The Colombian guerrilla of the National Liberation Army (ELN), which on Monday will resume peace negotiations with the Colombian government in Mexico, was pointed out since 2018 by the Colombian anti-drug police as a supplier of cocaine to the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel (CJNG), one of the main Mexican organizations of international drug smuggling.
The Anti-Narcotics Directorate of the Colombian National Police revealed in August 2018 the links of the fugitive Mexican drug trafficker Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho” and leader of the CJNG, with the ELN insurgency for the smuggling of cocaine to Central America, Mexico and the United States Joined.
In a report that it sent to El Universal that month, the Directorate assured that ELN rebels were collecting “a sum of money” to guarantee the departure of cocaine shipments from Colombia to the Mexican port of Manzanillo, on the coast of Mexico in the Pacific Ocean, for the CJNG.
For each kilo of cocaine, the Eln charged about 70 dollars, the report specified.
(You can read: Government and ELN are risking the future of the negotiations in Mexico)
The ELN repeatedly denied in the last five years that it was involved in drug smuggling and related activities, He reaffirmed his “policy of categorical demarcation from drug trafficking” and warned that there is a “severe discipline” to punish members of his organization who interfere in these illegal businesses.
Raised in arms since 1964 against the Colombian State, the ELN is the last communist guerrilla in Colombia. The government of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, which began in August 2022, and the ELN announced last October the resumption of peace negotiations between the two sides.
(Keep reading: Maduro assures that the peace dialogue between Colombia and ELN is on the right track)
The ELN repeatedly denied in the last five years that it was involved in drug smuggling and related activities
The first round was held last November in Venezuela and the second will begin this Monday in Mexico. The talks began in February 2017 in the administration of the president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018), but were temporarily suspended by that of his successor, Iván Duque (2018-2022) in September 2018 and permanently. Final in January 2019.
The suspension was due to the fact that the Eln launched a terrorist attack on a cadet school in Bogotá in January 2019, with a balance of 22 deaths. The process in Mexico continues other failed peace attempts, such as the 17-month negotiation period from October 2016 to March 2018.
The ELN established itself as “one of the most important threats in Latin America,” described Insight Crime, a non-state group that investigates transnational organized crime, in an October 2022 analysis.
“Originally, the ELN was a nationalist movement influenced by the Cuban revolution, focused on kidnapping, extortion, and attacking the oil infrastructure. And, although he avoided drug trafficking for decades, in recent years he has been deeply involved in international drug trafficking, ”he said.
The links with Mexican drug traffickers
The Anti-Narcotics Directorate reported in 2018 that finding the link between “El Mencho” and the CJNG with the ELN and Colombian drug traffickers was “a hard blow against the organizations associated with the Mexican cartels.”
With “Operation Titan”, in southern Colombia, eight men were arrested and 1,049 kilos of cocaine, two vehicles and two boats were seized, since the network used areas of the Pacific coast of that country in the departments (states) of Nariño (southwest), Chocó (northwest) and Valle del Cauca (center-southwest), to send drugs in sailboats, fishing boats and speedboats, he reported.
The ELN’s link with the “El Mencho” cartel was established with a drug seizure in parcels that “had labels with the letters CJNG,” he said. The investigation of more than two years included raids in the departments of Antioquia (northwest), Huila (southwest) and Valle del Cauca and the captures.
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One of the eight, identified only as “Julito”, led part of the “criminal gear” in shipyards near Buenaventura, Colombia’s most important port on the Pacific, and in Valle del Cauca, he added.
According to the official account, “they packed the drugs in the fishing boats so that they set sail in the early hours of the morning to the limit of international waters where deep-draft ships collected the substance that was still in transit to (the central-western port of) Manzanillo in Mexico.
On some occasions they skirted the northwestern coast of Colombia to reach some keys in Panama and continue to their final destination, he said.
The first clues arose with the seizure, in international waters, of a boat with more than 400 kilos of cocaine and the arrest of three Mexicans and three Colombians, which allowed “putting together the organization chart” of the criminal structure, he explained.
They packed the drugs in the fishing boats so that they set sail in the early hours of the morning to the limit of international waters.
Colombia warned at the beginning of 2018 that the Mexican cartels increased their presence in maritime points and land from the border areas with Ecuador to traffic cocaine through the corridors of the Pacific Ocean from those nations to Central America and Mexico, heading to the United States.
A March 2018 study by the Universidad del Rosario, one of the main ones in Colombia, and by Insight Crime exposed the relations of the Mexican cartels as buyers of cocaine with the now ex-guerrilla Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).
Now converted into a political party, the FARC took up arms from 1964 until in November 2016 when it signed a peace pact with the Colombian government and promised to withdraw from drug activity.
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