At least 80 people are dead and more than 18,000 have been forced to flee their homes in Colombia, officials say, amid fierce clashes between two rival armed groups on the border with Venezuela.
The violence, carried out over the last four days in a northeast region called Catatumbo, is some of the worst the country has suffered through in recent years. And it has raised concerns that the country is moving in the opposite direction of “total peace” — a goal made a priority by the country’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro, who is more than halfway through his four-year term.
The Colombian leader visited the region on Friday, writing on X that his government “stands with the people of Catatumbo.” He has also sent troops and humanitarian assistance.
Displaced families are taking refuge in a stadium in Cúcuta, a border town better known in recent years for receiving Venezuelan migrants. In some places, Colombians are fleeing into Venezuela — home to its own humanitarian crisis — and the Venezuelan autocratic leader there, Nicolás Maduro, has promised to send them aid.
The clashes in Catatumbo are a stark departure from the hope that swept across parts of Colombia less than a decade ago, when the country signed a peace deal with its largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
The nation had suffered through decades of internal conflict, with left-wing guerrilla groups, including the FARC; paramilitary organizations; and the government fighting for control of the country and for lucrative industries like narcotrafficking.
Thousands of FARC fighters laid down their arms in the 2016 agreement. and at the time it felt like a seismic moment for one of the world’s most violent countries. But old rebel groups, including the National Liberation Army, or ELN, persisted. At the same time, new ones emerged, all fighting for control of territory and industry left behind by the FARC.
In some cases, these new groups consist of former FARC fighters, and they have divided and subdivided, helping fuel an ever more complicated conflict.
Most of the violence has played out in rural parts of the country with many Colombians living in cities only dimly aware of the violence that has been unfolding not far from their homes.
In the past, the FARC clung to a leftist ideology, fighting the government and seeking to topple and replace it. Today’s armed groups are more focused on fighting each other, battling over land and profits, with the military trying to contain them.
Catatumbo is home to vast fields of coca, the plant that is a base product in cocaine. Two groups control the territory, the ELN and a group of former FARC members called the 33rd Front, said General Luis Emilio Cardozo, the head of the Colombian army, speaking to reporters over the weekend.
A precarious peace between the two groups broke down last week. General Cardozo said there had been four or five clashes between the groups in recent days, and in other cases armed fighters were going door-to-door, targeting former FARC fighters they suspected of being part of the 33rd Front.
“It was a very well planned criminal operation,” he said, “they went with a list in hand looking for the people they wanted to kill.”
In a message posted on X on Sunday, the ELN called the 33rd Front the “only objective of our actions.”
But many victims, including those fleeing their homes, appear to be civilians.
The ELN, which Mr. Petro has accused of a “massacre” in Catatumbo, is now the oldest existing leftist guerrilla group in Latin America.
It was founded in 1964 by radical Catholic priests and Marxist rebels. For years, the group argued it was pushing for better conditions for poor farmers through acts of violence against the state.
But Mr. Petro, whose own road to the presidency was preceded by years as a leftist guerrilla in a different group, accused today’s ELN of becoming nothing more than a “mafia.”
“I always admired their principles, their revolutionary dedication,” the president wrote on X of the rebel group. “I think that ELN is dead.”
At the beginning of his presidency, Mr. Petro had said he could strike a peace deal with the various groups in a matter of months. In recent days he suspended ongoing peace talks.
The ELN has thousands of members, according to the Colombian military, and its presence in the country grew from 149 municipalities in 2019, to 226 last year, according to Colombia’s ombudsman.
The group has also expanded into Venezuela in recent years, where its members are beyond the reach of the Colombian military and have found an ideological ally in Mr. Maduro.
Mr. Maduro in turn benefits from having another armed force as an ally.
With the military distracted, a separate conflict broke out in recent days between two former FARC groups in Guaviare, a department in the south-central part of Colombia, according to the country’s ombudsman’s office.
Organizations including the International Crisis Group have warned for years that Colombia’s security situation has deteriorated since 2016, and could erupt into violence at any moment.
“We are very concerned that moment is now,” said Elizabeth Dickinson, a Colombia-based analyst for the nonprofit organization. “Escalations on various front lines have taken the conflict to a very dangerous inflection point.”
Ms. Dickinson called the scale of conflict in Guaviare “very significant,” and said it had the potential to spread across several departments in southern Colombia. She added that there are “many children” in the ranks of the armed groups in that region.
The clashes in Catatumbo, in the north, on the border with Venezuela, come amid growing tensions between Mr. Petro and Mr. Maduro, who continues to provide safe haven to members of the ELN.
Both Mr. Petro and Mr. Maduro call themselves leftists, and just two years ago, the two were shaking hands in Caracas and promising more productive relations.
But Mr. Petro has turned more critical of the autocrat in recent weeks, reprimanding him for locking up political opponents and refusing to release the results of a recent presidential vote that Mr. Maduro claimed to win. The United States and a broad spectrum of other nations say the vote was actually won by a top opposition leader.
Mr. Petro’s criticism has provoked the ire of Mr. Maduro, who is increasingly isolated on the global stage, even from former allies like Colombia and Brazil, and is looking for ways to strike back at those who spurn him.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said last year that it was tracking eight different armed conflicts inside Colombia.
On Monday the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the number people forced to flee their homes amid the violence had risen to more than 18,000.
William Villamizar, the governor of North Santander, a border department, said the death toll had risen to more than 80 people.
And the country’s ombudsman, Iris Marín, said that the violence amounted to “one of the largest and most serious humanitarian crises that Catatumbo has faced, if not the worst.”
She blamed the conflict on a “few people” in the region and called on them to end it. “Those few people have the ability to stop the suffering.”
Federico Rios and Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting.
