Guns, drugs, jobs. In these Venezuelan towns, Colombian rebels call the shots

CARACAS, Sept. 2 (Reuters) – Shortly after rebels from neighboring Colombia arrived in this Venezuelan village, they began selecting students from the local high school to harvest coca, the plant used to make cocaine, said the headmaster told Reuters.

Four years later, these foreigners from the National Liberation Party (ELN) function in this city in the northwestern state of Zulia as both local government and important employers, according to the educator and 14 other residents. All spoke on condition of anonymity and asked not to name their community because they feared retaliation.

The guerrillas pay villagers, including children, to staff drug operations, extortion funds, and wild gold mines in both countries, people said. Colombian security officials say the criminal proceeds will fund the guerrillas’ longstanding uprising against the Colombian government. The group’s recruitment has intensified over the past year as the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated misery in Venezuela, where the economy has been plagued by years of hyperinflation and scarcity.

When the armed Colombians first arrived, villagers said they were flanked by local Socialist Party leaders who said they were there to bring security with the blessing of President Nicolas Maduro.

But their kind of law and order, the people said, quickly turned into tyranny. The Colombians banned residents from sharing information about the group’s activities, imposed a strict 6 p.m. curfew, banned firearms and controlled whoever entered the city, villagers said.

The rebels also brought in money. When they recruited the students to work the coca fields, they offered to “paint the school, fix the lights or whatever we needed,” the headmaster said in an interview. In 2020, when school enrollment was already falling as starving families fled the country, more than half of the remaining 170 students left the ELN, leaving only 80 children in class, she said.

The Colombian government has long claimed that Venezuela’s leadership is providing safe haven for anti-government Colombian rebels and that Caracas allows cocaine to be transported across its territory to reduce profits. Maduro denies the drug trafficking allegations but expressed sympathy for the rebel leftist ideology and openly welcomed some guerrilla leaders.

Venezuela’s Ministry of Information did not respond to requests for comment on the guerrilla group’s activities in the country.

Pablo Beltran, the ELN’s deputy commander, denied that the group was involved in cocaine production, drug trafficking, or other illegal activities, or that it was recruiting Venezuelans for such operations. He told Reuters that the group is collecting fees from drug criminal groups who enter coca-growing areas in Colombia that it controls. He acknowledged that poor Venezuelans, fueled by their country’s economic downturn, are working in these areas, but said they are not paid by the ELN.

Beltran said that while the ELN is invading Venezuelan territory, the group’s policy is not to have a permanent presence there. He also denied that the ELN was present in Venezuela with the blessing of Maduro.

“I hope we have his moral support,” said Beltran. “But the day they notice that a force like ours is stationed there, they not only lose their sovereignty, they also violate their constitution.”

This report is based on interviews with more than 60 Venezuelans – including pastors, ranchers and teachers – who live in six states near the Colombian border. Reuters also spoke to lawmakers, human rights activists, indigenous leaders, ex-Venezuelan military officials, two rebel defectors, and US and Colombian authorities familiar with the rebel’s growing control over the region.

The interviews show a portrait of areas being remodeled by armed Colombians who take advantage of Venezuela’s decline. Rebels who once hid from the Colombian military in the jungles of Venezuela have moved into population centers and ruled alongside the Maduros government in some places and ousted in others, residents of those areas said.

Reuters graphic

They are mainly ELN guerrillas and ex-fighters from another rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), according to residents and internal Venezuelan intelligence documents from Reuters. These fighters oppose the groundbreaking 2016 peace agreement between the FARC and the Colombian government. The FARC dissident groups could not be reached for comment.

In Venezuela alone there are more than 1,000 ELN members, Colombia’s then Foreign Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo told the Organization of American States in 2019.

The rebels have closed loopholes in Venezuela’s crumbling institutions, distributed food and medicine, and even approved infrastructure projects in some areas, villagers told Reuters.

Many said the rebel presence had reduced street crime. But all the locals who spoke to Reuters said they were afraid of these armed fighters. A villager in another town in Zulia compared life under ELN rule to “life in a prison with a constant eye”.

A 16-year-old high school dropout from outside the once prosperous oil town of Maracaibo, the capital of Zulia, said he worked 12-hour shifts on an ELN coca farm, picking leaves until his hands were bleeding. Still, the boy said he gets three meals a day and earns the equivalent of $ 200 a month, a fortune in large parts of Venezuela.

OLD ALLIANCE

After Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999, FARC and ELN were allowed to operate more openly in Venezuela, according to former Venezuelan officials, residents, analysts, US and Colombian authorities and former guerrillas.

What began as an alliance of like-minded revolutionaries with common enemies in the Colombian and US governments has grown, according to Bram Ebus, who oversees guerrilla activities in Venezuela for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. These companies have become financial lifelines for the guerrillas and Venezuelans, stretching from small villages to the power corridors in Caracas, Ebus, eight former Venezuelan military officials and two former members of FARC dissident groups told Reuters.

In March 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Maduro with allegedly running a drug trafficking organization that worked with the FARC to flood the United States with cocaine and offering a $ 15 million reward for information related to his Arrest.

Venezuela’s foreign minister at the time, Jorge Arreaza, called the allegations unfounded. The Ministry of Information did not respond to a request for comment on alleged financial links between government officials and Colombian guerrilla groups.

The US authorities said, on condition of anonymity, they were increasingly concerned about how deeply rooted the Colombian rebels are in Venezuela.

Venezuela has also tracked the expansion of armed groups from Colombia into its territory, according to Manuel Christopher Figuera, a former general and former chief of Venezuelan intelligence who fled the country in 2019 from one of the country’s intelligence agencies who are the alleged locations of ELN – and dissident FARC activists in Venezuela and their range of alleged activities, including drug and arms trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and contract killing.

Reuters was unable to verify the authenticity of the cards bearing the insignia of the Strategic Center for the Security and Protection of the Homeland. Venezuela’s Ministry of Information did not respond to requests for comment, and calls to the number provided for intelligence were not answered.

When Maduro’s government is allied with Colombian rebels, the relationship is not always friendly. In March, Venezuela’s military launched an offensive against a group of FARC dissidents in the border state of Apure after Maduro said the group had been dispatched by Colombia to destabilize the country.

Colombia’s Defense Minister Diego Molano dismissed Maduro’s claim, describing the dispute as a conflict over control of drug trafficking routes.

Locals in Apure, where thousands fled the fighting, told Reuters they had watched the guerrillas steadily consolidate their power, expand their illegal business activities, while largely taking over the role of law enforcement, over the past five years. A local rancher said they even went into economic regulation and told farmers what they could ask for cheese and beef.

“You are the government,” said the rancher of the rebels. The Apure governor did not respond to requests for comment.

Indigenous Venezuelans also say that their lives have been turned upside down by the guerrillas, whom they call “rubber boots” because of their high black shoes. In the mineral-rich Amazon state, more than a dozen tribal leaders told Reuters that in recent years the rebels have stepped up illegal mining of gold and coltan, a mineral found in cell phones.

In March, leaders of three tribes filed a complaint with the state human rights bureau alleging that “a large number” of indigenous Venezuelans have been “enslaved and blackmailed by an irregular group of Colombians identified as FARC dissidents who they are forced into gold mines.

The Amazon Human Rights Bureau admitted receiving the complaint but made no further comments.

“YOU FEEL SHAME”

Some Venezuelans credit the rebels for keeping their families afloat.

A 42-year-old corn farmer in Apure, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, said he has not seen his older brother since the FARC was forcibly enlisted eight years ago. But every month, he said, his brother calls her mother and sends $ 120, money that he and his elderly parents depend on to survive.

In Zulia, a teacher who only wanted to be identified by his first name – Armando – said that boys were rare in his high school because so many work for the ELN on coca farms or at border crossings and extort bribes from migrants and traders.

Armando understands the lure of drug money. He said he too began harvesting coca for the ELN in 2017 to supplement his $ 3 a month teacher salary. He has no intention of stopping.

“You are ashamed,” he said, “but you see food for your children in every leaf you pick.”

Reporting by Sarah Kinosian; Editing by Marla Dickerson

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