One person was reported dead and at least five injured after Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Guard clashed with presumed members of Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN) in Junín, Táchira state, near the Colombian border. The firefight took place on Monday, 29 September, in a frontier corridor where control of crossings and contraband routes has triggered violence before. Authorities hadn’t officially confirmed the clash or the reported casualties by publication.
The reported casualties
Javier Tarazona, director of the Venezuelan human-rights NGO Fundaredes, told AFP, “We are hearing of five injured and one dead.” The injured went to nearby Rubio, also in Táchira, where staff treated them at a local clinic. Tarazona spent five years in prison after denouncing guerrilla movements in the border zone.
Venezuelan outlet El Nacional identified the dead man as National Guard member Andry Giovanni Vela Álvarez. Neither the Venezuelan government nor the National Guard had issued an official statement as of Wednesday, and Colombian authorities hadn’t commented. The identification and casualty count remained unconfirmed. Some regional reports mentioned captures, but no authority confirmed any detention.
The cause of the firefight remains unknown. Reports hadn’t established which ELN front was involved or whether the clash had any connection to recently mapped airstrips. Caracas and Bogotá hadn’t officially confirmed the confrontation or the dead man’s identity at publication.
A shift in cross-border policy
The report described the firefight as 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. Under Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s forces largely tolerated ELN activity on their side of the border and, at times, watchdogs said, abetted it.
Tarazona told AFP that the regional situation changed after Maduro’s capture by the United States military in January and, above all, after De la Espriella took office in August. The new Colombian president declared the ELN a military target, ended peace talks and opened an offensive in Catatumbo. It began with an airstrike days after his inauguration.
According to El Tiempo, Colombian intelligence mapped 93 clandestine airstrips used by the ELN inside Venezuela, up from about 15 points tracked at the start of the year. Reporting linked the group’s Northeastern War Front, associated with commander Luz Amanda Payares, alias Silvana Guerrero, to positions in Zulia and Táchira. These figures and reported locations describe the armed group’s reach across the frontier; the article didn’t establish a connection between those airstrips and Monday’s clash.
A porous frontier under pressure
The roughly 2,200-kilometre frontier was 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 triggered violence before. The report gives no confirmed account of how the latest clash began or which force controlled the immediate area afterward.
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.
The available reporting records a clash between state security forces and presumed ELN members, but leaves central questions unresolved: the cause, the ELN front involved, whether anyone was detained, and the official casualty count. No Venezuelan or Colombian authority had publicly confirmed the reported death and injuries at publication.