Venezuela’s border no longer behaves like a normal frontier, but like a criminal corridor where the ELN taxes movement, dictates daily life, and turns cocaine, fear, and state weakness into power.
A Frontier Ruled by Someone Else
In the hills and coca country around the Colombia-Venezuela border, the old map is still printed on paper, but power has moved elsewhere. The Wall Street Journal, in a report by Ian Lovett, describes a region where the National Liberation Army, or ELN, imposes a 6 P.M. curfew in some towns, patrols in camouflage and red-and-black face coverings, forces motorcyclists to ride without helmets so faces remain visible, and kills people accused of speaking with rivals, leaving bodies on roads as warnings. Tens of thousands of villagers have fled. Jose Pinto, an activist and former member of a now-defunct armed force that opposed the ELN, puts it in the blunt language of people who live inside someone else’s law: “You have to submit to the rules they set, like it or not.”
That is the real meaning of the story. This is not merely a gang problem or a smuggling problem. It is a sovereignty problem. In Catatumbo and across the borderlands, neither state seems able to exercise the kind of daily authority that citizens are supposed to feel in their bones. The ELN has become what Latin America knows too well, an armed structure that does not simply hide in the state’s shadows but occupies the empty rooms the state left behind. It polices entry, imposes rules, punishes disobedience, and organizes the local economy. That is why the group is now a direct obstacle not only to Washington’s stated goal of halting the cocaine trade, but to any serious attempt to pretend that border governance still belongs mainly to Bogotá or Caracas.
The Guerrilla That Became a Cross-Border Business
The ELN did not begin as the force it is now. Founded in the 1960s by leftist Colombian rebels trained in Cuba and intent on taking power in Bogotá, it spent decades overshadowed by the larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. But after the FARC disarmed in the 2016 peace agreement, the ELN filled the vacuum. That shift matters because it captures one of the oldest tragedies in Latin American conflict. Peace with one armed actor does not automatically build state presence. Sometimes it simply clears room for another organization that knows how to convert abandoned territory into profit and control.
What emerged in the years that followed was not just a tougher insurgency, but a transnational criminal organization with increasingly Venezuelan roots. The Wall Street Journal reports that the ELN now has roughly 7,000 fighters, nearly half of them Venezuelan in border areas. It controls Venezuela’s 1,400-mile border with Colombia and the trafficking routes between them, oversees Colombian land where coca is grown, runs illegal gold mines in southern Venezuela, and has little criminal competition along the frontier, none inside Venezuela, according to InSight Crime’s Jeremy McDermott. In plain terms, it has become a binational business with armed teeth.
The Venezuelan side of the story is especially telling. Analysts cited by the Journal say the ELN cut a deal with the Maduro government, gaining broad freedom in Venezuela in exchange for helping guard against incursions from Colombia, long a U.S. military ally. The article adds that Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela’s powerful interior minister, has signaled the group’s protected status, a claim he denies, while the Venezuelan government did not respond to requests for comment about its relationship with the ELN. Whether one reads that as direct complicity, functional tolerance, or mutually useful overlap, the outcome is the same. The ELN enjoys a safe haven that turns the border from a line into a shield.
There is a harder social truth inside all this. Armed groups persist in Latin America not only because they are violent, but because they become useful. Much of the employment in Catatumbo is tied to coca farming, which local and central government officials told the Journal has tripled since 2018. Colombian Defense Minister Pedro Sanchez says the group is popular, which generates an illegal economy. Gabriel Silva, a former Colombian defense minister, adds that locals depend economically on the ELN’s activities, including coca production, and that some families have contributed fighters for generations. In some parts of Venezuela, researcher Ronal Rodriguez says, the group has gained legitimacy with locals, practically replacing the state. That is the kind of legitimacy bombs cannot easily erase.
Why Force Alone Keeps Failing
The temptation in Washington, and often in Latin American capitals too, is to hear a story like this and imagine that enough force can solve it. The Journal’s reporting pushes against that fantasy. Silva warns that if the U.S. tries to oust the ELN with force, it could become “a small Vietnam,” because the terrain is remote mountain and jungle, and because control on both sides of the border would be extremely difficult to establish. Ronal Rodriguez is even more direct: “If you just show up and do raids and bombings, that’s not going to work.” These are not pacifist slogans. They are descriptions of how criminal sovereignty behaves once it is embedded in geography, commerce, and community dependence.
The recent numbers explain why the problem feels so urgent anyway. The ELN’s safe haven in Venezuela has made pacifying border regions nearly impossible, the Journal reports. The group killed 60 Colombian soldiers and police officers in 2025, up from 29 the year before, increasingly through the use of drones, according to the Conflict Analysis Resource Center in Bogotá. Luis Fernando Niño, a peace and reconciliation adviser for the Colombian border state of North Santander, says there are at least 150 illegal crossings the ELN uses to move drugs, fighters, weapons, and other contraband. “They control it on both sides,” he says. “We have no control over who crosses via the trails.”
That is also why this story matters well beyond Colombia and Venezuela. Latin America has lived for decades with zones where the formal state exists, but real governance is outsourced to whoever can tax, punish, recruit, and distribute favors. Sometimes it is a cartel. Sometimes a guerrilla remnant. Sometimes a paramilitary heir. What the ELN shows is how quickly those arrangements harden when they straddle borders. One weak state is dangerous enough. Two states, one corridor, coca money, illegal mining, and political protection create something much harder to uproot.
The U.S. angle only sharpens the contradiction. Since the U.S. ousted Nicolás Maduro, Trump has pressed Venezuela’s new leadership to choke off the drug trade and open mineral resources to American companies, while also pushing Colombian President Gustavo Petro to go harder after drug smuggling. The article notes that in March, the U.S. convicted a relative of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on narco-terrorism charges after he agreed to sell the ELN military-grade weapons in exchange for more than half a ton of cocaine meant for the Middle East. That is the scale of the network now. Local rule, global trafficking, foreign strategic ambition, all piled into one frontier.
The border, then, is no longer where Venezuela ends, and Colombia begins. It is where the region’s oldest failures meet each other in public. Weak institutions. Armed economies. Uneven state presence. External pressure that imagines decapitation is the same thing as governance. The Wall Street Journal and Ian Lovett capture a brutal truth here: the ELN is stronger than ever, not only because it has guns, but because it has learned how to become infrastructure. Until the states on both sides can replace that infrastructure with something more credible than fear, the group will keep ruling roads, rivers, mines, and coca fields like the de facto power it has already become.
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