In a remote corner of northeast Colombia, where dirt roads lead to lush hills lined with banana trees, farmers and their families have become the victims of a spate of violence unlike anything the country has seen in a generation.
As two rebel groups battle for territory, more than 54,000 people have fled their homes, and an estimated 80 people died in a matter of days, with the death toll expected to climb.
At the root of this conflict are decades-old battles over land and drug money, and the failure of past deals to lead to lasting peace. But analysts, diplomats and even Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, point to another, newer factor helping foment the chaos in Colombia: neighboring Venezuela.
Over the past decade, as Venezuela has descended into autocracy, its government has also drawn closer to the principal aggressor in the current conflict next door, a longstanding rebel group called the National Liberation Army, or ELN.
Born as a Marxist group in Santander, Colombia, in the 1960s, the ELN has increasingly used Venezuela as a place of refuge, moving deeper into the country, enriching itself through drug trafficking and other illicit activities, tripling in size to roughly 6,000 fighters and strengthening relationships with Venezuelan officials.
In return, the Colombian authorities say, the country’s autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, who has become more isolated on the global stage, has benefited from having a powerful armed group as a buffer against domestic and foreign threats, including the possibility of a coup.
For years, the disintegration of Venezuela’s democracy has put a strain on neighboring Colombia, sending some three million refugees fleeing into the nation of just 50 million.
Now, some say, Mr. Maduro’s Venezuela is being used as a base to unleash something far more destabilizing: a new wave of destruction in Colombia.
Mr. Petro went as far as accusing the ELN of becoming a “foreign force” that had invaded Colombia. “This is a problem of national sovereignty,” he said, “not just an internal conflict, which we’ve had since long ago.”
Venezuela’s defense minister, Vladimir Padrino López, in a statement in late January, said it was “essential to state with crystal clarity that Venezuela does not serve, nor will it ever serve, as a platform for armed groups outside the law, whatever their nature, ideology or nationality.”
Why the ELN decided to attack now is unclear, but the relationship between Mr. Petro and Mr. Maduro, once friendly, has soured significantly over the last few months.
Mr. Petro is Colombia’s first leftist president, a former guerrilla himself and seemingly a natural ally of Mr. Maduro, who calls himself a socialist. Two years ago, they held a high-profile meeting in Caracas, where the two promised to work together on issues of mutual interest.
That included the security of their 1,300-mile shared border.
Then in July, Mr. Maduro declared himself the winner of a tainted presidential election, refusing to produce tallies to back up this claim and imprisoning roughly 2,000 people amid a wave of protest.
The United Nations and other independent monitors questioned the result. The United States recognized the opposition candidate as the winner.
Soon, Mr. Petro, one of few leaders to still be somewhat amicable with Mr. Maduro, took a more critical tone, publicly urging him to publish election results and release political prisoners. Mr. Maduro responded by ordering a “punch in the face” to anyone who meddled in Venezuela’s affairs.
When Mr. Maduro was sworn in for a third term on Jan. 10, Mr. Petro refused to attend the ceremony or to recognize the Venezuelan as president.
Five days later, the ELN sent fighters from a more southern point in Colombia into northern Colombia, to a strategically important region called Catatumbo, saying on X that it sought to oust a rival armed group called the 33rd Front.
The two groups had long divided control of the region, home to vast fields of coca, the base product in cocaine. Now, a fragile power-sharing accord had broken.
The violence has crushed Mr. Petro’s chances at accomplishing one of his most important policy goals: a peace deal with the ELN, a key part of an ambitious campaign promise — “total peace,” he called it — that he made to end all conflict in Colombia.
The country has suffered decades of internal violence that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
“‘Total peace’ was already in a bad spot,” said Kyle Johnson, co-founder of Foundation Conflict Responses, a nonprofit research group in Bogotá. “With this outbreak of violence it feels politically like the final nail in the coffin.”
Today, tens of thousands of civilians are trapped in the middle of the violence. Some families in Catatumbo have sought refuge in the forest, surviving on whatever they managed to carry with them.
Others have streamed into Tibú, a small Colombian town on the Venezuelan border, sleeping in a school that has become a shelter. Still others have crowded into a coliseum in Cúcuta, the region’s main city, lining up each morning for food and assistance.
On a recent day at the school in Tibú, classrooms had become bedrooms, and children played while a young woman, overcome with emotion, cried and wheezed until she fainted on a patio floor.
“Sow what you dream,” read a mural on one wall. Military helicopters buzzed overhead.
Venezuela’s powerful interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, had just paid a visit to the border, while a new wave of Colombian troops were moving in to fight the ELN.
As the sun set, Luz, 45, and her husband Francisco, 40, sat in the doorway of one of the classrooms, describing the home they had abandoned: dirt floor, wood construction, a small patio, a barrel for collecting rainwater.
Just days before, as armed men had stormed the region, a man had arrived at the school where Francisco worked and told him that he had five minutes to leave.
The couple and their two sons ran.
The Times is publishing only their first names, out of concern for their safety.
That night in Tibú, Luz was struggling to understand how they had gotten there.
“All of us civilians are saying: What are they fighting for?” she said. “What are they looking for? What is the reason for this?”
At his office in Cúcuta, Gen. Mario Contreras, the regional commander for the Colombian Army, said the violence had begun with the killing of a single family, which angered the ELN. The following day, he said, the ELN entered town centers — “because they know people are defenseless there” — armed with pistols and dressed as civilians, looking for suspected collaborators of the 33rd Front.
A generation ago, the ELN was so weak it was near extinction, battered by the Colombian state and paramilitaries. In a recent academic paper, two researchers, Jorge Mantilla and Andreas Feldmann, argued that “the support of neighboring Venezuela” has been the most important factor in the rebels’ “improbable resurgence.”
Bram Ebus, a consultant for the International Crisis Group, said that the Venezuelan government had in recent years even used the ELN as “an extension” of its security forces. “We know that there is a tacit alliance on the federal level in Venezuela,” he said.
The Colombian military says ELN fighters passed through Venezuela to get to the scene of their first attacks. In a message on X, signed by the Central Command of the ELN, the group called this “fake news” invented by the Colombian government to justify a possible invasion of Venezuela.
The group has focused its anger on the Colombian government, which it accused of uniting with the 33rd Front to “annihilate” the ELN.
The 33rd Front is a faction of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, who remain in arms despite a 2016 peace deal signed by the FARC and the Colombian government.
In late January, Colombia’s defense minister traveled to Venezuela to meet with his Venezuelan counterpart and said afterward that the two had discussed “cooperation” in capturing ELN leaders and containing the group.
As the violence unfolded in recent days, something remarkable started happening at the River Tarra, a muddy strip dividing Colombia and Venezuela. For years, Venezuelans had poured across it, seeking sanctuary in Colombia. Now, the flow was going in reverse.
At one crossing, a makeshift ferry carrying roughly nearly 3,000 people into Venezuela in the first three days of the fighting.
Jackline, 42, was one of them. Wearing a red skirt adorned with buttons and a blue blouse — more suitable for church than an escape — she was with her son, 7, and daughter, 17.
Jackline had been displaced once before by violence, she said. And though she is Colombian, she was now considering staying in Venezuela for good.
“It’s really nice there,” she said. “There is no war.”
Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá.
