Nothing in the border province of Arauca moves without permission from the National Liberation Army (ELN). The attack on provincial governor Renson Jesús Martínez and the kidnapping of five soldiers in the municipality of Tami, this week, showed that Colombia’s latest armed guerrilla seeks to exercise military and strategic dominance in this area of the border with Venezuela. The Domingo Line Front, the group’s most powerful structure, controls border crossings, organizes fuel and food smuggling, and exercises authority that combines armed coercion and local administration.
Attacks do not happen in a vacuum. Since January 2025, when the government suspended dialogues with the ELN following the group’s bloody attacks in Catatumbo and Arauca, the peace process has remained at a stalemate. Neither side considered the matter over, but negotiations cooled while the rebels consolidated their control over the border areas. In Arauca, where the armed front most reluctant to negotiate politically is based, it has expanded its regional power towards Venezuela. Carlos Velandia, a former ELN fighter who now works as peace director, explains that this group “has built a cordon along the border with the aim of further consolidating its territory.” He adds that 70% of his armed forces are present in the border area.
According to Filandia, these measures are more related to the international scene than to the conflicts in Colombia. “They have a defensive agenda toward Venezuela, and they see the Bolivarian war as almost their own war.” He confirms that the reinforcement responds to the continuing threats from the government of Donald Trump to influence Venezuelan territory. “They (the ELN and the Venezuelan government) are good allies, especially when Colombia had hostile behavior toward the Bolivarian Revolution.”
He explains that his movements were strategic to protect Venezuela. They tried to expel dissidents from the now extinct Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia from the Catatumbo region to gain full control of the border. “Their ‘ideological cleansing’ by killing peace signatories (former members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) is also part of their search for hegemony in the only two regions of the country where they have a strong military stronghold.” Although there is Elena As for the northeastern region of Colombia, the matter is not new, as its logic was modified last year to strengthen that power. For Filandia, this is an appropriate presence in the military matters of Nicolás Maduro’s regime. “Anyone looking to venture across the Caribbean to Venezuela or Colombia should keep in mind that the first party they will and must confront is the ELN.”
Despite this international factor, Araucanian political scientist Eduardo Simón Cedeño believes that the recent attacks and assaults are more related to the Colombian elections in the next semester. “Every time there is an election, it is six months before the cycle of violence begins.” For Cedeño, the foiled attack on the military base at Tunja, a nearby city, but on the other side of the mountain range, was intended to demonstrate his military prowess. “It’s an attack on the national government, telling it that it’s going where you don’t expect it. Plus, it’s strategic because Tonga is very close to Bogotá.” In the past, the ELN has attacked military units in Arauca, but echoes were echoed by the car bomb that targeted the Bogotá police school in January 2019. For his part, Filandia finds another explanation: “With the attack, they distracted the army to remove the force from Arauca, which had to be transferred to Boyaca province, to continue expanding its territorial authority.”
In this section, where the nicknames originated Pablito Arauca, The National Liberation Army, the leader and military mastermind who took refuge in Venezuela, includes at least 6,000 armed combatants and 3,000 civilian militiamen, according to data from the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace. Unlike other conflict zones in the country, it does not have a large coca economy that fuels the presence of drug actors and traffickers. Since the 2000s, these gangs have prevented the cultivation of illicit crops by the civilian population, and since then, annual monitoring of the Integrated Illicit Crop Monitoring System has reported fewer than five hectares in the entire province. This is a ridiculous number compared to nearby Catatumbo, which has an area of more than 28,000 hectares and where there are more than three illegal groups contesting the illicit economies.
What Filandia and Cedeno agree on is that the ELN’s military focus this year in the region has been to remove dissidents from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. “There are no more dissidents in Arauca because they have all fled to Casanare,” says the political scientist. In the fifteen villages where they were located, battles and clashes were reported, but the presence of the remaining groups there is now almost non-existent. “This assumes another new logic of management, much more so than it already was,” asserts Velandia.
Regarding Monday’s shooting attack on the armored truck in which Governor Renson Martinez was traveling, the guerrilla said in a press release that it was a mistake. They claim that the car in which the president was traveling ignored an order to stop on the highway between the municipalities of Fortul and Thiem. The letter stated: “We publicly and self-critically acknowledge our mistake.” What happened, and the text, which shows the attack as a routine roadblock, makes clear that the ELN claims to be able to exercise near-absolute control, especially in the foothills region, where the road is located. For Filandia, what happened could also be a political message for the president.
Moreover, like the kidnapping and failed attack in Boyaca, it occurred weeks after the General Forces and the Public Prosecutor’s Office conducted a simultaneous operation against the ELN’s finances in Arauca, Amazonas, and Bogotá. According to the authorities, they discovered a network laundering extortion and smuggling money on the border. While the government highlighted the coup as an example of its operational capacity, the guerrillas responded with a demonstration that revealed their ability to compete with the state in the large rural areas of their province.
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