FARC-EP and ELN – The ‘Leftist Insurgencies’. ELN and Liberation Theology.

FARC-EP and ELN – The ‘Leftist Insurgencies’. ELN and Liberation Theology.

The National Liberation Army (ELN) is the oldest and one of the most powerful insurgent groups in Colombia. It seeks to control critical areas of the country—particularly those associated with drug trafficking—and frequently engages in armed confrontations with Colombian authorities. The ELN operates throughout Colombia, with its heaviest concentration in the country’s northwest and southwest. Estimates of their membership ranges between as few as 1,600 to as high as 5,000. The ELN conducts armed assaults, assassinations, extortion operations, and hostage-takings. The group mostly attacks the Colombian Government, military forces, and critical infrastructure but also targets civilians. The ELN equips its members with small arms, machineguns, mines, and IEDs. Operationally, the ELN competes with the right-wing auto defence paramilitaries for resources and territory, both in support of drug trafficking, and control of the population. From our external perspective, separating the FARC-EP from the rural indigenous and mestizo population segments that fed its number was far more straightforward than what we would face with the ELN. Where the FARC-EP ideology was politically centred in communist or socialist reordering of Colombian society, the United Camalista National Liberation Army of Colombia UCELN had a far deeper emotional calling over its adherents.

Figure 20 offers some of the object symbolism of the UCELN, beginning with the conceptualisation of Liberation Theology.

During the mid-20th century, disenchanted members of the clergy and the oppressed classes of Latin America united to reinterpret the role of the Catholic Church in everyday society and to reclaim religion towards the pursuit of social justice.

Liberation theology encouraged a break from an elitist notion of the Church and the return of control to the people. By involving the poor in their own liberation and offering Christianity as a tool towards a more perfect society, liberation theologians dramatically changed the relationship between not only the Church and the state, but also the Church and the people. Guided by innovative Catholic priests Father Camilo Torres Restrepo in Colombia and Father Gustavo Gutiérrez in Peru, this movement reinvigorated marginalized people throughout Latin America, while still utilizing a formal theological approach. Though ultimately opposed by the Vatican because of its radical leanings, liberation theology implicated the Church in the ongoing struggle between the population segments of the Centaur State in Colombia. The ELN’s claim to Catholic theology as a basis of its social goals created an entirely new dilemma for the Catholic nation of Colombia, one that the Catholic Church was of little assistance in resolving. Liberation theology offered a home to large numbers of otherwise Eurocentric criollo Colombians based in widely accepted religious thought rather than debates over Marxist-Leninist ideology. Even though Colombia’s conservative right denounced liberation theology as simply a mask for Marxist-Leninism, the new theology allowed for dialogues and sales pitches to occur in contexts of religious righteousness rather than foreign political ideas.

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In 2007, we were charged with assisting the Governor of the Department of Caqueta and the Commanding General of the 6th Colombian Army Division with resettling a strategic town called La Union Peneya. The village of La Union Peneya (formerly of approximately 2000 inhabitants) was abandoned in July of 2002 when government troops from the 12th Brigade (responsible for defending the Department of Caqueta) and FARC Forces fought for control of the town. During fierce fighting between government forces and insurgents who used the town as a base of support and operations, significant portions of the town were badly damaged including the hospital clinic, church, both the elementary and high schools as well as most of the resident’s homes. As the fighting grew, the inhabitants (led by the town’s catholic priest) who were not active members of the FARC insurgency fled to homes of relatives in nearby villages and municipalities. After several months of intense fighting, government forces finally open FARC resistance in the Municipality of Montanita where La Union Peneya is located. The 12th Brigade’s Guipe Battalion then established a company sized outpost in the hills overlooking the town to secure it against a return of the rebel forces. For the next three and half years, the village of La Union Peneya remained abandoned, no man’s land between the FARC-EP and the Colombian Army. The issues facing the resettling of the town were nearly beyond the capacity and authority of the departmental government and only with direct intervention by President Uribe and his Accion Social, was the project even possible. To even access the town’s population in nearby IDP camps, we were required to employ the offices of the bishop and priests who served as sort of gatekeepers to the vulnerable refugees. The issues to be resolved to the satisfaction of the church leaders included decisions on funding and access to repair the town’s schools and healthcare facilities left in ruins. More contentiously, only 15 of 367 families living in La Union Peneya had title or legal permission to live in the house they had built and lived in for generations. Similarly, only 32 of 80 established small farms were legally titled, and 48 small farmers who had been living on and working the farms for one or more generations did so with the knowledge that large family companies could or would, one day try to return and lay claim to them against their occupants. While the area of Caqueta was FARC rather than ELN, we found it easy to understand the lure of and integration in, Colombian rural society by the ELN and their Catholic liberation theology. The import of this is in the ELN’s ability to sustain its numbers in the field and provide a rationale for control over the civilian towns and farms with provide resources, manpower, intelligence, and obscurity from Colombian Armed Forces seeking to separate civilian from insurgent guerrilla. The steadily increasing violence by the right wing self-defence forces appears to be focused on reigniting the armed conflict as a means to reenergise the Centaur State which is fuelled by the work of countering an insurgency, even if that insurgency is created by those who control the state.