On 26 August, an explosive was detonated on the Cano Limon Covenas pipeline at a tiny village called Pavita in the municipality of Saravina in Arauca, Colombia, just over the border from Venezuela.

Videos of the attack were quickly shared on social media, thick black smoke billowing into the air.

Two days earlier, in Forta, a small town around 130 km from Pervita, the Bicentenario pipeline was also attacked.

Both attacks caused widespread disruption and environmental damage.

On the morning of September 1, two soldiers were killed at a checkpoint on a highway near Tame, also in Arauca, after an attack from gunmen.

Then, just a couple of weeks later, on September 17th, at the Puerto Rdan military base, again in Arauca, a truck packed with explosives detonated.

Photos circulated by the Colombian military showed the burned out skeleton of a truck and a partially destroyed green roof of a military building.

The attack left two soldiers dead and wounded another 27.

All these attacks were blamed on the guerrilla group, the Elnados Professional.

In this press conference, the president, Gustavo Petro, as he scribbled on his notes and continually tapped the lectern, visibly despondent and frustrated, said that the latest attack practically closes the peace process with blood.

People who are in government now were saying in campaign and even at the beginning of government was.

And even Petro said the ELN won't exist anymore in three months because we have negotiated peace with the eln.

And the idea was that we're a leftist government.

You're a leftist Europe, war in power.

You want to be part of this?

So they elongated like, yeah, let's do this, this and this, and that would be easy.

Lovely.

Not at all.

They learned the hard way on that one.

Welcome to Deep Dive from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

I'm Jack.

Megan Vickers.

And this is Columbia and Total Peace, Part one.

The eln the easy win.

Over the course of the next couple of episodes, we're going to look at Colombia and this policy called Total Peace.

It's the flagship policy of the current president, Gustavo Petro.

The aim is to transform regions beset by armed groups as well as criminal actors, putting an end to the violence that has gripped certain parts of the country for decades.

Of course, back in 2016, after almost seven years of negotiation, the Colombian government of Juan Manuel Santos signed a peace agreement with the farc, ending one of the longest conflicts in recent times.

Thousands of FARC members demobilized.

But what makes Total Peace different is the ambition.

The proposed scope is vast.

Nothing like this has happened anywhere else in the world.

The commissions of Colombia's Congress approved this Monday the extension of the Law 418, one of the essential elements to develop the Total Peace Project, designed by President Gustavo Pedro.

For two years, the government of Colombia has forged this new path, but the question is, is it working?

And that is what we're going to explore now.

Before we really get into it, we need to look at the policy itself.

So it's a very white policy.

This is Juanita Duran Velez, a lawyer who works for the Crime and Justice Lab, a nonprofit in Colombia.

But I would like to highlight like three points.

First, it recognizes that peace building, or reducing violence through negotiation, it's not only about rebel organizations, which is like the traditional path, but also about organized crime, including for example, those organizations that are primarily involved in drug trafficking.

So in a way, it recognizes that criminal prosecution, military confrontation, other policies are not enough to address organized crime.

Second, it promotes the notion that safeguarding life is a core objective of the state and is even more important than other values, for example, the monopoly of territorial governance.

And I think that's also like, very key to understand what the negotiations that are currently going on.

And finally, it includes the consolidation of previous peace processes, which in a way recognizes that government can also fail to comply peace agreements.

But that peace building is like a long term commitment in which you have long term interactions.

And I think that's also very important to understand what is going on in Colombia.

Now, there are some technical aspects that we should run through for this episode, because there's a lot of legal stuff going on within Total Peace.

There are two paths for negotiations.

You have political criminals, which are groups that have a political ambition.

That means groups that are aimed to rebel against the state, that pursue a radical transformation to the political institutions.

So they have like an altruist objective with those groups.

You can negotiate, like in a very broad way.

You can negotiate, of course, transitional justice, or what are going to be the rules to transition to peace.

But also you can negotiate transformations of the state, like to recognize the political voice of those groups.

That's specifically the context in which you can sign peace agreements.

So that is the more traditional part, for example, like the peace agreement with the FARC in 2016.

But then there is the other avenue for total peace, the second part, and that is for so called high impact crime organizations, which to me and you is organized crime.

The objective in this case is to define the conditions for submission to legal authorities.

But something that is important to clarify is not that they are going to negotiate the procedures, the rules the benefits, no, that has to be defined by law.

But you can sit with these groups, for example, to design when they are going to surrender, who is going to participate, for example, what's going to be the location of the group.

You can, like, define some conditions, but that's the second path.

Now, there is a third path for those that blur the lines between political criminals and organized crime, where they can have a more restricted version of transitional justice rather than the submission to justice.

Now, stay with me.

Here in Colombia, those lines between political and criminal are often blurred.

And these two types of groups, political criminals and organized crime, are both involved in various illicit economies, from drug trafficking and human trafficking to extortion and illegal mining.

But they also might provide dispute resolution, a form of justice, albeit sometimes brutal, create policy and even build infrastructure.

The group that everybody's more or less happy about being characterized as a political criminal, which is the eln, they also are involved in drug trafficking, you know, and they are also involved in illicit economies.

They are involved in corruption, in mining, because they have to have a way to fund the war.

It's what they say in the opposite side.

Some of those criminal groups have also, at least at some extent in some territories, they are the authority.

They solve problems, they provide security, they provide justice.

So I would say all of them have a bit of this and a bit of that.

The incentives within Total Peace are more favorable if you are a member of a political criminal group rather than organized crime.

And anyone who knows me knows that I am a cynicism by nature, particularly when it comes to organized crime.

So what's to stop an organized criminal group pretending that they have an altruistic political ambition lying behind its criminality?

Who decides which negotiated path within the Total Peace Framework is available to each group?

This might sound like an academic question, but it has a real world impact.

This body that is located in the Ministry of Defense that does like routinary rounds of characterization of groups.

And that's key to understand what you can do with each group.

If you can do, for example, military operations, or you cannot, depending on the characterization of the group that what is actually functioning right now.

It started this year, but it started after most of the negotiations were in place.

So actually what happened in reality, it was the characterizations of the groups.

What, like a mix between what the government decided to do and what the groups were trying to push.

You know, like there's a very interesting discussion about, for example, how much these groups have been rebranding themselves to being able to be in this path or the other path, for example, with MSN Estao Major Central and Segunda Marketalia about if they are actually like high impact crime organization, just, you know, criminal drug traffickers, or if they are more than that, if they have, for example, political objectives and what they want to do.

So it was a missed opportunity to have that body in place earlier it would be.

It would have given more like legitimacy to the government decisions.

That's right.

It took two years to get this categorization body off the ground.

Meanwhile, the Total Peace Policy has pushed ahead regardless, with only two years left now on the current government's term in office.

And there has been some criticism.

The whole process has been far too centralised.

Remember, Colombia has many different groups operating in the country, both political criminals and organised crime, each in regions with their own variables and local concerns.

Not to mention that the structure of many of these groups is federalized in nature.

So each have an element of autonomy.

To an extent it makes sense to have some sort of centralization so you can more or less have a unified idea of what are the policies, what is the stand of the government.

But at the same time, if you want to do paths locally, you need to involve the local authorities.

It's going to be very difficult because if you want them to implement what you are deciding, well, you maybe need to hear them.

They need to have a say on what is going on because it's the.

Local communities who've been dealing with the levels of violence and homicides over the past few decades.

According to Insight Crime, in 2022, the year the total peace policy began, there were 26.1 homicides per 100,000.

That's approximately 36 people every day.

And many of these homicides were driven by a conflict between armed groups, which we'll talk about later.

But violence reduction and the protection of life theoretically is at the heart of total peace.

I think that's very important, that it's a very transformative way of thinking about how to deal with organized crimes.

I just need to preserve life.

I think that's something very good for a country in which the value of life has been so relative for so long.

Second, this idea of violence reduction, in the current implementation, it's been focused on homicide actually more than violence reduction is homicide reduction.

And I feel that's something that it's been happening in most of the cities in which negotiation is involved.

For example, in the field work we did for most of people that was like something good.

It's like I really felt that there was a reduction in homicide and that's always good.

However, focusing so much in homicide has avoided discussion regarding, like, more extended and more complex patterns of violence.

But I want to recognize the importance of the homicide reduction in Colombia, because Colombia has one of the highest rates in the region and in the world.

Doing whatever you do to reduce homicide is a good thing, but you cannot forget that violence is more than homicide.

Now, this raises some really important questions.

Everyone can agree that a reduction in homicides is welcome.

More than that, it should be applauded.

And on the face of it, Total Peace has managed this to an extent, but it's much more nuanced than the headline.

As Juanita said, violence manifests itself in many different ways.

And criminal governance, the type we're going to be hearing about throughout these episodes, also falls into that category of violence, as armed or criminal groups control so many aspects of people's lives and mete out severe punishment on those who challenge their rulings.

As of 2024, there were nine separate negotiations taking place across Colombia under Total Peace, which is an awful lot when you think about it.

The negotiations with the FARC took almost seven years.

But within Total Peace, the big one, the one that the president himself said during the election would take just three months to do, was with the eln.

So who are the eln?

Well, it has its roots in the Marxist Leninist revolutionary movements in Latin America from the 1960s, combined with a liberation theology, which is a belief that God and the Bible can only truly be understood through the perspective of the poor.

Indeed, some of the ELN's earliest members were from the Catholic Church, like Camillo Torres Restrepo, who was killed by the Colombian military in 1966 during a battle.

The ELN are still operating in Colombia some near 60 years later, and are now the world's oldest guerrilla force.

Over time, the Eland historically, and it had two modes of strengthening itself.

This is Kyle Johnson, a researcher and the academic director of the Conflict Responses foundation, based in Bogota.

The first was creating its own front.

So it send people off to a region, they'd create a unit there, they'd recruit, they'd bring people in, et cetera, do political work and all this, and just kind of organically create their own fronts.

But also they brought in things that already existed.

So the group itself has a federalized structure, which means that different fronts have a degree of autonomy and financial independence.

There are a bunch of different ones operating across both Colombia and Venezuela, like the Jesus Dario Ramirez Castro war front, the northern war front, the Manuel Perez Martinez north eastern war front.

And so on.

But the overall organization is controlled by a central command.

In this episode, I want to focus specifically on the Department of Arauca and the powerful Domingo Lain Front, or fdl.

So the Domingo Lain Front is the main ELAND unit in Arauca and in other parts of the eastern plains, but mainly, mainly in Arauco.

The Domingo La Infront, which is importantly created out of social movements from the 60s and 70s in Arauco.

This very local base one has given, gave them over time a bit of legitimacy, but also gave them even more autonomy vis a vis the rest of the ELN and the ELM leadership.

So even in the 80s and 90s, the ELN leadership would say this is the general order on a certain issue.

And sometimes the Dominguez, that's very nice, but we're not going to do that.

So this relationship there is part of the elm, but so much power and autonomy just because of its local roots or not.

And nowadays because of the money that it handles and its leadership of the Front, that that autonomy sometimes is open.

Rebellion doesn't really lead to violence.

But this internal issues within the total.

Peace framework, the ELN and their FTL Front would fall under the political criminals pathway.

And so a process of transitional justice is open to them.

The FDL has kind of its own political views.

A lot of people think that they're not political anymore, that they've lost all their ideology.

But you do see, I think on the ground with the way they act, that it's there, even though it's not maybe at the forefront.

But like when meetings with communities and meetings with leaders and things like that, there is a.

There's a political tint to things.

The main thing is anti oil production.

And so one of the main things is what they call like permanence in territory for communities, because they think oil production has led to displacement, led to paramilitaries coming in and all that affects communities.

And so one of their main ideas is communities get to stay in their territories.

The oil production won't force people out.

That is also connected to an anti US discourse because we see the US as one of the main kind of backers of the Colombian army, which is true.

And one of the main extractors of oil in the region, which used to be true because Oxy, which is an LA based company, used to be the main oil extractor.

Natalka Kyle has also identified a couple of key points that potentially make a peace agreement difficult to achieve with the eln.

First, it relates to the ideology behind the group.

There are Documents internally that talk about the socialist overflow of the government.

But the yellow doesn't believe in that, that's just to put it on paper.

What they believe in is more kind of a quote unquote, socialist armed resistance.

So their idea is that they will they exist in the communities and on the ground to resist against the entrance of an abusive human rights violating state is their argument.

And in that sense, the ideology of this abusive human rights violating, paramilitary supporting, oil extracting state then ties into the military strategy of just we're existing in and of itself on the ground and resisting becomes kind of the end in and of itself.

It's not a means to an end, it's the end.

The second relates to the leader of the fdl, a man called Gustavo Anibal Giraldo, better known as Pablito.

He's a really interesting character.

He was born and raised in Arauca and it's alleged he joined the FDL when he was just 14 years old and rose to become a mid level commander.

In 2008, Pablito was arrested in Bogota whilst using a fake identity.

After they discovered his true identity, he was arrested on a slew of charges, including orchestrating an attack on a Venezuelan military base in which eight people were killed, the bombing of the Cano Limon Cavenas oil pipeline, and also of the kidnapping and murder of Jesus Emilio Jaramillo, the Bishop of Arauca who'd been campaigning against the actions of the ELN in the region.

But just nine months after his arrest, a woman in a bulletproof vest pulled up on a motorcycle outside the prison in Arauca that was holding Pablito along with two others on bicycles.

The woman alongside 15 other gunmen tossed Pablito a gun.

Whilst the gunmen opened fire on the guards, Pablito shot and killed the guard holding him and escaped the prison.

Outside waited a truck and a couple of motorcycles which were later found abandoned on the border with Venezuela.

And then five years later, he was in the top leadership body of the Yale.

You don't just get named, you get voted in.

Some of the voting is kind of like whatever, the same guys are going to be there.

But the fact that Pablito moves up and gets voted in kind of shows the power across the organization that he gained in a very short period of time.

This is five years between getting broken out of prison and becoming part of the Central Command.

Now what's interesting about the FTL is that it's one of those movements Carl mentioned who were bought into the ELN in 1980, not created by it, it was the FDL who began the campaign against oil production in the region, where they began to attack pipelines and extort oil companies.

Indeed, when Pablito was arrested in 2008, the state accused him of targeting the Canyo Limon Covenas oil pipeline over 200.

Times in the 80s and 90s.

It really didn't need the ELN.

It was making a ton of money on its own.

It had its own local legitimacy, governed on a local level.

It is more the ELN as a whole that needed this farm than vice versa.

So that gave him a bit more power to push back to pushing back against the leadership.

But over time, that dynamic hasn't really changed a whole lot, especially when the Domingue Line firm has used its money to strengthen other ELN units.

Pablito was put in charge of rebuilding ELN units in the west of Colombia and he did it successfully at least.

Comparing those units basically 20 years ago to now, it's a whole different ballgame.

So it ends up being like a bit more of who needs who here and what identity does the FDL actually have?

And those fighters nowadays may have a bit more of an ELN identity, but they also have a very much a We're the ELN of Arauca, so why.

Focus on this one front, the FDL in Arauca, rather than the entire eln?

Well, during the negotiations that have taken place under Total Peace and even discussions with earlier Colombian administrations, the FDL sent a representative as part of the eln, but have played a quiet observational role rather than actively taking part in the negotiations.

And we've already heard that they are a powerful front within the ELN with a capable leader in Pablito who has his own tensions with other ELN leaders as well as that independent Aralkan identity.

As Carl said, we're the ELN Arauka.

And so this all starts to set off alarm bells.

Pavlito is also important because he's considered the most anti peace commander of the eln.

I think that's a little simplistic, but nonetheless that is his general attitude.

And he's also the leader of a lot of the ELN operations and movements in Venezuela.

So all of the ELON shift within Venezuela are taking off territory operations in Arco, which is in English like the mining alt, which is a part where the Venezuelan regime is designated as special territory for mining.

Chinese companies are supposed to operate, but they haven't been able to operate anything from all the armed groups there.

All of that has been led by Paul And Paulito uses that money not only to just have money, but also to gain power within the eln.

So he's kind of this somewhat next generation ELN commander.

He's younger than the other ELN Central Command members, with a lot of money, a lot of power, and probably little interest in peace, at least in how it's been negotiated up until now.

Now, back in 2016, when the FARC demobilized after the peace agreement was signed, the vast majority did hand in their weapons and leave that life.

And about 90% of those fighters have remained demobilized.

But the rest of the FARC fighters that refused that initial peace agreement are still active, often referred to colloquially as FARC dissidents.

There are some fears that if the ELN agree to demobilise under total peace, that Pablito and the FTL won't.

And there is reason for this scepticism.

This isn't the first time negotiations have taken place between the ELN and the Colombian government.

Under the previous president, Ivan Duque, discussions began in 2017, only for them to be abandoned two years later when a car bomb exploded at a police training school in Bogota, killing 21 people and injuring another 80.

It was Pablito who was accused of ordering this terrorist attack.

And what makes it more interesting is that Pablo Beltran, a senior leader within the Central Command of the eln, said that he did not know the attack was about to happen.

An investigation by Reuters in late 2023 revealed that up to 40% of ELN fighters could reject any peace deal, apparently because they don't want to give up the lucrative profits from drug trafficking and illegal mining.

And it'll be even more difficult to negotiate with those based in Venezuela.

If you go to Arauca, where negotiations are being held with eln, which is a centralized or a national structure that operates in a federalized way, they know that there are local components of ELM that govern over.

Arauca is not very likely to engage into a national peace talks.

This is Felipe Botero Escobar, the head of the Andean regional office of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

So they said to us during the fieldwork, we know that even though we signed peace, the most probable thing is that we will see a decision group being created.

Right now in this region, people want whatever work to have a better life quality and to be less affected in humanitarian ways for the conflict that they are living.

But the reality is that right now, while Total Peace is being implemented, they have not seen an increase in their life quality or a Decrease in the existing virus, maybe there is less homicides, but other type of violence in the control that they're receiving from criminal groups.

What Felipe is talking about here is criminal governance.

You see, violence can mean more than just direct physical assault, for example, extortion, disappearances, fines, criminal taxation, even control over movement in and out of communities.

Total Peace has aimed to reduce the overt violence suffered by communities.

But an unintended consequence of that is that armed groups such as the ELN have entrenched and expanded their control over the communities that live under them.

So you have a region, for example, Arauca, which is on the border with Venezuela, far away from the central government and lacking a lot of development, and claiming for a lot of development needs to the national government.

But at the same time, you have ELN operating right there as the hegemonic actor.

And it's so embedded in the community that there are some researchers and some people that say that ELN co governed that region.

So basically they have legal enterprises that go and execute policies like bus companies or the limitation programs for schools.

So they're regions that even the criminal actor, or in this case the subversive actor who is a demonic in the region, work together with the state and is delivering social services.

Let me give you an example of how they co govern.

In Colombia.

You have these community groups that help make decisions within those communities.

Juntas de Accion Communal or jax, essentially Community action boards which exist in each village all throughout Colombia.

Essentially you have a group of community members who come together to decide on disputes or simple questions like where to leave your garbage or what to do about a dog that won't stop barking.

They are regulated by the state and provide some relationship between communities and the state, but are not really part of it anyway.

In Arauca, people approach the JACS to help solve problems or disputes.

But if they aren't able to, the Jacks approach the ELN to help administer justice.

Someone we spoke to in Arauca said that they turn to the ELN because they have no one else to solve their problems.

And truthfully, these Jacks in Arauka have been infiltrated by the ELN anyway, which shows just how much the ELN has embedded itself into formal structures.

The ELN has deep roots in places like Arauca, which is why it's so embedded.

They operate under legal facades to provide social programs, using public money to fund them.

The ELN has even created its own municipalities, which, although not recognized by the Colombian state, are a territorial reality.

And so perhaps we should explore what life is like on the ground for those who live under the ELN in arauca.

Back in 2013, the ELN and the FARC, before they demobilised, released a joint manual on the rules communities had to live by alongside administrating their own version of justice.

They dealt with issues like disputes between neighbours or where does one farm end and another begin.

Created rules on carrying weapons when bars have to close, and they ruled on cases of domestic violence.

But they also had prohibitionist rules.

For example, if you bring your horse to the local market, you're not allowed to drink because you can't ride under the influence.

Bars had to close at 10pm and they're absolutely not allowed to sell alcohol to members of indigenous tribes.

Selling or using illicit drugs were also banned.

In fact, these days, the ELN kill people for selling drugs because they assume the person is working with the FARC dissidents who they've been in a violent dispute with for the last few years.

And we'll talk about that shortly.

Here's Kyle.

Control is a bit these days, much harsher because they have this dispute with the farc.

And so even community leaders sometimes will say, okay, you have to stay in the village 29 days out of the 30 days in a month.

Once a month you can go to 10.

Rest of the time you have to stay in the village because they don't want information filtering out.

So it's a big thing and people call it a necessary evil because no one really likes it.

But they don't have any other choice.

They don't have anyone else who resolves these issues, who keeps crying down, it's an expanding governance model, shall we say?

Total peace, at least so far, has not diminished the power of groups like the eln.

It's actually contributed to an expansion of criminal economies.

For example, kidnapping.

The ELN continued this practice despite the demand for it to stop under the terms of the ceasefire.

Many of you will probably know the story of Manuel Diaz, the father of Luis Diaz, a leading footballer at Liverpool in the Premier League.

He was abducted from Barrancas, which is in the northern part of the Department of Arauca, by a local criminal group called los Primos, on 28 October 2023, who then handed him over to the ELN a few days later.

Ms.

Marolanda had been driving with Luis Manuel Diaz in Barrancas over the weekend when they were abducted by a gang at a petrol station.

Within hours, Marulanda was released, but Diaz's whereabouts remained unknown.

He was forced into the mountains, but eventually released A few days later, after an international outcry, the father of the Liverpool footballer Luis Diaz has been released by a Colombian rebel group.

Nearly two weeks after his abduction sparked a massive manhunt, Luis Manuel Diaz was reportedly handed over to the UN officials.

The footballer's parents were kidnapped by the ELN rebel group as they were driving.

In the family's hometown.

The ELN said that the kidnapping was a mistake.

Aside from kidnapping, one of the most alarming and unintended consequences of Total Peace is the rise of extortion, which has increased significantly.

Everyone reported an increase in extortion that even small businesses and people who don't make much money at all, who never paid extortion before, are paying extortion now.

I remember I did an interview in the hotel with some people in Arauca and they were talking about how everybody is paying.

And they said even this hotel pays because they knew the owner.

But even if you sell arepas, little tortillas on the street, like, you're probably paying as well.

And that's new.

Secondly, we saw more infiltrating of local civil society by the eln.

This is not new.

The ELN has infiltrated parts of Aralkan civil society for a long, long time.

And they pressure independent organizations to try to get them on board as well.

But there are these things, the Community Action Boards and the ELN has been pressuring them a lot more and infiltrating them more, as well as their kind of umbrella organizations of these, of these Community Action Boards.

Earlier we heard from Juanita about the centralized approach of Total Peace.

Some have argued that in places like Arauca, Such is the ELN's infiltration and influence in the region, that any participation of these local authorities jacks or civil society is largely redundant.

Although the ELN pushed for their involvement in the peace process, you see, the ELN FTL in Arauca has long been the hegemonic actor in the region, which means they can dominate the local system through various means, either through coercive or non coercive means.

Means indeed.

Interviews conducted by the GI showed that the ELN control every aspect of the peasant life.

And so if Total Peace fails with the eln, what does this mean?

It just means the ELN has more power than Aralka.

It's kind of like a win win.

No matter the scenario.

You might be asking where the state is in Arauca and other places where the ELN operate well within the communities.

The state also doesn't have the best reputation.

Back in the middle part of the last Century.

The Colombian government promoted a policy they called the colonization of Arauca, where they encouraged peasants to go to Arauca and set up farms and gave a promise that they would get state support.

But that support never came, causing protests and the eventual emergence of the fdl.

One person we spoke to said that in some communities, the ELN's justice is seen as better than that of the state.

This is because the FDL is often seen as more effective, cheaper and less corrupt.

That is a fairly damning statement.

But perhaps Total Peace provides an opportunity to learn from the local dynamics within Arauca how to build the state from what is already in place.

Here's Felipe.

Most of these groups, as part of the criminal or armed governance that they exercise, they provide justice and they're the ones who solve conflict.

And I believe that this is a central theme that should be discussed in the negotiation tables that are open and is how do the central state of Colombia can learn of the way, how the groups are actually administering justice in those territories and who can assist a transition from this justice that is provided by criminal groups through other customary local institutions, like ethnic communities that exist in most of the areas and have their own justice systems.

If we can arrange a transition from the justice that is provided by the criminal group and that is corner for their governance, to informal mechanisms in ethnic communities and in local neighborhood communities, and then to cases that are lead by the state, by the general prosecutor, but in a very efficient way, because that's what the groups make.

They're very efficient in the provision of justice.

This transition can actually give hope to changing the scenario of the paradigm again.

The reality is that Colombia has historically had a very centralized approach to public policy, and successive governments have neglected regions such as Arauca.

This lack of investment creates an ecosystem that has allowed organized criminal groups and armed groups to thrive.

Here's Kyle.

Yeah, there's not a lot of state legitimacy either, whether it be national state or local state.

So the national state is seen as absent, only interested in oil, just not really present in the region.

And people want it to be present.

They want it to be present in a way that is good for them.

It's not just they want more state, they want higher quality state, but they feel just abandoned by it.

So there's kind of like a lack of legitimacy in general, more because of the abandonment.

Not everybody thinks the national state is this abusive machinery that's going to come in and kick them out.

Like the ELN says.

No, most people don't believe that.

But the local state has even less Legitimacy because it's just seen as extremely corrupt.

And the eln, this is, this is weird for a rebel group, but the ELN and the local state work together quite a bit.

Some people even say like would say they co govern together and they have these like a kind of a corrupt economic model around the state that works both for the ELN and both for many, but not, obviously not everyone, but you know, a decent amount of local politicians and local people within the state.

So sometimes if you want to go speak to like the local human rights person in the, in the mayor's office, some people won't do it because they believe, I think in some cases rightly so, that that person works for the eln.

So you don't want to go denounce the ELN in the local state.

For example, back in September 2023, the then governor of Arauca, Jose Fergundo Castillo Cisneros, was arrested on charges of the financing of terrorism and organised crime groups and handing out a bunch of contracts to alleged members of the ELN in exchange for protection and electoral support.

Some of those contracts involved educational infrastructure, road design and public space projects.

Then in 2019, a contractor named Johnny Alexander Bello Ortega was accused of financing the ELN's eastern block through, through a web of companies and an acquisition of war material for the FTL after he secured a load of contracts from a series of local politicians.

Indeed, it's alleged he is the nephew of the Eastern Bloc Front's leader Garganta.

Contracts which come in from the national or the local state for oil production and money around oil production.

The ELN takes its part and so do local politicians.

And so.

And the funny thing is the ELN created its own business to fix the oil pipeline because there's oil production there, there's a pipeline that goes out of the department and the ELM bombs it quite a bit.

But then one of the companies who gets contracted to fix that pipeline when it gets bombed is owned by the eln.

So it's kind of like a win win no matter what.

But the local state is seen as being in on this and in their judicial cases against local politicians that show that there are many times it is in on these kind of economic agreements with the eln.

So the local state also has very little legitimacy, just seen as super corrupt.

So we've heard about one of the fundamental aims of total peace violence reduction, particularly homicide reduction.

Back in 2013 the FARC and the ELN were working together.

Remember they wrote that coexistence manual on the Rules for the communities that was created partly due to the near decade of violence that preceded it.

Between 2004 and 2010, it's been estimated that 50,000 people were displaced and over 1,100 killed as a result of that conflict.

The 2010 truce divvied up access to lucrative cocaine trafficking and smuggling routes.

After the FARC demobilised following the peace agreement in 2016, a number of former FARC members refused to lay down their arms and became known as FARC dissidents or sometimes the ex FARC mafia.

With different groups based all over the country.

According to a report for the UN, there are around 30 different splinter factions.

The 10th front is one of those dissident factions.

Indeed, it's the same front that had fought against the eln in the 2000s when the FARC was still operational.

The distant 10th front operated in Arauca and Venezuela.

At first coexisting alongside the eln.

Both groups continued to enforce the rules laid out in the manual.

Both were happy to extort people, charging 5% each, but they approached things differently.

The ELN would kidnap people and take them to Venezuela for months of forced labour.

The FARC dissidents were far more willing to just murder people.

And then things started to change.

The FARC dissidents started extorting people for more than 5%.

And the violence against people began to escalate.

Some people in Arauca went to the ELN and said, hey, these guys are out of hand, they're killing people, they're charging double extortion, they're working with the army.

Some people stated at the time, the ELM believes this to be the case now.

And in one of the meetings between the FARC dissidents and the eln, these issues came up.

It became very heated, a lot of accusations, and it couldn't be resolved.

And so it just ended up the ELN saying, okay, you know what?

We're here, we're going to wipe you out.

It basically be like we're going to clean the house.

Because of the way the FARC is reacting, the demands on the eln, their identity, some economic issues there as well.

Definitely with it, especially with the extortion issue and some other economic stuff about who were the FARC dissidents partners and drug trafficking schemes and all this stuff kind of came together to create this conflict that they couldn't resolve and broke down.

And so they started fighting in the eln, hit the dissidents very, very hard, very quickly.

Earlier we heard how the homicide rate in 2022 was running at around 36 people every day.

That was mainly driven by the conflict between the ELN and the ex FARC 10th Front in Arauka, which began in late 2021 before exploding at the turn of the year, just months before total peace began.

Conflicts between armed groups are really important when talking about government negotiations with those same actors.

So let's just dip into the early confusion of the ceasefires.

On 31 December 2022, the government announced six month ceasefires with five different armed groups, including with the ELN.

A few days later, on 3 January 2023, the ELN denied there had been any agreement on a ceasefire.

A day later, the government suspended the ceasefire with the ELN because of this rejection.

Discussions then began between their government and the ELN and a full bilateral ceasefire wasn't ratified until 3 August 2023.

In Cuba, the peace delegation of the.

Government of Colombia and the National Liberation Army ELN signed protocols of specific action.

For the bilateral interparati ceasefire with the participation of society.

You see, the ceasefires announced on 31 December 2022 between the state and the various armed groups were originally unilateral, which means the state declared ceasefires without negotiating.

And it was then on each political criminal or high impact criminal organization to agree to it, which subsequently many have.

But these ceasefires obviously don't cover the violence between rival armed or organized criminal groups such as the ELN and the ex FARC 10th front.

And that brings me back to our point of reference, the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC.

Because between 2016 and 2023 over 320 former FARC fighters have been murdered, which adds a real complication to the negotiations.

Can the government assure armed groups that if they are demobilised they won't be targeted and killed by their former rivals?

But the Elan have said, you know, if we're going to give up our guns at some point in time, but there are these other illegal armed groups here, these other enemies of ours operating in these territories.

Well, we're probably not going to give up our guns because who's going to protect us?

And in every peace process in Colombia, unfortunately there have been ex bounds that have been killed, every single one, because multiple armed groups have said we're not going to give up our guns.

If there's other armed groups operating these areas, it kind of pushes the government to adopt a total peace policy.

The government says we don't think we can military defeat all of these armed groups, then probably it's better to negotiate.

But if the ELN won't give up the guns, the FARC dissidents are there.

I'm probably going to have to negotiate with the FARC dissidents as well.

And so it does actually make total peace extremely difficult and probably least worst approach to negotiations.

At least if the state can secure the peace, it will require a security policy to ensure that there are no reprisal attacks or targeted assassinations.

But alongside that security aspect, the state has to create comprehensive development and investment policies.

Communities need to see improvements because whether a group demobilizes or not, the illicit markets are still there.

The insatiable demand for drugs like cocaine internationally or illegally mined gold will still exist, and the money available to those willing to engage in those markets is significant.

Here's Felipe.

You can demobilize one group, but due to the complex situation and complex socio economic dynamics of the place, the most probable thing is that a new group will come and take control.

So unless the state really take this area and makes a priority, and makes a priority in terms of security, but also on long term development, the incentives for new actors to come and take control over the criminal economies remain very high and very difficult to be fought.

So this is the question, and I think that this is one of the main experience that we have after the 2016 peace agreement, where part of the problem that we are seeing right now, the fragmentation among criminal organizations and this need to actually enlarge the negotiations comes because we were not able as a country or as a state, to actually fulfill the 2016 peace agreement to put the state in the place where it needs to be.

Now this is a big concern around total peace and another added layer of complexity to the discussions.

You might have the leadership who've made their money and want out, the green foot soldiers who don't want this life and also want out.

But what about those who are middle managers, for want of a better phrase, and in the context of some of these political criminals or organized crime members, this could be people between 16 and 20 years old who are making a decent amount of money, already hold power and have fought a lot.

What is their incentive to leave the life?

We need to think seriously incentives and the role for this middleman, because otherwise we are just going to keep recycling violence.

And we need to understand who these middlemen are, what are they thinking, what can be an incentive for them?

Because clearly the economic one will not beat.

So what do we do with this middle manager, these middle rank people who knows the business, knows the people and knows the operation of War.

Something that should be in the center of the discussion of the strategy of total peace right now.

And at the same time, how do we manage the persistence of criminal markets?

Those criminal markets remain in the same places, in the same regions of the country.

There is a lot of incentives for actors to actually go and take care of that criminal economies.

So what do we do with drug markets?

What do we do with illegal mining?

What do we do with extortion?

How do we manage these criminal markets in order to secure the place if total peace succeed?

So the question is incentives.

What can you offer?

And here is where it starts to get complicated, particularly if you have so many different groups with so many different demands.

Here's Juanita.

So engaging in negotiation.

It's always.

It's attractive for organizations because it can offer like a way out of crime in which you can have more or less good conditions.

That helps you to think about incentives first.

There are some rules defined about what we can negotiate, under what conditions, how, etc.

But we don't have such a legal framework for justice.

The incentives to the transition to peace are, I would say, less clear because like this abstract incentive that it's good to negotiate because that can be a way out.

But then you don't have like the specific incentives.

For example, okay, you are not going to go to jail, you are going to be able to stay outside prison because you are engaging here.

So we don't have those rules that clear.

The second point is, especially for organized crime, there are very significant economical incentives from being part of the criminal organizations.

Is the whole organization that is in the table happy with the idea of negotiating?

Or is more like a leadership, like a pension retirement plan?

I think that's very important.

Like to think, how is the representation working?

Because it's like the illegal drug market is going nowhere, so it's going to be there after they negotiate.

How do you compete economically with the revenues generated by criminal markets?

There must be something beyond an economic incentive to embrace total peace.

But what does that look like?

Is Felipe so exploring things like family, like personal security, like getting involved into political arenas?

We need to actually think way beyond the purely economic types of incentives to a broader set of incentives to actually keep these groups in.

Because there can be willingness from the people who is right now.

But once these people demobilize or left the conflict, the criminal market persists.

So new actors, new people, dissidents can come and take over this criminal market again, as we saw it with FARC and as we saw it before with Auto Defense De Colombia that we have been recycling violence because new actors come and take advantage of the existing criminal markets.

And then you have the ideology of the eln, that socialist armed resistance that Kyle said was the purpose of the group.

If resisting is the end goal, then how do you even begin to move beyond that?

Before anyone says that you should just go in and destroy them militarily, that strategy has failed for 60 years.

And that military side is only one half of the eln.

Here's Kyle.

The ELN itself has its military wing.

It also has a civilian political wing, while activists, who are well known and open activists, but they're clandestinely part of the eln.

And the ELN says, when you compare the military link to the political link, for every military fighter, there's six political activists.

So they also have this thing that one analyst here, it's one of the best analogies ever, the circus mirror effect.

And so when you go to a circus and you go into the hall of mirrors, there's a mirror where you go in and you're skinny, but the mirror makes you look really strong because it's deformed.

And this analyst, who's a former ELN commander, actually, he says this is how the ELN sees itself.

They're this skinny little guy that goes to the circus but then looks in the mirror and sees this huge buff strongman.

And that also comes into play as well.

It's a phenomenal analogy, which is, like I say, it comes from a former member of the Central Command of the elm.

So if anyone knows how to do analogies with a lot of authority, it's him.

After the FARC demobilised, a vacuum was created that was all too quickly filled by other criminal actors, such as the eln, Clandel, Golfo and the FARC dissident groups.

Groups fragment, others contract or expand.

And we've heard within the ELN that the FDL in Arauca, led by Pablito, are considered to not be overly thrilled with the idea of peace and allegedly actively sabotaged it in the past with that bombing in Bogota in 2019.

So if we go all the way back to the beginning and think about that federalised structure of the eln, well, down in Narino, which is in the southwest of Colombia, there's an ELN front called the Southern Community Front.

In May this year, it was announced that it had become the first ELN dissident front, but not because they didn't want peace, but because they did and thought that the national negotiations weren't working for them.

They split from the ELN and became an independent and distinctive organization and were recognized as such by the government and total peace.

So the government started having these kind of private discussions with this ELN front to kind of break off from the ELN and create their own process.

And in effect, that's what happened.

This front officially broke with the eln.

It's now got its own peace process in the Southwest.

And the ELN were ligid.

The ELM was saying, like, well, you're supposed to be negotiating me on the national level.

Now you're breaking me apart and negotiating without my permission with my own units so that they break away from us.

And like, no, this is unacceptable.

So the talks, they were frozen is what they were called.

During that freezing, the ceasefire ended, ceasefire falls apart, violence increases.

And a few weeks ago, there was a.

For Colombia, a big attack in that same exact town where we visited, which killed three soldiers and injured 17, maybe even more.

That's kind of big for Colombia.

And so that led the government to say, okay, peace talks are suspended.

So right now there are no peace talks with the ELN officially, and there's no direct communication between the government and the eln.

And so we have two different routes here.

We have one group, the Southern Community Front, splitting to ensure peace, and another, the fdl, who are said to not be overly keen on the idea at all.

Fragmentation within armed groups or organized crime usually leads to more violence.

It would be interesting to see what security guarantees the Colombian government negotiators are putting in place for those in the Southern Community Front, given their acrimonious split from the eln.

But what this split does illustrate is that negotiating on a national level doesn't always take into consideration or address local concerns and dynamics, potentially causing fragmentation and all the uncertainty that comes with that.

This split was a primary cause in the breakdown of negotiations with the ELN and those attacks on soldiers and the oil pipelines that followed.

And the negotiation with the ELN was billed as the flagship deal of total peace.

According to the current administration, People who.

Are in government now were saying in campaign, and even at the beginning of government was.

And even Petro said, the ELN won't exist anymore in three months because we have negotiated peace with the eln.

And the idea was that we're a leftist government, you're a leftist group, we're in power.

You want to be part of this.

So the Elongates do this, this and this.

It won't be easy, not at all.

They learned that.

They learned the hard way on that one.

So what next for Total Peace?

And what does this breakdown mean?

There are eight other negotiations still in process, and we'll talk about a couple of those during the next episode.

But how does this collapse of the talks with the ELN influence the perception of this policy?

It definitely kind of confirms, I think, two things, but at least politically here, the second is more important.

First is what you said.

Total Peace is very ambitious.

The government has decided to negotiate with probably too many armed groups.

It could have stuck with five and been okay.

The ambition and the goals of Total Peace, if you actually want peace, not thinking about just reducing homicides, but actually building peace and making peace, it kind of confirms that, yeah, this is way too ambitious.

But like you said, I don't know if anyone expected all these processes to be done within four years, but I think there's a lot of hope that you could do something.

But the second one is this is a reflection of the poor handling by the government of Total Peace.

The breakdown with the eln, I think, is really, at least in the public discourse here, really confirmed or really strengthen that narrative.

That narrative is not wrong.

The government has handled this in a lot of ways very poorly.

It's the armed group that was supposed to demobilize in three months.

I don't know if anyone honestly believed that, but it was supposed to be this win for Total Peace that we mentioned earlier, and now this one has fallen apart.

So if the early victory of Total Peace has fallen apart, then it definitely.

The narrative of this is in good measure the fault of the government.

It has been strengthened as well.

And so that politically has hit Total Peace even harder than all of the critiques and issues that have happened over the last couple years.

So Total Peace is still ongoing with two years left until a new administration takes the reins of power in Bogota.

The issue surrounding the implementation of the policy aside, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that Colombia has been at war for the best part of 60 years, with a verb variety of political and criminal actors with untold violence to the communities in the crossfire.

People want peace.

Here's Juanita.

We are a country which still is in war.

That's amazing.

It's like an awful thing.

For example, I was born in the 80s.

I have never lived in a country without war, not even one day.

You know, hopefully our people, these policies will keep growing and building upon the lessons learned.

So hopefully it will get better.

Whether Total Peace will deliver that, we'll have to wait and see.

That's it for this episode of Deep Dive.

I'D like to thank Juanita, Felipe, and Kyle for shining a light on what's going on in Colombia at the moment.

There is a reading list in the summary to this show as well as a link to our engine office here at the GI which covers Colombia.

For other research on organized crime from around the world, head over to our website, globalinitiative.

Net.

This has been Deep Dive from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

I'm Jack.

Megan Vickers.

Thanks for listening.