Venezuela reportedly struck the ELN on its own soil: a rupture still to be proven

According to RFI, the Venezuelan army reportedly bombed, on Friday 30 October, an encampment of the Colombian guerrilla group ELN (National Liberation Army) installed on Venezuelan territory, in the state of Apure, on the border with Colombia. The operation has not been confirmed by the authorities. It was the NGO Fundaredes that documented the presence of government forces on the ground. This organisation has for years denounced the protection Caracas offers to Colombian guerrillas, and claims this would be the first Venezuelan strike against the group. That is what we know. It is little, and it is worth saying so.

We do not know what was targeted, with what means, with what toll, and above all why now. No official source is speaking, and we have no independent evidence beyond what the NGO reports. Caution, then: what follows is our reading, not an established fact.

If the attack is confirmed, the question is not only military. A border several hundred kilometres long, on both the Colombian and Venezuelan sides, has long been a space where the state is thin and armed groups act as local power, police and sometimes employer. These neglected rural areas feed the guerrilla as much as the guns do. Hitting a camp does not resolve what the camp replaces.

Then there is the regional context. A Venezuelan government under external pressure has good reason to want to prove it controls its territory, and to show Washington and Bogota that it can play the cooperative neighbour. We do not know whether that is the case here, and we do not claim to read minds. But one can ask the question: who benefits from a strike, even a discreet one, against a group that other capitals would like to see weakened? Counter-insurgency, border security, access to the region's resources: the interests of neighbouring powers and of the North American ally weigh on these choices.

There is a broader lesson here. The Gazette's conceptual notes on dependency remind us that a country whose economy is shaped from outside sees its room for manoeuvre eroded: sanctions, debt, the need for hard currency. Under such conditions, sovereignty is negotiated, including over how a state handles its own borders. A state strangled in this way sometimes ends up offering security concessions to those who hold the upper hand.

The ELN, for its part, claims the mantle of a liberation struggle. But that same tradition teaches that liberation without social transformation leaves the structure intact. The peasants of Apure, meanwhile, live caught between two fires, the armed groups and the regular armies, with no one offering them anything beyond fear or conditional protection.

We will therefore need confirmation, or denial, from Caracas, and testimony from residents. Until then, caution is in order: a strike announced by an NGO is not a military doctrine. But if it is confirmed, it will show that the Colombian-Venezuelan border has once again become a stake fought over by capitals far removed from the people who live there.