Colombia reactivates arrest orders for top rebels blamed for deadly violence in cocaine turf war

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Colombia’s government is reactivating arrest orders for the top leadership of the nation’s largest rebel group following attacks on civilians as part of a deadly turf war with dissident guerrillas from another armed group for control of a coca-growing region bordering Venezuela.

President Gustavo Petro’s leftist government in 2022 suspended warrants against top commanders of the National Liberation Army, or ELN, as part of an effort to coax the 60-year-old insurgency into a peace deal.

Among the 31 rebel leaders whose arrest was ordered Wednesday by the chief prosecutor’s office is Pablo Beltrán, the lead ELN negotiator in those halting peace talks, as well as the group’s top military commander, best known by his alias, Antonio García.

Petro — himself a former member of the M-19 guerrilla group — has also suspended the peace talks in response to the violence.

At least 80 people have been killed and thousands more displaced in Colombia’s Catatumbo region in the past week as fighting intensifies between the ELN and holdouts from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a guerrilla group that largely disbanded after signing a peace deal in 2016 with the government. Some of the estimated 18,000 displaced people have fled into Venezuela.

The armed groups are fighting over control of strategic drug routes that have been fueling a boom in cocaine production from Colombia in recent years.

It’s not clear what upset the delicate truce between the groups, which rely on the drug trade to fund their insurgencies. Some analysts believe the Cuban revolution-inspired ELN has been losing strength in its historic stronghold in northeastern Colombia as the FARC dissidents expand their influence.

Colombia’s Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo told the U.N. Security Council Wednesday that the government will not rest until those responsible for the violence that killed signatories of the 2016 peace agreement and civilians in the Catatumbo region are brought to justice.

“We reject the war crimes and the crimes against humanity unreservedly committed by the ELN and the dissident groups…,” he said. “The murder of the signatories to the peace agreement are unacceptable, and we condemn those deaths robustly.”

Murillo said the government suspended peace talks with the ELN “because peace requires reciprocity,” and he called on the international community to support its position.

He added that Colombia is not renouncing peace, stressing that “Peace continues to be our cornerstone commitment.”

The top U.N. official in Colombia, Carlos Ruiz Massieu, also condemned the Catatumbo bloodshed that he said resulted from an ELN attack by fighters who traveled to an area where a rival armed group was present.

He called the killings “an act against peace itself” and reiterated his call for armed groups to halt all actions that put civilians, including community leaders and peace signatories, at risk.

Massieu told the council that Catatumbo, like many regions of Colombia, is still awaiting dividends of the 2016 peace agreement, especially “a comprehensive presence of the state that would bring public services, legal economies, development opportunities and security.”

“It is in the vacuum of state presence that illegal armed groups are fighting for territorial and social control,” he said. “Implementation of the peace agreement is central to lasting solutions for preventing and resolving the causes of armed conflict.”

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Edith M. Lederer contributed to this report from the United Nations.