Venezuela strikes ELN with drones: is Washington holding the reins?

According to Courrier international, at least 19 ELN guerrillas were reportedly killed on 30 October in the state of Apure, in a drone strike by the Venezuelan army. The outlet calls the event "highly unusual": Venezuela has long served as a refuge for Colombian guerrilla movements. The operation is said to have been carried out with US help, and under their pressure. We know nothing more at this stage: not the exact nature of that help, not the identity of the dead, not the version offered by Caracas or by the ELN. The conditional is unavoidable.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, the dead. Nineteen people, whatever their weapons and whatever we think of their organisation, are nineteen lives. In Apure, a border region that one can imagine is poor and poorly served by the state, civilians live in the middle of these logics of force. Nothing in the dispatch says how they experienced the strikes.

Next, the question that interests us: who decides? If Washington is pushing and helping, is the Venezuelan army acting for its own security or for someone else's agenda? The meaning of a strike depends less on its targets than on who gives the orders. A state that bombs its own soil at the request of a great power sees its sovereignty, the very thing it proclaims, become a bargaining chip.

The pattern is not new. Amílcar Cabral already warned against the temptation, for newly independent states, to accept "compromises with the enemy or its agents": this is a paraphrase of his analyses in Return to the Source, which describe the weaknesses of the anti-imperialist front. Our concept of dependency says the same thing, more prosaically: when an economy is caught in external power relations, its room for political manoeuvre shrinks too. What remains to be known is what Caracas obtained in return. Some easing of pressure? Recognition? The dispatch does not say, and we will not invent it.

We should also guard against a reading that is too comfortable. Defending sovereignty does not mean making the ELN an unblemished liberation movement. The lesson of Fanon and Cabral is precisely that a national struggle without social transformation leaves in place elites who run the apparatus for their own benefit. A guerrilla that settles durably in a poor territory is not necessarily the voice of its inhabitants, just as a government that strikes under foreign influence is not necessarily the government of its people.

What to watch for: whether American help is confirmed and documented, whether other strikes follow, and what the people of Apure have to say about it. Because it is always on their ground that the quarrels of capitals are settled, at a distance.