has in the past called political prisoners the "sons of the bitches of the Imperialist US government", blaming them for massive nationwide protests in Nicaragua in 2017.
Bukele continues to cause a stir in El Salvador, this time with the inauguration of a mega-prison for 40,000 gang members in one of the countries with the highest prison population in the world. The center was built in the rural area of Tecoluca, southeast of the country's capital, San Salvador.
The structure's pavilions occupy 23 hectares and was named "Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo" (Terrorism Confinement Center) by the administration and has surveillance systems with video and scanner circuits. This project is part of a 'war' against the guerrillas that the president took on 10 months ago and which has been harshly criticized for its punitive and dictatorial approach, which has also led to an increase in the number of people deprived of their freedom as a result of arrests of suspects without warrants.
In Ecuador, a referendum proposed by the government of Guillermo Lasso was held with the intention of legalizing tools to 'combat' organized crime and drug trafficking, which has been on the rise in the country. In each of the eight questions that made up the referendum, the banker's administration was defeated. Some of the questions had to do with allowing the extradition of Ecuadorians or making changes in the Judiciary Council and the Attorney General's Office.
On the same day, local elections were held in which a strong loss for the Government party was also evidenced, in the face of the advance of the left associated to Correismo, the current of former President Rafael Correa.
What we’re writing
Our pirate Daniela, wrote a note about the young Afro women who are transforming literature in Cartagena, passing through this city. Most of them are developing cultural works with their communities. You can read it here.
Joshua has been working on really boring energy stories in Colombia, which he would prefer not to brag about. We can’t always write about only the stories we love! Well, except here, which makes PWS so special
Spanish word of the week:
Parchar: Colombian slang for “to chill” or maybe “to hang out”, like one does with the homies.
Que haces, pana? - What are you doing, bro?
Pues nada, parchando con los pelaos, compa. Vienes?- Just hanging out with the homies, bro. Wanna join?
With that, thanks for parchando, piratas! See ya next week!
Spanish word of the week. Always interesting, parcero