“We are hearing of five injured and one dead,” Javier Tarazona, director of the Venezuelan human-rights NGO Fundaredes, told AFP after Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Guard clashed with presumed members of Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN). The confrontation happened Monday, 29 September, in Junín, Táchira state, near the Colombian border. Five injured people went to a nearby clinic in Rubio for treatment.
The casualty count remains unconfirmed. Venezuelan outlet El Nacional identified the dead man as National Guard member Andry Giovanni Vela Álvarez, but neither the Venezuelan government nor the National Guard had issued an official statement as of Wednesday. Colombian authorities hadn’t commented either. Regional reports mentioned captures, but no authority confirmed any detention.
What’s confirmed—and what isn’t
The cause of the firefight, the ELN front involved and any connection to recently mapped airstrips remain unconfirmed. Caracas and Bogotá hadn’t officially confirmed the clash or the dead man’s identity at publication. Along this frontier, even a basic account of an armed confrontation remains caught between competing armed actors and institutions that haven’t publicly established what happened.
The roughly 2,200-kilometre frontier is described as porous, with guerrillas, dissidents, traffickers and smugglers operating along it. Junín sits in a corridor where control of crossings and contraband routes has previously triggered violence. The injured were taken to Rubio for treatment. Armed organizations contest the routes around them.
A border shaped by state decisions
The report called this the first confrontation between Venezuelan security forces and the ELN since Abelardo de la Espriella, Colombia’s right-wing president, took office on 7 August. It said Venezuelan forces had largely tolerated ELN activity on their side of the border under Nicolás Maduro and, at times, watchdogs said, abetted it. Tarazona told AFP that the regional situation changed after the United States military captured Maduro in January and, above all, after De la Espriella took office in August.
De la Espriella declared the ELN a military target, ended peace talks and launched an offensive in Catatumbo that began with an airstrike days after his inauguration. Those decisions came from governments and military institutions; the report gives no account of local residents having a say in them, or of any grassroots organizing or mutual aid response to the clash.
Colombian intelligence, according to El Tiempo, mapped 93 clandestine airstrips used by the ELN inside Venezuela, up from about 15 points tracked at the start of the year. The ELN’s Northeastern War Front, associated with commander Luz Amanda Payares, alias Silvana Guerrero, was linked in the reporting to positions in Zulia and Táchira.
Warnings, armed groups and missing answers
On 29 September, the U.S. State Department advised citizens against travel to Norte de Santander, the Colombian department facing Táchira, and within 10 kilometres of the Venezuelan border. It cited risks of drone and explosive attacks by armed groups. Washington classifies the ELN as a terrorist organisation, while Colombia’s Fundación Ideas para la Paz estimated the group’s membership at 6,450.
Tarazona’s account is the only direct quote in the report. It identifies Fundaredes as a human-rights NGO, but the article provides no information about its funding or services beyond Tarazona’s comments. It also notes that Tarazona spent five years in prison after denouncing guerrilla movements in the border zone. Governments and security forces still haven’t confirmed the central details of the latest clash. People living along the frontier face the consequences of armed power—and unanswered questions.