Cocaine-Fueled Private Armies Create Colombia Refugee Crisis

(Bloomberg) -- Tens of thousands of refugees are fleeing one of Colombia’s biggest cocaine-producing regions to escape the most intense outbreak of violence since a 2016 peace deal.

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Colombian authorities reported at least 80 dead and 36,000 displaced from a week of fighting between guerrilla factions in Catatumbo, a remote and turbulent region close to the border with Venezuela.

Some families also fled into Venezuela, arriving by river or on motorbikes and in cars, many waving white flags.

The humanitarian catastrophe is another blow for President Gustavo Petro’s attempts to seek “total peace” through talks with guerrillas and drug cartels whose private armies dominate much of rural Colombia. It is also souring his once-warm relations with the government of Venezuela, which began to fray when Petro called on President Nicolas Maduro to provide evidence of his controversial election victory last year.

Negotiations between Petro’s government and various illegal armed groups have repeatedly started and stalled, and have so far failed to curb the power of violent militias funded by money from drugs, extortion and illegal gold mining.

In Catatumbo, ELN fighters went door to door with death lists, murdering civilians they suspected of helping a rival guerrilla faction, according to Carlos Velandia, a former senior ELN commander who left the group in 2004.

“They are trying to “cleanse” the region,” said Velandia. “They don’t believe that any group other than themselves should be present there.”

The ELN lives off the cocaine trade in Catatumbo, charging farmers who grow the raw materials, merchants who sell chemicals such as acetone, and traffickers who set up laboratories and airstrips, said Velandia, who now monitors Colombia’s conflict as the head of the Peace Observatory at Colombia’s National University.

The ELN, the world’s oldest guerrilla force, currently controls about 60% of Catatumbo, according to Gerson Arias, an analyst at the FIP, a Bogota-based research center that monitors Colombia’s conflict. Most of the rest is controlled by an offshoot of the FARC guerrilla movement, which signed a peace accord with the Colombian government in 2016.

The area of land in Colombia planted with coca leaf — the raw material for cocaine — rose 10% last year, to 253,000 hectares, a new record. That’s enough to produce more than 2,600 tons of cocaine, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Venezuelan Relations

On Wednesday, Venezuela sent Russian-made military jets to patrol its border in a show of force, potentially heightening tensions with Colombia.

Dressed in military fatigues, Maduro said in a national address that he would defend Venezuelan territory against any group that tries to violate its sovereignty.

In fact, Venezuela’s armed forces have long tolerated the presence of the ELN and other Colombian armed groups, and Maduro has sometimes fanned foreign disputes to rally nationalist sentiment and deflect attention when he is facing protests at home.

At least two Venezuelan air force Sukhoi jets flew low along their side of the frontier, according to local residents.

ELN’s Power

Petro signaled that Venezuela bears some of the blame for the strength of the ELN.

“The ELN doesn’t come by its power internally,” he said Tuesday, in a statement posted on X.

Petro’s words are “an admission of the negative impact of the involvement with the regime in terms of security and peace in Colombia,” said Jorge Restrepo, director of Bogota-based political research group CERAC.

It remains to be seen whether Petro’s relationship with Maduro changes because of this, Restrepo said.

The Petro government declared a state of internal disorder in the region, as it struggles to cope with the humanitarian catastrophe.

State oil producer Ecopetrol SA is currently operating its fields in the region with a minimum level of personnel. Those assets produce around 1,900 barrels of oil and 4 million cubic feet of gas, the state company said in a statement Sunday.

The company’s pipeline subsidiary also said last week that repairs at the Cano Limon-Covenas crude pipeline are underway after it was shut Wednesday due to an attack in the region.

--With assistance from Andrea Jaramillo, Andreina Itriago Acosta, Fabiola Zerpa and Oscar Medina.

(Updates number of displaced people in second paragraph.)

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