The Underestimated Combatant: Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN)

The following has been taken from the preface of the book, ELN: A Profile of Ejército de Liberación Nacional (2021), which was just published on August 1, 2021. The book is currently available via Amazon.com.

I completed the first version of this manuscript in April 2019 after four years of research, including in the field. Even as I finished that draft, the public trajectory of the ELN had shifted.

The issue: the ELN has often been the less-researched guerrilla group involved in Colombia’s civil war, less often appearing in the international press. This is despite the ELN having been formed before FARC/FARC-EP following the period known as La Violencia in Colombia, also following the Cuban Revolution, from which the ELN derived its inspiration, its founders having been trained by the Castros and Che Guevara. FARC, having originated from the organized Communist movements supported by the then Soviet Union until the end of the Cold War, by far, has received most of the attention; this was especially true upon the declaration of peace with FARC in 2016 and the beginning of its formal and monitored Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) process in Colombia, despite a referendum indicating the slight majority of the Colombian public — with a long memory of war, displacement, and violence — did…