ARAUCA/CUCUTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Venezuela’s crisis is spilling across the border into Colombia as Marxist rebels and right-wing paramilitaries recruit migrants to strengthen their ranks, according to five Colombian military commanders.

FILE PHOTO: People walk along a pathway near the Colombian-Venezuelan border on the outskirts of Cucuta, Colombia June 10, 2019. REUTERS/Juan Pablo Bayona/File Photo

Violence still simmers in Colombia despite a 2016 peace deal with leftist FARC rebels, meant to end five decades of conflict. Dissident FARC fighters, the rebel National Liberation Army (ELN), right-wing paramilitaries and drug-trafficking gangs are battling each other and the military.

Keen for recruits, these armed groups are targeting Venezuelans as they traverse the porous 2,219-km (1,380-mile)frontier at illegal border crossings, according to the military officials, human rights officials and migrants themselves.

Five military commanders told Reuters that as many as 30% of insurgents in Colombia’s eastern border region are Venezuelans, willing to take up arms in return for food and pay.

“Recruitment of Venezuelans is happening,” said Colonel Arnulfo Traslavina, military commander of a special unit battling armed groups in Colombia’s eastern border state of Arauca. “The ranks of illegal armed groups are increasing. It’s a major threat to Colombia.”

Nationwide, an estimated 10% of fighters are Venezuelan, the commanders said. Their estimates were based on information from informants, deserters, captured rebels and residents.

Reuters was not able to independently verify these figures.

The head of Colombia’s military and government spokesman on this issue, General Luis Fernando Navarro, told Reuters that armed groups were targeting Venezuelans because they were easier to recruit than Colombians.

At the last official count by military intelligence in May, there were 2,296 FARC dissident combatants and 2,402 fighters from the ELN in Colombia. Including their urban offshoots, the two groups total nearly 8,400 members.

Rebel numbers are small compared with the 250,000 combat troops in the armed forces but Colombia’s rugged jungle terrain - spread across a country the size of France and Spain - makes it difficult for the military to tackle small, mobile units of fighters.

The military officers say they had interrogated some Venezuelans who had defected from armed groups and identified Venezuelan nationals killed in combat. They did not provide a total number for Venezuelan casualties.

Reuters was not able independently to confirm the information provided by the commanders or speak directly to any Venezuelans who had been recruited by an armed group.

Several Venezuelan migrants told Reuters they had been approached by armed groups for recruitment on entering Colombia.

“They said I’d get clothes, food, money, accommodation, a cell phone,” said Gregorio, a 20-year-old Venezuelan migrant who said he was asked to join an unspecified group in the mountains as soon as he waded across the Tachira River onto Colombian soil.

“I was tempted, but scared... I’d been told there were bad people offering such things and I didn’t want to join,” said Gregorio, who declined to give his second name for fear of reprisals.

An estimated 1.3 million Venezuelan migrants have settled in Colombia in recent years, fleeing shortages of food, electricity and water as the South American nation has seen its economy unravel amid a bloody political confrontation.

Most Venezuelans do not come to Colombia to enlist in insurgent groups but with almost nothing in their pockets, the prospect of food and shelter is enticing, said Deisson Marino, human rights ombudsman for the border region of Arauca.

“They end up enrolled in a war that has nothing to do with them,” said Marino, whose job involves traveling to remote areas and speaking to victims of the conflict and armed groups.

RECRUITING IN VENEZUELA

Colombia’s Defense Minister Guillermo Botero has said the military has more than doubled operations against armed groups since President Ivan Duque took office in August, looking to tackle a rise in illicit drug production and trafficking. Colombia is the world’s largest producer of cocaine.

“The ELN has been retreating - at least its leadership - to Venezuela where it’s recruiting for greater strength, to attack us,” Botero said recently.

A FARC dissident, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters the group was also present on Venezuelan soil and was recruiting Venezuelans.

The Venezuelan information ministry - which handles media enquiries for the government - did not respond to a request for comment about the conscription of Venezuelans by Colombia’s armed groups.

Venezuela’s government has acknowledged that the ELN and dissident FARC are present on its territory. It has said it does not support the groups or tolerate their presence, and that its troops pursue them as they would any other illegal group.

Representatives of the ELN did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The FARC, which became a political party after the peace deal and kept its former acronym, has publicly expelled the armed dissidents.

Since it was founded in 1964, the ELN has funded itself from kidnapping, drug trafficking and extortion but is increasingly making money from illegal migration, the officials said.

Military officials and rights workers say the ELN and colectivos - shadowy irregular armed groups in Venezuela affiliated with President Nicolas Maduro’s Socialist Party - control most of the crossing points into Colombia and demand payment from migrants and traders.

PICKING COCA

Army Colonel Rodolfo Morales, head of the army’s 30th Brigade in the border town of Cucuta, said migrants were also being drafted by drug trafficking groups to pick coca, the raw material for cocaine.

Antonio, another Venezuelan migrant who declined to give his second name, said that after crossing the border he was offered money by unidentified men to go into the jungles around Tibu - a border town around 115 km north of Cucuta in the dangerous Catatumbo region - to pick coca leaves.

“I’d rather go hungry than go with them,” said the 33-year old from the central Venezuelan state of Carabobo.

Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary groups, which battled the ELN and FARC for decades, are also recruiting migrants, the military officials said.

The paramilitaries were behind most of the 260,000 killings that occurred during the nation’s half-century conflict and never fully demobilized under a 2006 peace agreement.

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Eddinson, 26, a migrant from Venezuela’s coastal state of Aragua, said he and three other Venezuelans were approached by armed men who identified themselves as paramilitaries as they trekked through the mountains of Santander province near the border.

Eddinson said the leader of the eight armed men - who were dressed in khaki uniforms - tried to recruit them.

“He said that training would last six months. We’d be given salaries according to rank,” said Eddinson, adding that he and the other Venezuelans declined the offer. “He told us that we’d know our start date but not when we could leave.” </s> As Venezuelans flee their country in search of safety and economic security, another set of dangers awaits them across the border.

In Colombia’s northeast, where many Venezuelans have ended up, rival armed groups control illegal border crossings and wreak havoc on civilians with killings, intimidation, sexual violence and recruit children as soldiers, according to a new report by NGO Human Rights Watch.

The report focuses on the impoverished Catatumbo region, where armed groups — including the National Liberation Army (ELN), the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), and former members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) — wage bloody battles for control not only between each other but also on Colombian soldiers. The area is an important one for coca cultivation, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

More than 100 civilians were killed there by the battling groups in 2018, according to the HRW report, which cites United Nations figures. Some Colombian and Venezuelan children have been coerced into either joining groups or enforcing their rules.

The report claims that in March, ELN fighters “visited a rural school in Catatumbo to try to convince children to join their ranks.” Some children have been threatened for allegedly cooperating with rival groups, according to HRW.

One mother told HRW that local fighters offered her son guns and a motorcycle to work for them, and later warned the family to avoid interacting with government soldiers.

As local authorities struggle to keep up with a rising number of homicides in the area, armed fighters are policing territories and local populations.

Tens of thousands of people have left the region since 2017, according to Colombian government figures cited in the report. Yet Venezuelans continue to flood in from across the border. Earlier this year, Reuters reported that internally displaced Colombians in the area “can be seen begging for food alongside” Venezuelan migrants and refugees.

Colombia has welcomed vast numbers of refugees from Venezuela since its economic downturn began accelerating. On Monday, Colombian President Iván Duque announced in a series of tweets that the country would grant citizenship to more than 24,000 children born to undocumented Venezuelan parents — any child born since August 19, 2015.

“Colombia, once again, is showing the world that even in the midst of fiscal constraints, with a per capita income of less than $8,000 dollars,” Duque said, “we also know how to make out of fraternity, a feeling of solidarity.” However, he also called for the international community to end Venezuela’s crisis, which has created an estimated exodus of four million people.

Colombia’s Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Foreign Relations did not respond to a request for comment. </s> Colombia’s foreign minister said on Tuesday that Venezuelan helicopters and soldiers illegally crossed the two countries’ border amid ongoing tensions.

In a press release, the Colombian foreign ministry said that two military police helicopters on Sunday dropped some 30 armed soldiers in Tibu, a municipality on the northern half of the country’s 1,300-mile border.

The unannounced cross-border operation was a “violation of the sovereignty of Colombia,” the foreign ministry said.

The alleged incursion in the virtually lawless border region between the two countries is the first since President Ivan Duque took office earlier this month.

At the instruction of the president, the foreign ministry, a letter expressing “the most energetic protest” was sent to Venezuela’s embassy in Bogota.

While this would be the first illegal cross-border operation for Duque, it is by far not the first in recent history.

Former President Juan Manuel Santos on multiple occasions claimed that Venezuelan armed forces entered Colombian territory without permission, often in areas where the countries are separated by shifting rivers.

Alleged incursions like the one on Sunday are particularly sensitive now that tensions between the two countries is high.

The government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has converted the country into a virtual one-party state and has claimed the Colombian government has been involved in plots to either topple or assassinate him.

At the same time, food and medicine shortages in Colombia’s socialist-run neighbor has spurred a mass exodus of Venezuelans to neighboring countries.

Like Venezuela, Colombia has also not taken the exact location of their neighbors’ borders too seriously.

Ecuadorean courts are currently investigating top former military officials from Colombia for a 2008 cross-border bombing raid that killed a prominent Colombian guerrilla leader who was hiding in the jungle on the Ecuadorean side of the border.

was last modified: by </s> BOGOTA (Reuters) - Fighting between three armed groups for control of territory and drug trafficking in northeastern Colombia has exposed some 300,000 civilians to potential rights abuses, Human Rights Watch said on Thursday.

Rebels from the National Liberation Army (ELN), dissident fighters from Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) who refused to demobilize under a peace deal and the Los Pelusos crime gang are all present in the Catatumbo region, near the border with Venezuela, the rights group said.

"In Catatumbo a war to the death has been triggered between irregular armed groups. This war has the civilian population as prisoners, as captives," Human Rights Watch Americas director Jose Miguel Vivanco told journalists. "These are poor rural people who haven't seen the Colombian state for decades and who are exposed to grave abuses."

People living in the region, including more than 25,000 Venezuelans who have fled the economic and political crisis in their own country, are at risk of murder, forced disappearance, sexual violence, forced recruitment of minors, landmines, displacement and kidnapping, Vivanco said.

Migrants are especially vulnerable, Vivanco said, adding that some Venezuelan children are involved in harvesting coca, the base ingredient in cocaine, while migrant women may be forced into sex work that pays them as little as $2.

Armed groups are known to target desperate Venezuelans for recruitment as they traverse the porous 2,219-km (1,380-mile) border between the two countries.

Vivanco said the Colombian government should invest in roads, education, healthcare and job creation in the region, where military forces number more than 5,600 and police 800.

The demobilization of the FARC in 2017 left a power vacuum in restive regions around the Andean country, sparking bloody competition between remaining armed groups for control of lucrative drug trafficking and illegal mining operations.

"Within Colombia and outside Colombia it is probable there exists the impression that the situation was resolved with the signing of the deal and that the country is in peace," Vivanco said. "The country is at war in Catatumbo!" </s> Image copyright AFP Image caption Farc guerrillas have almost all arrived in their concentration zones across the country

Families on Colombia's border with Venezuela have been displaced by criminal former paramilitary groups trying to fill the vacuum left by the departure of Farc rebels, the UN says.

Officials said 96 families in the northern region of Norte de Santander had fled their homes.

Some crossed the border into Venezuela and others went to refuges in local Colombian towns, the UN said.

The government has denied any families have been forced across the border.

Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin was quoted by local media as saying there was "no certainty of any such displacement" although she conceded that there had been some internal displacement in the Norte de Santander area.

Image copyright Reuters Image caption The Colombian military is reported to be finding it difficult to take over in more isolated regions because of the problems of terrain and lack of access

The UN said tension was high in the area and they feared more families could flee.

According to the UN, various groups operate or have operated in the region: the Farc, Colombia's second largest guerrilla group, the ELN, and criminal and former paramilitary groups.

Officials said people are fleeing because illegal armed groups are trying to take over the mining and cocaine trade which had provided the Farc with an income.

Norte de Santander has emerged as the country's main hub for coca cultivation.

Last week peasant farmer organisations in the region around Catatumbo blocked the demobilisation of Farc units saying that their departure would leave them unprotected as the paramilitary groups gathered nearby.

There have also been reports by local communities of an increased presence of criminal groups in at least three other departments: Antioquia, Uraba and Choco.

The Farc - which signed a peace accord with the government last year - has largely left towns and rural areas it occupied and most of the fighters have gathered in 26 concentration zones under the watch of a multinational commission.

The Colombian military is finding it difficult to take control in more isolated regions because of the problems of terrain and lack of access, the government's Peace and Reconciliation Foundation says.

The Farc is expected to hand over its arms by the end of May.

It has agreed to co-operate with investigations into drug trafficking and war crimes.

The armed conflict in Colombia has resulted in more than 220,000 deaths and 40,000 people missing over the past 50 years.

All sides have been accused of war crimes including massacres, torture and rape.

More than six million people have been displaced - the second highest number in the world after Syria. </s> Colombia issued a strong protest Tuesday over what it said was a border incursion by Venezuelan helicopters and troops over the weekend.

The government of President Ivan Duque said it sent a strongly-worded protest to the Venezuelan ambassador over what it claimed was a “violation of Colombia’s sovereignty” in Norte Santander department on Sunday.

“Two helicopters, identified with the initials of the Bolivarian National Guard and about 30 armed personnel belonging to the Bolivarian National Armed Forces of Venezuela” landed in the border region of Tibu, the foreign ministry said.

The ministry said it sent a note “expressing the strongest protest” to the Venezuelan ambassador in Bogota.

The South American neighbors have locked horns in recent years over similar incidents along their 2,200-kilometer (1,370-mile) border crisscrossed by guerrillas and drug traffickers.

The most recent incident was in November last year and also involved the Tibu region.

Like his predecessor Juan Manuel Santos, Duque has branded Venezuela a “dictatorship” under President Nicolas Maduro.

Earlier this month, Maduro accused Santos of being behind an alleged attempt to assassinate him during a military parade in Caracas.

Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans fleeing the economic crisis in their home country have taken refuge in Colombia, which Maduro has also accused of sheltering his opponents.

Colombia urged Peru and Ecuador to coordinate their immigration policies to deal with an influx of Venezuelan migrants. </s> Colombia issued a strong protest Tuesday over what it said was a border incursion by Venezuelan helicopters and troops over the weekend.

The government of President Ivan Duque said it sent a strongly-worded protest to the Venezuelan ambassador over what it claimed was a "violation of Colombia's sovereignty" in Norte Santander department on Sunday.

"Two helicopters, identified with the initials of the Bolivarian National Guard and about 30 armed personnel belonging to the Bolivarian National Armed Forces of Venezuela" landed in the border region of Tibu, the foreign ministry said.

The ministry said it sent a note "expressing the strongest protest" to the Venezuelan ambassador in Bogota.

The South American neighbors have locked horns in recent years over similar incidents along their 2,200-kilometer (1,370-mile) border crisscrossed by guerrillas and drug traffickers.

The most recent incident was in November last year and also involved the Tibu region.

Like his predecessor Juan Manuel Santos, Duque has branded Venezuela a "dictatorship" under President Nicolas Maduro.

Earlier this month, Maduro accused Santos of being behind an alleged attempt to assassinate him during a military parade in Caracas.

Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans fleeing the economic crisis in their home country have taken refuge in Colombia, which Maduro has also accused of sheltering his opponents.

Colombia urged Peru and Ecuador to coordinate their immigration policies to deal with an influx of Venezuelan migrants. </s> Illegal armed groups have forced some 40,000 people to flee their homes as they fight for control of drug trafficking routes in Colombia's Catatumbo region bordering Venezuela, Human Rights Watch said Thursday.

The international watchdog published a 64-page report on abuses committed against civilians by armed groups in the mountainous area. The situation reflects the significant security challenges that Colombia faces after the government signed a 2016 peace deal with the FARC guerrilla group, leaving a void that has been filled by smaller armed groups that have moved into Catatumbo and other remote areas unleashing a new wave of drug-fuelled violence.

In the report called "The War in Catatumbo," Human Rights Watch says three armed groups are fighting over drug routes and coca plantations abandoned by FARC rebels in the region, including the Popular Liberation Army, the National Liberation Army and a small group of former FARC fighters.

These armed groups have expelled thousands of rural dwellers from their homes, murdered community leaders and forcibly recruited children into their ranks, according to the report, which also includes interviews with children who have been forced to work harvesting coca leaves, the raw material for cocaine.

"The 2016 peace accord between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia presented a landmark opportunity to halt the serious abuses and atrocities associated with a decades-long armed conflict," the report says.

"Yet in practice, the government does not exercise effective control over all territory in particular areas reclaimed from the FARC."

Catatumbo is about the size of Rhode Island. It borders Venezuela and in 2017 it produced about 15 per cent of Colombia's coca crop, according to United Nations figures. The mountainous region has been used by drug traffickers as a staging point for exporting cocaine.

Human Rights Watch accused Colombia's government of "not meeting its obligations" to protect civilians in the area, which include an estimated 25,000 Venezuelan migrants. The organization said migrants fleeing economic hardship in Venezuela have been forced into sex work in Catatumbo and are also harvesting coca leaves in a desperate bid to feed their families.

The report said there were 231 homicides in Catatumbo last year or twice as many as before the peace deal with the FARC was signed. Only two members of armed groups have been convicted for murders in Catatumbo over the past three years.

"As armed groups fight for the void left by the FARC in Catatumbo, hundreds of civilians have been caught in the conflict," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director of the group.

Human Rights Watch is calling on the Colombia government to increase the number of investigators working on cases of forced displacement, murders and disappearances in the region. It also urged the Colombian government to ensure Venezuelan migrants attain legal status so that they can find work in safer parts of the country. </s> Cucuta, Colombia, Feb 23 (EFE).- Venezuela’s National Police on Saturday impeded a human cordon that formed on a border crossing to accompany several trucks carrying humanitarian aid from this northeastern Colombia city.



In blocking the aid deliveries, the security forces fired tear gas at hundreds of civilians who had taken up positions on the Simon Bolivar International Bridge in the early-morning hours.



The civilians, who had demanded that the aid be allowed to cross and also called on the police to abandon their posts, responded by throwing rocks at the security forces.



Colombia’s police did not intervene in the conflict and remained positioned at the Migracion Colombia (migration agency) posts set up on that bridge to control the movement of people and goods across the border.



Several members of the National Police who were assigned to that border crossing deserted on Saturday and crossed over to the Colombian side of the frontier.



Several Colombian police escorted their Venezuelan counterparts to the other side amid the applause of Venezuelans gathered in the area.

 Migracion Colombia confirmed that at least 11 members of Venezuela’s National Guard and two police deserted on Saturday amid the attempts to deliver humanitarian aid from Colombia to Venezuela, which has been racked by severe food and medicine shortages and hyperinflation.



“At this time, Migracion Colombia, in Norte de Santander province, is expediting interviews with 10 members of the Venezuelan National Guard and two women with the Bolivarian National Police who arrived in the country fleeing Nicolas Maduro’s dictatorship,” that migration agency said.



One other member of Venezuela’s security forces deserted and crossed the border into the northeastern Colombian province of Arauca, according to the official report.



These isolated instances notwithstanding, the vast majority of Venezuela’s armed forces have remained loyal to leftist President Nicolas Maduro.



Separately, Venezuelan authorities on Saturday blocked the entry of trucks being used to carry humanitarian aid over two other border crossings – the Francisco de Paula Santander and Tienditas bridges.



They fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators on both of those bridges.



The speaker of Venezuela’s opposition-led National Assembly, Juan Guaido, who proclaimed himself interim president last month, traveled to Cucuta on Friday for a massive aid concert organized by British businessman Richard Branson and also to receive the international humanitarian aid stockpiled in Colombia.



He said Saturday that the trucks carrying the aid from Colombia were already in Venezuelan territory but that the leftist government was impeding their advance.



“The usurper regime is blocking (the trucks). They can’t deal with our irreversible decision to live in freedom,” Guaido wrote on Twitter.



The opposition leader said earlier Saturday that humanitarian aid trucks had entered Venezuela via that country’s border with Brazil.



Maduro has ordered both of those borders closed, saying that the humanitarian aid is a Trojan horse for a US-led military intervention.



Venezuela’s opposition, as well as the United States and much of the international community, regards Maduro’s May 2018 re-election victory to be fraudulent.



The US has also imposed severe sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry in a bid to expedite regime change.



The major European nations – save Italy – also are among the roughly 50 governments that have recognized Guaido.



Several dozen other countries, including Russia, China and India, continue to recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s president.
The Colombian military reveals that dissident FARC groups, in spite of a 2016 treaty, have been recruiting Venezuelan migrants at illegal border crossings, strengthening their numbers and increasing attacks.