National Liberation Army (Colombia)

Based on Wikipedia: National Liberation Army (Colombia)

In 1966, a Roman Catholic priest walked into the Colombian jungle to join a guerrilla army. His name was Camilo Torres Restrepo, and he was a respected university professor who had grown disgusted by the vast gap between rich and poor in his country. Within weeks of picking up a rifle, he was dead—killed in his very first firefight.

Torres became a martyr. Not in the conventional religious sense, though that mattered too, but as the symbolic face of one of history's strangest revolutionary movements: a guerrilla army that fused Marxist revolution with Catholic theology, that quoted Che Guevara and the Gospels in the same breath, that saw armed insurgency as a Christian duty.

This is the story of the National Liberation Army of Colombia, known by its Spanish initials as the ELN. For over sixty years, they have waged war in the mountains and jungles of one of South America's most troubled nations, driven by an ideology that their enemies struggle to even categorize.

The Children of Two Revolutions

The ELN was born in 1964, when the revolutionary fever of Castro's Cuba was spreading across Latin America like wildfire. A group of Colombian rebels, trained on the island nation itself, returned home with dreams of toppling what they saw as a corrupt oligarchy. Their founder, Fabio Vásquez Castaño, had studied at the feet of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, absorbing their theories of peasant uprising and armed struggle.

But here's what made the ELN different from dozens of similar movements that sprouted across the continent in those years: they weren't just Marxists. They were devout Catholics.

To understand how these seemingly contradictory identities merged, you need to understand a theological movement called liberation theology. It emerged in Latin America in the 1960s, arguing that the Gospel demanded more than personal salvation—it required the active dismantling of social injustice. Jesus, liberation theologians argued, had sided with the poor and the oppressed. To be a true Christian was to fight for their freedom, even if that fight required bullets.

The Vatican has always viewed liberation theology with deep suspicion, seeing it as Marxism dressed in priestly robes. But in the slums of Bogotá and the villages of rural Colombia, many priests saw it as the only honest response to human suffering on a massive scale.

The Priest Commanders

After Camilo Torres died in 1966, his legend only grew. Other priests followed his path into the guerrilla camps, creating what scholars have called "Catholic Marxism"—an ideology that insists Catholicism requires the creation of a socialist society built on equality and justice.

The most remarkable of these priest-commanders was Manuel Pérez Martínez, a Spaniard who arrived in Colombia as a missionary and ended up leading the ELN for two decades. Known by his nom de guerre "El Cura Pérez" (Father Pérez), he shaped the organization's peculiar moral code. The ELN stressed what they called "living with dignity"—adhering to Catholic teaching even while waging guerrilla war.

This had practical consequences. For years, the ELN officially refused to participate in the Colombian drug trade, considering it incompatible with their Catholic morals. This was a remarkable stance in a country where cocaine money flowed like water, where other rebel groups and right-wing paramilitaries alike funded their operations with drug profits.

Father Pérez led the ELN until his death from hepatitis B in 1998, presiding over both its near-destruction and its resurrection.

Death and Rebirth in the Mountains

The early 1970s nearly killed the ELN.

The Colombian military launched Operation Anorí in 1973, a sustained campaign that devastated the guerrilla forces. The ELN was encircled, outgunned, and on the verge of annihilation. What happened next reveals the strange dance between the Colombian state and its insurgents that has characterized this conflict for generations.

President Alfonso López Michelsen, who took office in 1974, made a calculated gamble. Rather than finish off the ELN, he allowed them to break through the military encirclement and escape. His reasoning? He hoped this gesture would bring them to the negotiating table and end the war peacefully.

It didn't work. The ELN regrouped in the mountains and resumed operations, but they had learned a lesson about survival. They needed money—lots of it—and their Catholic scruples about drugs meant finding other sources.

They found two.

The first was kidnapping. The ELN became experts at abducting wealthy Colombians and foreign nationals, holding them for ransoms that could reach into the millions of dollars. The second was oil. Colombia has significant petroleum reserves, and the foreign companies extracting them became targets for extortion. Pay up, the ELN told them, or see your pipelines bombed, your workers kidnapped, your operations paralyzed.

This anti-extractive-industry stance fit neatly into their ideology. Liberation theology had always been suspicious of foreign corporations profiting from Latin American resources while local communities remained poor. Taxing the oil companies was both revolutionary praxis and practical fundraising.

The Other Guerrilla War

To understand the ELN, you have to understand that they've always operated in the shadow of a bigger, more powerful insurgency: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC.

The two groups emerged around the same time and shared similar Marxist goals, but they differed in crucial ways. The FARC was fundamentally a peasant army, rooted in rural communities, speaking for the campesinos who worked the land. The ELN drew its early recruits from cities—students, intellectuals, activists who had read Marx in university and gone to the countryside to spread revolution.

This urban intellectual character shaped the ELN's identity. They saw themselves as more ideologically pure than the FARC, more committed to genuine revolutionary transformation rather than simply building a parallel state in the countryside. The FARC eventually dove deep into the cocaine trade, becoming as much a drug cartel as a revolutionary movement. The ELN held out longer, though they eventually softened their stance.

Today, the ELN claims they earn only small amounts from "gramaje"—essentially a tax on drug producers operating in their territory. Critics argue this distinction is meaningless: taxing the drug trade is still profiting from it. But for an organization that stakes so much on its Catholic morality, the distinction matters to them.

The Endless Peace Process

Colombia's civil war is one of the longest-running conflicts in the Western Hemisphere, and attempts to end it through negotiation have produced one of history's most exhausting diplomatic sagas.

The ELN has been a reluctant, suspicious, on-again-off-again participant in peace talks for decades. When President Andrés Pastrana opened major negotiations with the FARC in the late 1990s, the ELN stayed on the sidelines, participating only in "exploratory conferences" about possibly joining future talks.

A pattern emerged that has repeated itself with numbing regularity ever since.

Talks would begin, often in Havana, Cuba, which has served as a neutral host for Colombian peace negotiations. Both sides would make cautious statements about their commitment to peace. Progress would seem possible. Then something would go wrong—a kidnapping, a bombing, a political shift in Bogotá—and the talks would collapse. Both sides would blame each other. Years would pass. A new government would take office. Talks would resume. The cycle would repeat.

In 2004, Mexico offered to mediate. The ELN eventually rejected Mexican involvement because Mexico had voted against Cuba at the United Nations—a reminder of how the Cold War's ideological divisions still shaped the conflict's diplomatic terrain decades after the Berlin Wall fell.

Norway, Spain, and Switzerland have all sent observers to various rounds of talks. Cuba, Chile, Venezuela, and Mexico have served as "guarantor countries" at different times. Negotiating teams have met in Havana, Caracas, and Mexico City. Documents have been drafted, ceasefire agreements have been signed, and prisoner releases have been announced as "gestures of good will."

None of it has produced lasting peace.

The Bogotá Bombing

On January 17, 2019, the ELN demonstrated why peace remained so elusive.

A truck loaded with explosives detonated at the General Santander National Police Academy in Bogotá, Colombia's capital. Twenty-one people died, including the bomber. Sixty-eight others were wounded. It was the deadliest attack on Bogotá in sixteen years.

The ELN claimed responsibility, justifying the massacre as a response to Colombian military operations during what had been a unilateral ceasefire. This is the logic of insurgent warfare: tit-for-tat violence, each atrocity justified as retaliation for the last, the body count climbing while each side insists the other started it.

President Iván Duque immediately suspended peace talks. He demanded that Cuba extradite the ELN leaders who had traveled to Havana for negotiations and were now sheltering there. Cuba refused, citing the protocols that govern peace talks—negotiators need guarantees of safety, or no one will ever negotiate.

The diplomatic impasse dragged on for years.

The COVID Ceasefire and What Came After

In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world, the ELN made an unexpected announcement: a unilateral one-month ceasefire, starting April 1.

It was a strange gesture from a group that had killed police cadets just a year earlier. Perhaps they saw an opportunity for positive publicity. Perhaps they genuinely wanted to reduce violence while the country grappled with a public health crisis. Perhaps they simply needed time to regroup.

The Colombian military reported in early 2021 that it had killed or captured 700 ELN members in 2020 alone, estimating that roughly 2,500 armed fighters remained. By 2025, however, the Central Intelligence Agency would estimate the ELN's strength had grown to between 5,000 and 6,000 active combatants—a sign that the organization retained significant recruiting power despite decades of war and the loss of so many members.

The Petro Promise

In 2022, something genuinely new happened in Colombian politics.

Gustavo Petro won the presidency—the first leftist ever elected to lead Colombia. Petro had himself been a guerrilla in his youth, a member of the M-19 movement that demobilized in 1990. He understood the insurgent mindset from the inside, and he promised to achieve what no Colombian president had managed: total peace with all armed groups.

Peace talks with the ELN resumed in Venezuela in November 2022. The ELN's chief negotiator, Pablo Beltrán, spoke of reconciliation and building a new nation. The government's High Commissioner for Peace, Danilo Rueda, said peace was "not only a question of laying down arms, but a process linked to the need for change."

The ELN declared a holiday truce that December, lasting from Christmas Eve through the new year. Talks moved to Mexico City in early 2023, with five countries now guaranteeing the process.

But familiar problems emerged. The ELN's military commander, Antonio García, complained that the peace process was being used as an "umbrella" for other issues. The government accused the ELN of bad faith. Ceasefires were announced, then violated, then suspended.

In August 2024, the government ended a six-month ceasefire after the ELN resumed kidnapping civilians for ransom—the same practice they had used to fund their operations for half a century.

Then, in January 2025, something even worse happened. Gunfights between the ELN and dissident factions of the now-demobilized FARC resulted in a massacre in Tibú, with around fifty civilians killed. The government suspended peace talks yet again.

The American Dimension

The ELN has been classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada, the European Union, New Zealand, and, of course, Colombia itself. This designation carries serious consequences: financial sanctions, travel restrictions, and the legal framework for military action.

In October 2025, that military action arrived directly from Washington.

The U.S. Department of Defense struck what it called an ELN drug vessel, killing three people. The attack was part of a broader American naval deployment in the Caribbean, targeting boats suspected of drug trafficking. Colombia's civil war had become, in this moment, an extension of America's own drug war.

The strike illustrated how the ELN's claim to be minimally involved in drug trafficking had become increasingly untenable. Whatever their Catholic scruples, whatever their ideological distinctions between direct trafficking and mere taxation, the organization had become entangled in the cocaine trade that flows from South America to North American markets.

The Venezuelan Connection

Colombia and Venezuela share a border that runs over 1,400 miles through some of the most lawless terrain in South America. For the ELN, that border has been both refuge and opportunity.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, and his successor Nicolás Maduro, have governed with an ideological sympathy for leftist insurgencies. The ELN has reportedly found safe haven on the Venezuelan side of the border, a charge that Colombian and American officials have made repeatedly. Venezuela denies actively supporting the guerrillas, but the porous border makes enforcement nearly impossible.

In 2019, during protests against the Maduro government, something disturbing allegedly occurred in the border city of San Cristóbal. According to Colombian human rights organizations, armed groups composed of ELN members and FARC dissidents, supported by Venezuelan security forces, murdered two Venezuelan protesters. If true, it would represent a new and troubling dimension: Colombian guerrillas acting as auxiliaries to Venezuelan state repression.

What the ELN Wants

After sixty years of war, what does the ELN actually want?

Their stated goals remain rooted in their founding ideology: a Colombia transformed along socialist and Christian principles, with wealth redistributed, foreign corporations expelled from the extractive industries, and genuine democracy replacing what they see as oligarchic rule by the wealthy few.

But observers note that the ELN has also become, in some ways, an end in itself. The organization provides livelihoods for thousands of fighters and their support networks. It controls territory where it functions as the de facto government. It has institutional interests in its own perpetuation that may transcend any ideological program.

One-fifth of ELN supporters have taken up arms, according to Felipe Torres, a former member of the organization's national directorate. That means four-fifths support the movement without fighting—a substantial social base that believes, however naively, that the ELN represents something worth supporting.

The Strange Persistence of Catholic Marxism

The ELN is an anachronism. The Cold War that gave birth to it ended over three decades ago. The Soviet Union is gone. Cuba's revolutionary model has calcified into authoritarian stagnation. Liberation theology has faded as a force in Latin American Catholicism, displaced by evangelical Protestantism and conservative Catholic revivals.

And yet the ELN persists, still quoting Camilo Torres and Father Pérez, still claiming that Marx and Christ demand the same revolution, still fighting a war that most of the world has forgotten.

They have survived military offensives that should have destroyed them. They have outlasted presidents and generals who vowed to crush them. They have adapted to the drug economy they once rejected on principle. They have killed and kidnapped and bombed, and they have sat at negotiating tables speaking of peace and reconciliation.

Whether they are freedom fighters or terrorists depends entirely on who you ask. What seems undeniable is that they represent something deep in Colombian society—a wound that refuses to heal, a grievance that refuses to die, a dream of justice that has curdled into violence.

The ELN's war is not over. It may never be over. It has become part of the landscape, as permanent as the mountains where its fighters hide, as stubborn as the ideology that refuses to accept defeat.

A Note on the Present

As of late 2025, the situation remains fluid. Peace talks have been suspended, resumed, and suspended again so many times that the cycle has become almost ritualistic. The Petro government still hopes to achieve the comprehensive peace that has eluded all his predecessors. The ELN still demands transformations that no Colombian government has been willing or able to deliver.

The kidnappings continue. The extortion continues. The occasional ceasefires come and go. Civilians die in the crossfire between the ELN, FARC dissidents, right-wing paramilitaries, drug traffickers, and the Colombian military.

Somewhere in the mountains, men and women who believe they are fighting for Christ and Marx and the Colombian poor load their rifles and wait for whatever comes next.