Something Bad Is Brewing on Venezuela’s Border

Opinion|Something Bad Is Brewing on Venezuela’s Border

Around 4:40 a.m. on Jan. 6, just a few days after the U.S. capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, armed men intercepted a bus carrying civilians and several policemen on the main highway near Tibú, a town on the Colombian side of the border with Venezuela. They ordered passengers to hand over their phones for inspection, and then proceeded to kidnap five police officers.

The assailants were members of the National Liberation Army, or E.L.N., a Colombian guerrilla group that started off mounting a leftist insurgency in the 1960s but has since expanded into criminal enterprises. As many as half of its roughly 6,300 fighters are now based in Venezuela, where they have, at least until this month, enjoyed an alliance of mutual convenience with the government.

In the lead-up to the U.S. raid in Caracas, it appears the Maduro regime gave the group a green light to expand its control of the border, fearing, according to Colombian military officials, that Colombia might serve as a back door for U.S. military operations. The E.L.N., which dominates the area’s illicit economies and uses the frontier as a safe haven, has taken advantage of the opportunity to consolidate its grip along the perimeter, which stretches from the Atlantic coast down to the Amazon jungle.

Now the E.L.N. stands emboldened to challenge the authority of the Colombian state — and U.S. ambitions in Venezuela. The borderlands are webbed with lucrative corridors where the E.L.N. and other armed groups move seamlessly and often exercise more control than the government. With profits flowing from illegal mining, drug trafficking and human smuggling, both the Colombian guerrillas and complicit members of Venezuela’s security forces have deep interests in maintaining the status quo in Caracas and resisting attempts to bring rule of law to these territories.

In advance of Mr. Maduro’s capture, the E.L.N. was taking steps to ensure its interests in the borderlands were safe, regardless of what happened in Caracas. Since mid-December, it has gone on the offensive in the Colombian region of Catatumbo, displacing thousands of civilians in the process. It has also clashed with a local criminal group known as the 33rd Front, a dissident faction of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which has repeatedly angered the E.L.N. with attempts to control key rivers used for trafficking in and out of Venezuela. President Gustavo Petro’s announced deployment of some 30,000 troops to the border has done little to stop the fighting.

But rather than anchoring the region with America’s longtime partner in Bogotá, President Trump turned on Mr. Petro, threatening direct attacks on Colombia the day after Mr. Maduro’s capture on Jan. 3. Although a phone call last Wednesday between the leaders lowered tensions, the détente is fragile.