By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
The boat cut its engine and drifted toward the riverbank. Camouflaged figures watched from the tree line. Deeper in, under a jungle canopy thick with insect noise, an ELN commander sat with a rifle across his lap while his troops hacked bamboo with machetes, building a camp hidden from drones overhead, according to reporting by The Guardian.
The scene, described by the paper's correspondents who reached the encampment, marks what may be a turning point for Colombia's last active leftist guerrilla force. The National Liberation Army, known by its Spanish initials ELN, is preparing to fight rather than negotiate, The Guardian reports, just as Abelardo de la Espriella takes office as president promising a new offensive against the group.
Colombia has spent decades trying to close the book on its long civil conflict. The 2016 peace deal with the larger FARC rebel group was meant to be the final chapter. The ELN, smaller and more fragmented, never fully joined that process, and talks with the group have collapsed and restarted under successive governments.
This account rests on a single news organization's report; the Press could not independently confirm the details of the encampment or the ELN's posture ahead of the promised offensive. The commander quoted and the camp described are the Guardian's source and the Guardian's dispatch — everything we know about conditions in the camp traces back to that one piece of reporting, not to our own correspondents.
The details of de la Espriella's promised offensive are not yet public. What is clear, at least in the account we have, is a mood of a rebel force bracing for renewed combat rather than another round of talks.
For a country that has buried tens of thousands in this war already, the stakes are not abstract. Every failed peace effort in Colombia has been paid for in bodies, mostly rural and mostly poor. Whether this new administration's offensive brings the ELN back to the table or simply back to the trenches will shape the next chapter of a conflict Colombia has never quite managed to end.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
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The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."