How do groups like the ELN still exist after all these years?
More could be said, but at present here are, I think, the main reasons for the ELN's continued existence and its continued strength.
1. The ELN is a highly adaptable and flexible guerrilla which has come back from the dead many times. Most recently, after being rather severely weakened in the 2000s, it has reorganized and strengthened itself since 2012 (especially since 2017-8). Most likely, it has also grown in size quite substantially over the last 5-10 years. It has been able to shift and adapt itself to the state's counter-insurgency strategies, reorganized in smaller and more diffuse contingents, resisting through guerrilla warfare rather than direct armed confrontations with the military. The ELN is not fighting for victory, but rather to continue fighting while consolidating its political and social relevancy.
2. The ELN has diversified its sources of revenue from extortion and kidnapping (historically against oil companies) and expanded its influence over coca cultivation, cocaine production, drug trafficking, illegal mining, contraband and human trafficking. It has moved to control strategic territories and drug trafficking corridors (on the Pacific coast, northern Chocó, Cauca and Nariño, Catatumbo and the eastern Llanos/Venezuelan border).
3. The demobilization of (much of) the FARC following the peace process created a power vacuum in territories which had been controlled by the FARC. In most cases, the state has remained both unable and unwilling to fill this power vacuum in the long-term. The ELN has sought to expand into these strategic territories from its existing areas of influence, entering into conflict with other illegal groups (the EPL in Catatumbo, FARC dissidents and neo-paramilitaries/criminal groups like the Clan del Golfo in northern Chocó).
4. With the protection of the Maduro regime, the ELN has thrived in Venezuela - not only using the country as a sanctuary, but also controlling resource extraction areas in the border region and around the Orinoco mining arc (rich in iron, gold, rare earth minerals, bauxite, copper). The ELN is now reported to be present in 12 of Venezuela's 24 states, and an
InsightCrime op-ed is now describing it as a 'Colombo-Venezuelan rebel army'. The Colombian military and government have said that about 43-45% of the ELN is in Venezuela, including several members of its central command.
5. The ELN is a more diffuse organization with a federated stronger, with more or less autonomous fronts (some known to be particularly radical, like "Pablito" and his eastern war front in Arauca), urban militias and multiple small networks and cells. With the incipient peace negotiations frozen since 2018 and formally broken off since 2019, there's a possibility that the more radical factions have gained the upper hand at the expense of the political factions, and that there's been a 'degradation' towards an even greater dependence on illegal economies.
There still is massive inequality and mistreatment of the rural peasantry and urban poor in Colombia that provides a semi-stable support network of people willing to die in battle than die from medical bills.
That and the ELN most likely has a still strong student and workers network providing aid to the populace in the place of the current government.
It is true that the ELN from its history sees itself as more of an NGO at times than an army - unlike the old FARC - and the ELN still has a large network of social and political organizations linked to it or has infiltrated several social movements. It's also true that conflict dynamics are more complex than 'drugs', but at the same time inequality and the failures of the state cannot come close to explaining the existence of any armed group or the conflict.
And nobody should be idolizing them as selfless revolutionaries: they are criminals, sustained by criminal activities, who continue to cause untold humanitarian crises with their actions. They're far more interested in criminal activities than providing humanitarian aid to anyone. Thousands of people from poor, remote regions of Colombia are still being forcibly displaced from their homes because of violence, or confined in their communities amidst violence and crossfire. The territorial control of the ELN (and others) isn't about building schools and clinics, it's about regulating conflicts and illegal economies, collecting extortion payments (
vacunas and
cuotas), forced recruitment (including child soldiers) and violently repressing anybody they don't like (targeted killings, forced disappearances).
