Colombia's president says ELN rebels will 'get war' as violence in the country's northeast escalates
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Colombian president Gustavo Petro warned on Monday that his nation’s military will take offensive actions against the National Liberation Army after the rebels, known as the ELN, unleashed a wave of attacks in the country's northeast that left dozens of people killed and forced thousands to flee their homes.
“The ELN has chosen the path of war, and that’s what they will get,” Petro wrote in a message on X, in which he accused the rebels of turning into a drug trafficking group and compared their methods to those of Pablo Escobar, the infamous cartel leader who bombed government buildings and murdered his enemies by hiring hundreds of hitmen.
Petro, who was a member of a guerrilla group during his youth, initiated peace talks with the ELN in 2022, after promising in his presidential campaign that he could get the rebels to demobilize within three months of taking office. But talks have stalled over multiple disagreements about how the rebels would disarm and the kinds of economic reforms that the government would implement in exchange for their disarmament. The ELN has also criticized the government for staging separate negotiations with a breakout group in the country's southwest and angered officials by continuing to kidnap civilians and extort businesses.
On Friday Petro suspended negotiations with the rebels after violence escalated in Catatumbo, a mountainous region that produces around 15% of Colombia's coca crop and is located along the border with Venezuela. The ELN, which has an estimated 6,000 fighters, reportedly attacked civilians it accused of being collaborators of a rival group, the FARC-EMC, taking people from their homes and shooting them in the streets, while in rural areas firefights broke out between members of both groups.
