National Liberation Army–Bolivia

The National Liberation Army–Bolivia (ELN) was a Communist terrorist group that is now believed to be defunct.

Bolivia, bordering on Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay, occupies a central place in Latin American history. The country has experienced more than 200 coups in its 157 years as a nation. Because of its strategic location and chronic political instability, the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara chose Bolivia in 1966 as the place to attempt to repeat the successes of the Cuban revolution.

Guevara's foquista revolutionary theory held—and his experiences in Cuba taught him—that a mobile band of hardened guerrillas operating in the countryside could become the foco, or focal point, of peasant opposition to the government. Guevara arrived in Bolivia in March 1966 with a group of about 20 Cubans and established a camp [Page 419]in the southern jungle, naming his new group the National Liberation Army. (A different National Liberation Army was founded in 1964 in Colombia, where it is still operative.) Guevara hoped that a successful Communist revolution in Bolivia would ignite continent-wide wars of liberation.

Guevara's group was joined by about 20 Bolivian Communists, but the Bolivian Communist Party favored open political efforts over armed struggle and refused to back his group. In addition, the largely Cuban forces seem to have frightened the local peasants rather than inspiring them to rebellion. Within weeks, Guevara's camp was discovered by the Bolivian armed forces, and the revolutionaries were forced to go on the run. Guevara's health and that of his men declined rapidly in the jungle. After months of hardship, during which the force was split in two and suffered many casualties, Guevara and the remnants of the ELN were captured and executed by the Bolivian armed forces in October 1967.

A few of the group's members escaped the final military ambush, and for the next several years strived to reestablish the ELN; Nestor Paz Zamora, brother of future Bolivian president Jaime Paz Zamora, was killed fighting for the ELN during this period. By the early 1970s, however, the group had been effectively crushed by the Bolivian military.

In the late 1980s, a group calling itself the Nestor Paz Zamora Commission and claiming to be a wing of the ELN, carried out several attacks in Bolivia. These attacks included the 1990 kidnapping and murder of Jorge Lonsdale, president of Coca-Cola's Bolivian division, and an October 1990 attack on a U.S. Marines residence in Bolivia's capital, in which a Bolivian police officer was killed. This reincarnation of the ELN ceased operating sometime in the 1990s.