Hemispheric securityColombia: First Extraditions of ELN Rebels to U.S.

Colombia announced on Tuesday that José Gabriel Alvarez, one of the leaders of the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla, will be extradited to the United States for drug trafficking. He will be tried in a Texas court. Ten more ELN members will be extradited to the United states within the next few months.

“There are a total of eleven members of the ELN, including four already arrested” and seven wanted, declared the high commissioner for peace, Miguel Ceballos, specifying that their extradition “is part of a broader concern of prosecutors and judges of the United States.”.

Colombia president, Ivan Duque, on Monday signed the extradition order for José Gabriel Alvarez.

The leftist ELN guerrilla is the last active guerrilla group in Colombia since the 2016 signing of the peace agreement between the government of Colombia and the much larger Marxist guerrilla, the FARC. The leaders of ELN denied any connection to Alvarez.

“It is totally untrue that the figure called José Gabriel Alvarez Ortiz is a member of the ELN, as are the three others who will be extradited,” the guerrilla central command said in a statement. The three others already arrested are Yamit Rodriguez alias “Choncha,” Franco Ruiz alias “Motorola,” and Henry Trigos.

The ELN, now numbering around 2,300 fighters, has been fighting the Colombian government since 1964. Both the FARC and ELN financed their guerrilla operations by drug trafficking, although the ELN officially denies it has anything to do with the drug business.

The ELN has been designated a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union, but experts say that with the decline in the group’s Marxist ideological fervor, it should now be more properly regarded as a group of drug traffickers.

President Duque leads the conservative party of Alvaro Uribe, who was president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010, and who led the opposition to the 2016 agreement with the FARC, which was negotiated by his successor, Juan Manuel Santos. The Duque’s government abides by the terms of the 2016 agreement – although critics says it is doing so with obvious lack of enthusiasm – and in January 2019 pulled f the negotiations with the ELN following a car bomb attack on the Bogota Police Academy, in which twenty- two cadets had been killed.

Duque insists that Cuba, which has been a main supporter of both the FARC and the ELN, turn over the ELN leadership, now living in Havana, to Colombia. Cuba has refused, citing the protocol signed by Colombia and the guarantor countries which provides for a safe return of the rebels to their camps in the jungles of Colombia.