National Liberation Army–Colombia

Founded in 1965, the National Liberation Army–Colombia (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or ELN) is a Marxist terrorist group that has conducted a guerrilla war of almost 40 years against the Colombian government.

The founders of the ELN were student activists inspired by the success of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Most important among them was Fabio Vasquez, the founder of the MOEC, a students, workers, and peasants union. Many MOEC members would become ELN members. Most of the ELN's first leaders received military training in Cuba in the early 1960s; returning to Colombia, they attempted to apply Fidel Castro and Che Guevara's foquista tactics to Colombia.

The ELN first attacked on January 7, 1965, when 27 ELN guerrillas held the town of Simacota for two hours. The organization remained obscure until November 1965, when Camilo Torres, a former priest well known in Colombia for his political activism, joined the organization. Despite Torres's death in action the following February, he attracted many other recruits. In 1973 the organization suffered a major setback, when a carefully planned army operation, code-named Operation Anori, succeeded in killing several hundred ELN fighters and nearly wiping out the group. After a 1978 defection resulted in the arrest of the majority of the organization's leaders, many thought the ELN was finished.

The dedication of the organization's grassroots workers had been underestimated, however. At first the ELN had ignored political work in favor of military action; after the losses of the 1970s, however, low-level organizers working independently in several areas chose to continue their efforts to gain political support among the peasants and urban poor. As the Colombian regime of the time was particularly repressive and economic [Page 420]conditions were bad, they soon found support. By 1983 the ELN had regrouped and had enough recruits to once again begin guerrilla operations. The new leadership was organized as a national council of nine members led by another former priest, Manuel Perez.

Between 1984 and 1986, the ELN enjoyed a brief truce with the Colombian government, but bad faith on both sides stalled negotiations. After breaking the truce, the ELN began a new strategy—focusing its attacks on the Colombian oil industry, one of the country's top revenue generators. Over the next several years, the group attacked the country's oil pipelines thousands of times; the damage cost hundreds of millions of dollars and forced the government to deploy a significant percentage of its armed forces to protect the pipes. The ELN also engaged in kidnapping for ransom; early targets were oil executives, but as kidnapping has been adopted by other guerrilla groups and ordinary criminals, almost anyone is now at risk. Colombia has the world's highest kidnapping rate.

The ELN is believed to receive millions of dollars in extortion payments from oil companies to protect their pipelines and ransom their executives. Unlike the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia's larger guerrilla organization, the ELN's leadership has generally not engaged in drug trafficking. This abstention coupled with the extremely strict discipline imposed by the ELN may be what has prevented it from expanding as much as the FARC did. Nevertheless, ELN grew from a few hundred members in the early 1980s to over 6,000 in 2003.

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