A Return to Arms: Colombia’s Marxist Relics Brace for a Right-Wing Crackdown

Deep in the humid jungles of the Chocó department, Colombia's longest-running Marxist insurgency is quietly preparing for a violent renaissance. For decades, the National Liberation Army, or ELN, has sustained its revolutionary fantasies through a lucrative blend of illegal gold mining, extortion, and kidnapping. Now, as the country prepares for a sharp political pivot, these self-proclaimed ideological purists are bracing for a renewed military confrontation.

The catalyst for this impending escalation is Abelardo de la Espriella, Colombia’s incoming president. A wealthy criminal lawyer who previously defended leaders of right-wing paramilitary groups, De la Espriella has little patience for the diplomatic overtures of his predecessor. He has issued a blunt one-month ultimatum to all armed factions: submit to the state or face the full force of the military. Promising to construct massive penal facilities inspired by El Salvador’s draconian security model and to deepen cooperation with the United States, the new administration is formally abandoning the negotiated settlements of the past.

This hardline approach marks the definitive failure of outgoing President Gustavo Petro’s ambitious but ultimately naive pursuit of comprehensive pacification. Petro, a former leftist guerrilla himself, took office in 2022 with the promise of integrating all remaining armed groups into civil society. Instead, negotiations with the ELN, the Gulf Clan, and dissident factions of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia predictably stalled. The ELN leadership viewed Petro’s modest land and pension reforms as mere bourgeois concessions, wholly insufficient for their grand vision of a popular uprising. They look upon the 2016 demobilization of the FARC not as a blueprint for peace, but as a foolish surrender.

Operating as a heavily armed syndicate with an estimated 6,300 members spread across Colombia and Venezuela, the ELN claims to function as an embryonic state. In reality, their governance consists of extracting taxes from every illicit enterprise within their reach, from logging to the coca trade. While guerrilla commanders insist their teenage recruits join out of ideological conviction, the stark economic truth is that the insurgency offers one of the few viable avenues in deeply impoverished regions like Chocó.

With the collapse of diplomatic channels, the insurgency is explicitly threatening to resume offensive operations across the country. Rebel commanders have indicated a willingness to strike both rural outposts and urban centers, ominously referencing the 2019 suicide car bombing at a Bogotá police academy that killed 22 people as a template for future operations. They maintain that such targets are legitimate military objectives, a semantic distinction that offers little comfort to a war-weary public.

As De la Espriella prepares to unleash the armed forces, Colombia faces a tragic regression. The 62-year conflict, originally born of extreme land inequality, has long since devolved into a contest over illicit economies. The ELN may still quote Simón Bolívar and claim to be on the right side of history, but their impending clash with the state promises only another bloody chapter in a war where ideology is mostly a convenient mask for organized crime.

Written by Freya Stensrud freya.stensrud@alpineweekly.com