In early 2025, two violent outbreaks in the Colombian department of Norte de Santander have echoed into neighboring Venezuela. The first was an armed conflict that erupted in January in the border area of the Catatumbo River, involving dissident factions of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), resulting in approximately 80 fatalities and over 92,000 displaced individuals. The second incident was an explosive attack that destroyed a toll station near the city of Cúcuta, the departmental capital, injuring six people.
However, Venezuela is not merely a collateral victim of the Colombian internal conflict; it actively participates in it, whether intentionally or not. Several actors and causes have taken root on both sides of the binational border.
Official reports from Colombian authorities have long warned that, for at least the past five years, Venezuelan territory along the border is no longer just a safe haven or buffer zone where guerrilla groups from that country, particularly the ELN, retreat for rest or find shelter to evade military pursuit. Instead, it serves as a theater of operations and barracks on one hand, while also facilitating routes for illicit trafficking—such as cocaine, arms, and gold—which are fiercely contested by both subversive groups and organized crime.
These phenomena intersect with the political control ambitions that characterize both the Colombian guerrilla and the self-styled Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela. Both retain remnants of a shared ideological foundation, often aligning their interests, though not always, forming a de facto alliance they frequently prefer to keep under wraps.
A Venezuelan human rights defender, who frequently moves between the states of Zulia and Táchira and requested anonymity from Armando.info, affirms that the ELN’s presence on the Venezuelan side of the border has been permanent for years “throughout the border area.”
As a consequence, the security and individual freedoms of residents in the border region remain precarious. The violence unleashed in Catatumbo and other areas of Norte de Santander represents the emergence of conflicts that have been secretly brewing in the border area despite the ongoing validity of the 2016 Peace Agreement with the FARC. The bidirectional flow of illicit businesses hinted at a new eruption of hostilities. While the movements of armed actors crossing back and forth across the border were a tangible reality for local inhabitants, they sometimes only trickled out as whispers in the media. Various testimonies outlined an observable fact but offered limited evidence. Though the situation could be assumed, it did not appear to be adequately documented.
What was certain is that security and justice agencies in Bogotá had indeed been effectively monitoring this geographical reorganization of future combat fronts, particularly concerning the ELN. They had reflected these findings in official documents.
Recently, a batch of those intelligence documents from the Armed Forces and the Attorney General’s Office of Colombia, accessed by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and shared with Armando.info, revealed that at least since 2020, the National Army of Colombia was aware of the sustained movement of ELN troops into Venezuelan territory.
“The ELN maintains its criminal strategy by protecting its key leaders in Venezuelan territory, aiming to enhance Political Organizational Work (TPO) to destabilize the border area and continue its plans,” reads a report from the Colombian army, prepared under the title Evaluation of Critical Threat Capabilities.
In that document, dated December 2021 and presented to the U.S. Southern Command, the Colombian army counted 1,408 ELN guerrillas in Venezuela, accounting for 26% of their total strength (then estimated at around 5,397 fighters).
Many answers from this side
A ticking bomb exploded on January 16, 2025, triggering a chain reaction of violence that no one has yet been able to suppress. That day marked the beginning of clashes in the Colombian municipality of Tibú, adjacent to the namesake river—part of the binational Catatumbo river basin—and close to the border of Norte de Santander with the Venezuelan state of Zulia. Initial reports indicated that the fighting started after the murder of Miguel Ángel López, his wife, and their nine-month-old son. According to local sources, the young man was well-known in the area as he worked in a funeral home and collected bodies from places no one else would go. However popular López was, his death—and that of his family—was not sufficient to explain the resurgence of armed groups. This incident merely acted as the fuse that ignited the powder keg forming in that remote, jungle, and mountainous region.
This massacre revealed the unresolved scores between two armed groups contesting the territory. On one side was the ELN’s Juan Fernando Porras Martínez Front, and on the other was a dissident group of the nearly extinct FARC, known as Structure 33 or E-33, which did not adhere to the peace process.
Colombia’s President, Gustavo Petro, only spoke out days after the fighting began, announcing the declaration of an internal state of emergency—its first in 17 years. He also halted the peace talks that were already in critical condition between his government and the ELN.
“How can an organization jump in technical and military strength in such a short period?” asked Petro, surprised during a speech on January 21, 2025, referring to the ELN, with whom he was then advancing peace talks which, following the violence in January, ultimately fell apart. “We should have had some kind of information, and we didn’t. Where did they walk, or how did they get transported?” he continued expressing doubts. And these were questions that had already been answered in the archives of Colombian military intelligence agencies.
Very soon, all eyes turned to the border with Venezuela. The close proximity of the Colombian Norte de Santander with the Venezuelan states of Zulia and Táchira—where, between the 19th and 20th centuries, the Catatumbo River served as the natural route to transport coffee from those Andean foothills to Lake Maracaibo and, from there, to export markets—prompted Bogotá to request support from Nicolás Maduro’s regime in the area. The then Colombia’s Minister of Defense, Iván Velásquez, called for “containment actions” from his Venezuelan counterpart, General Vladimir Padrino, during an urgent meeting, “so that the actions undertaken by the ELN are likewise repelled from Venezuela, preventing their entry and generating the great possibility of acting against these criminals.”
The demand came too late. The leftist Colombian government had long had enough clues to prevent the guerrilla infiltration that it was now seeking the Venezuelan regime to suppress.
For instance, a military report from June 2021, while President Iván Duque was still in power, detailed in its early pages that 56% of the ELN’s leaders, a total of 13, lived in Venezuela, while only six remained in Colombia and four were sheltered in Cuba. By then, according to the same document, two high-ranking members from the ELN’s Central Command (COCE) were in Venezuela: Eliécer Herlinto Chamorro, aka Antonio García, in Zulia, and Gustavo Anibal Giraldo Quinchia, aka Pablito, in the Apure state of Venezuela’s Llanos Occidentales. These were regarded as the number one and number three, respectively, of the collegiate body coordinating the decentralized federation of grassroots groups operating under the ELN umbrella.
The Colombian army report stated that five ELN leaders were stationed in Zulia, three in Apure, and one in Bolívar state, in southeastern Venezuela. The remaining four had no specified location.
According to the document, in 2022, the ELN had deployed across 14 groups or fronts in Venezuela. It also detected another seven fronts of dissident FARC groups, which have infiltrated, reside, and control various illegal activities on Venezuelan territory.
Another report from the Evaluation of Critical Capabilities in 2022 shows that the number of ELN leaders in Venezuelan territory had risen to 19 (79%), with only three in Colombia and two in Cuba.
By that year, Colombian authorities detected that the ELN’s International Front was based in Los Teques, the capital of Miranda state near Caracas, with suspicions it was “engaging in coordination and parallel diplomacy activities with sympathetic political figures in the region.” Without naming names, it mentioned that the ELN had contacts with members of the Venezuelan party Patria Para Todos (PPT).
Among the ELN and FARC dissident fronts that then had a presence in Venezuela, reports indicated the Juan Fernando Porras Martínez Front and the Structure 33, the factions that would initiate hostilities in the Catatumbo area in 2025.
The reports from 2021 and 2022 identified that the ELN had bolstered its presence particularly in the states of Zulia, Táchira, and Apure. Meanwhile, the FARC dissidents had infiltrated the Venezuelan states of Amazonas and Bolívar, with the Acacio Medina Front and the Comando Frontera spearheading their penetration into Venezuela. Of all those mentioned, Bolívar is the only Venezuelan state that does not border Colombia.
Incidentally, Nicolás Maduro responded swiftly to Bogotá’s requests. At least, on the surface. In late January, he ordered the activation of the operation Lightning of Catatumbo, allegedly within the framework of military exercises known as Bolívar Shield. At that time, Defense Minister General Vladimir Padrino López emphatically stated: “We have decided to launch the operation to prevent armed groups from accessing Venezuelan territory, regardless of what they are called.”
Little is known about the operation’s outcomes: the seizure of approximately 31 tons of cocaine, the dismantling of 17 coca processing camps, and the arrest of four Venezuelan mayors allegedly involved in drug trafficking and with the guerrilla itself at the border. Yet, there has been no report of the capture of an active member of the ELN or the dissidents of the FARC on Venezuelan territory.
In any case, until the commencement of the Lightning of Catatumbo operation, the prevailing stance among the chavista political-military hierarchy hadn’t been one of containing the ELN. On the contrary, there were clear signs of a certain tolerance from Caracas toward the incursions of the Colombian guerrilla into Venezuelan territory, if not outright approval.
From 2017 to 2018, the ELN exhibited an “expansive logic throughout the border, which became very evident in 2019,” notes María Victoria Llorente, a political scientist and director of the Colombian institute Ideas for Peace. According to Llorente, this guerrilla group rushed to fill the void left by the diminishing FARC, weakened by both military setbacks in Colombia and partial demobilization following the peace agreement, as well as the effects of the cessation of support Hugo Chávez had once afforded them, which stopped shortly before the Venezuelan commander passed away in 2013.
However, even in 2021, the previously mentioned military intelligence report for the U.S. Southern Command asserted that the purpose of the ELN’s presence in Venezuela remained to “destabilize Colombian security and defense, facilitating the expansion of the Bolivarian Revolution.” It also claimed that the ELN had established “Temporary Special Operational Zones” to “control illegal crossings in the border and conduct intelligence tasks for these groups within Colombian territory.”
What had fueled this evolution? As Llorente explains, an expert in peace and security issues, Nicolás Maduro turned out to be far more permissive with the ELN than Chávez had advocated.
“The ELN has much deeper connections; they already have Venezuelan combatants recruited, and in this sense, it does possess characteristics of a binational guerrilla,” emphasizes the scholar in an interview with a reporter from Armando.info. “This is a far more complex problem, I believe, than what the FARC were at that time. It is clear that for a state like Colombia, there is practically no possibility of resolving this if the group has a political sanctuary on the other side of the border. (…) Today, this type of threat serves Maduro very well against Colombia.”
The reviewed documents do not specify how many Venezuelans were among the ranks of the ELN and the FARC dissidents. However, they did alert that from the Venezuelan side of the border, the guerrilla groups were planning crimes, which often resulted in internal confrontations. Controlling the border crossing points was one of their strategic objectives.
A 2021 report from the Colombian Judicial Police, yet reviewing events that occurred since 2019, states that “according to intelligence work, it is known that the Juan Fernando Porras Martínez Front (GAO-ELN) carries out its illicit activities and terrorist actions in the municipality of Tibú.”
In the José María Semprún municipality of Zulia state, on the Venezuelan side of the Sierra de los Motilones, tens of displaced individuals arrived after the attacks in the Colombian Catatumbo region in January of this year. “This municipality is the closest to Tibú. They entered through the [town of] El Cruce and were initially settled in the Esminda de Núñez school, but later the stadium was opened, and many children and elderly entered,” explained a journalist based in the area to Armando.info.
This flow of displaced individuals was preceded by another flow, constant and longstanding, of cocaine through Catatumbo. The Colombian army documented this in another of its 2022 reports, stating that this area is the “epicenter of international drug trafficking to Venezuela.” It continued, “The organized armed groups, GAO ELN, GAO-r E33, and the GAO-EPL have promoted the expansion of coca leaf cultivation in the Catatumbo region as one of their main sources of funding; these armed groups obtain approximately 25.10 trillion pesos annually.”
The ELN’s operations in Venezuela included, at least since 2020 and according to this report, the establishment of support networks in the rear, engaged in training activities for the manufacture, use, and activation of explosives and firearms “with the aim of attacking the physical integrity of law enforcement members.” By 2022, Colombian military forces were asserting that the ELN had increased its political work along the border “prioritizing communities in precarious conditions; evidence of road and housing construction was seen to strengthen the social accumulation supporting their presence in these areas (Venezuela: Zulia, Táchira, and Apure – Ecuador: Esmeraldas).”
The trophy of the trochas
With a common land border of 2,219 kilometers, Colombia and Venezuela connect through seven official entry points and, according to another intelligence report from the Army in 2022, also through about 270 illegal crossings known as veredas or trochas, through which people transit back and forth alongside all kinds of contraband, including drug trafficking, weapons, and minerals.
This last report identified the land crossings into Venezuela as an essential element of control that guerrillas like the ELN and the FARC dissidents seek in Norte de Santander, “as from there depart countless routes that interconnect the entire Catatumbo region, to the west, with the Department of Cesar, as well as to the east toward Venezuela, where the border dynamics are crucial.”
Another report from the Colombian army in 2022 referred to the holding of a meeting of the “continental bolivarian movement” with members of the ELN in the Venezuelan state of Apure. It further detailed the establishment of ELN camps in the Venezuelan municipalities of José María Semprún, Machiques de Perijá, Catatumbo, and Rafael Urdaneta in Zulia state; and municipalities in Táchira state.
All these levels of alert were condensed in an intelligence analysis from the Ministry of Defense, dated October 2022, which, in retrospect, accurately predicted the situation. The Colombian Defense portfolio then enumerated at least 10 incidents that led them to conclude that the dynamics between the two principal armed groups located in Catatumbo, the ELN and the E-33 group (the Structure 33) would lead to a “public order crisis in the region… to maintain the narcotrafficking chain.”
To date, following the violence that erupted in the Catatumbo area at the beginning of this year, clashes between FARC dissidents, the ELN, and now Colombia’s public force have lessened in intensity but continue. The government of President Petro has even announced a reward of nearly $700,000 for information on the whereabouts of four key ELN leaders: Nicolás Rodríguez Bautista, Eliecer Herlinto Chamorro, Gustavo Aníbal Giraldo Quinchía, and Israel Ramírez Pineda. Up until 2022, according to the military authorities in their country, all but one (Ramírez Pineda aka Pablo Beltrán) had been living in Venezuela for at least two years.
