Earlier this summer, Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced a six-month cease-fire deal with the leftist guerrillas known as the National Liberation Army, or ELN.
The move was sure to trigger emotions, especially bitter memories, not just in Colombia but in South Florida, home to the U.S.'s largest Colombian expat community — a diaspora brimming with past victims of the ELN's violence.
The ELN is the last rebel army still fighting in Colombia. The country’s largest guerrilla force, the Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC, signed a peace accord seven years ago.
Now, getting the ELN to put down its guns for good is considered critical to realizing paz total, or complete peace, after almost 60 years of civil war in Colombia, a conflict that was sparked by the country’s epic socio-economic inequality.
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“Definitively ending decades of war between the ELN and the Colombian state will definitively empower the people to build the nation we want,” said Petro, who himself was once a member of another leftist guerrilla group in Colombia, M-19.
The ELN ceasefire took effect earlier this month — and Petro said he hopes to reach that final peace settlement with the guerrillas by May of 2025. In the meantime, though, Colombians like Hernán Parra, a retired expat in Pembroke Pines, will remain wary at best.
"I'm pessimistic," Parra told WLRN from Cali, Colombia, where he’s visiting family.
Parra recalled his own traumatic moment with the ELN 25 years ago, when he says they bombed and burned his transport company’s tractor trailers on a road in northeast Santander state.
"I can see [ELN] reneging on this ceasefire sooner than later — and on the flimsiest of pretexts ... there's a reason they're the last guerrilla army fighting."Hernan Parra
No one was killed, but "it showed how much harder it is to deal with the ELN," Parra says, "because their mindset is more radical than even the FARC's. I can see them reneging on this ceasefire sooner than later — and on the flimsiest of pretexts.
"Maybe I'm wrong — I of course hope I'm wrong — because as a former guerrilla himself, President Petro perhaps knows how to convince these people. But there's a reason they're the last rebel army fighting. Their leaders started as university types, too ideologically rigid."
Even Colombian expats who haven't been directly affected by the ELN understand the distrust.
“I remember the grotesque ways that [the ELN] would show that they were not to be messed with," says Evelyn Perez-Verdia, who heads the communications consulting firm We Are Más in Fort Lauderdale.
Perez-Verdia grew up in Colombia — and remembers her parents dying her hair a darker color when she was a young girl so she'd be less of a kidnapping target for the country's guerrillas.
Because she knew people victimized by the ELN, Perez-Verdia researched the Marxist guerrilla group as a student at the University of South Florida in Tampa. One conclusion she reached: because the ELN was Colombia’s smaller rebel army, it often resorted to terrorism against civilians, like attacking Parra’s trucks, to gain attention.
“Because they were the little guy, they had to show that they needed to be respected," Perez-Verdia says. "Unfortunately, because of that, a lot of innocent people have suffered.”
She’s referring to atrocities like the ELN car-bomb attack on a police academy four years ago in Bogotá that killed 21 people, including teenagers, and to the ELN's notorious history of kidnapping civilians and blowing up infrastructure like oil pipelines. (The ELN remains on the U.S.'s list of foreign terrorist organizations.)
For Colombian expat Luz Perez, the difficulty of getting the ELN to disarm, as the FARC has, is a reminder that "they don't just want to share power, as the FARC is now doing as a political party with members in Congress and such. Their aim was always to completely remake Colombia, from its constitution to its moral values."
Perez heads the nonprofit Fundación Emprendedores Luz in South Florida, which in large part helps Colombian expats who experienced civil war violence overcome the trauma and move on with their lives. Her police officer husband, Alexánder Supelano Angel, was killed in the line of duty in Colombia 17 years ago, though not because of ELN violence.
She says even if Colombia does eventually reach a definitive peace deal with the ELN, it will be especially hard for its victims to accept it.
“I’d say 90% of them don’t want any peace dialogue," Perez says. "They don’t trust the ELN to stick to any peace agreement because its ideology is too radical.”
Paving stones to peace
Still, expats like Perez-Verdia say that while they understand that pain, they believe Colombia has no choice but to reach for that elusive total peace.
“We have to step back and realize what matters most right now are the Colombian people," she says, "the ones who are living this every day in Colombia and deserve a conflict-free future."
Either way, non-Colombians like Ruth Morris know how badly Colombia needs healing. In 2003, Morris was one of the most respected foreign correspondents living and working in Colombia when she and a colleague, Scott Dalton, were abducted by the ELN and held captive for two weeks.
Morris, who today lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area as a podcast producer, told WLRN the ELN ceasefire announcement reminded her that Colombians, however they proceed now, should keep in mind the more than a quarter million people killed in their civil war.
“My mind immediately went to all the victims who won’t see the chapter close," Morris says."I think there are a lot of gravestones in Colombia in quiet places, visited by just a few people — and those are the paving stones on the path to peace.”
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