Cocaine violence driven by Marxist guerrilla army rocks Colombia

The mountains of Catatumbo in eastern Colombia are so dangerous that the police and army generally don’t stray far from their barracks for fear of snipers.

The sharpshooters concealed in the jungle have varying allegiances, from drug cartels to Marxist guerrillas. But they’re all ultimately in the deadly business of asserting control over the region’s fields of coca, the raw material for Colombia’s multibillion-dollar cocaine industry.

Over the past week, Catatumbo — named after the river that snakes through it — has been ripped by the most intense outbreak of violence in a decade. The source of the terror is a Marxist guerrilla group which wants to take total control of the area’s cocaine laboratories, clandestine air strips and smuggling routes into Venezuela.

The National Liberation Army, or ELN, launched an offensive to try to drive out a rival group, with its fighters going door to door with death lists of local farmers suspected of supporting its enemies. The violence has already claimed at least 80 lives and displaced 36,000 people.

The bloodbath in Catatumbo is another blow for leftist President Gustavo Petro’s attempts to seek “total peace” through talks with guerrillas and the private armies of drug-traffickers. Worsening security across the nation, and the spread of crime gangs into areas that were previously peaceful, has made many Colombians impatient with attempts to negotiate with groups that extort, kidnap and smuggle cocaine.

The failure of Petro’s strategy could favor conservative presidential and congressional candidates in 2026 who can appeal to voters hankering for a military crackdown, according to Sergio Guzman, who heads Colombia Risk Analysis.

“Public order” is now Colombia’s single biggest problem, according to an Invamer poll published in December, exceeding concerns about the economy and corruption.

“This is going to be central to the election,” Guzman said.

Record cocaine

The violence has fueled a refugee crisis, with thousands of people making their way to the provincial capital Cucuta to seek shelter. Others have gone into Venezuela.

One of the refugees is Francisco, who hid in the trees when ELN fighters in combat fatigues came hunting for him at his farm in Tibu, the municipality that produces more coca than any other in Colombia.

“I was there for two or three hours, praying to God that they wouldn’t see me,” said Francisco, who asked to withhold his last name for fear of retaliation. Once it became dark, he fled the area.

Although Catatumbo is currently the worst-affected region, various armed militias are battling across the country, on the Pacific coast, along the Andes mountains, in the eastern cattle-ranching plains and in the Amazon. The fighting has sometimes spread to the other side of the Venezuelan border.

Much of the current fighting has its roots in the demobilization of Colombia’s biggest guerrilla group, the FARC, which agreed in 2016 to hand in its weapons and form a political party in exchange for pledges of agrarian reform, seats in congress and other benefits.

Before then, the FARC was powerful enough in many regions to keep out rivals, but its disappearance sparked a fight for control of the areas it had abandoned, with record cocaine production aggravating the situation.

As of 2024, there were 58 illegal armed groups operating in the country, according to Bogota-based political research center CERAC. Those groups were present in 281 Colombian municipalities last year, up from 215 in 2021, the year before Petro took office.

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

That generates about $14 billion in annual revenue for Colombia’s illegal armed groups, according to a Daniel Mejia, an economics professor in Bogota who has researched drugs and crime.

On Friday, the Petro administration declared a state of internal commotion over the situation in Catatumbo, giving the government extraordinary powers to face the crisis, while Finance Minister Diego Guevara said he is considering a value-added tax on online gambling platforms to help finance costs associated with the deterioration in security.

Political problems

Colombia’s conservative voters have yet to coalesce around a single candidate. But Senators Paloma Valencia and Maria Fernanda Cabal, former Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon and journalist Vicky Davila, are among the possible presidential candidates who might benefit from the current mood, according to Guzman.

“I don’t think the government is going to reach an agreement with any of the groups,” Valencia said. “It’s going to have to understand that it’ll need to return to the struggle against drugs.”

In 2002, rebel violence and failed peace talks led to the election of Valencia’s mentor, Alvaro Uribe, who ordered a massive military offensive against the guerrillas — which weakened the fighters, though failed to eliminate them.

For now, Colombia’s countryside remains ungovernable — and that could quickly sour relations between Petro and U.S. President Donald Trump. Colombia has been among Washington’s closest allies in Latin America for decades and the biggest recipient of U.S. aid in the region.

But with Trump pledging to step up the war on cartels, Colombia might even face decertification as a partner in the war on drugs. That would put the country in the same rogue category as Bolivia and Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela, and limit access to some aid and loans.

Still, though this might affect Colombia’s reputation, it won’t do major economic damage given that U.S. aid is not as significant as it was at the start of the century, according to Adam Isacson, who studies US-Colombia policy at the Washington Office on Latin America.

The fighting in Catatumbo has also caused friction with Maduro, who until recently has had warm relations with the Petro government.

Many of the workers who pick coca in Catatumbo are Venezuelans. Some have fled back across the border in recent days, arriving by river or on motorbikes and in cars, often waving white flags.

Venezuela’s armed forces have long tolerated, and sometimes even helped, the various Colombian armed groups such as the ELN that operate on both sides of the border.

In a post on X this week, 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.

For his part, Maduro sent Russian-made military jets to patrol the border on Wednesday in a show of force. Maduro has sometimes sought to rally nationalist sentiment by fanning disputes with foreign countries when he is facing protests at home.

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With assistance from Fabiola Zerpa, Andreina Itriago Acosta and Patricia Laya.