The rebel army led by ex-priests that lives off ransom money

Telegraph ^ | 07/01/2004 | Jeremy McDermott

[Tailgunner Joe]

The National Liberation Army (ELN) was born in the aftermath of the victory of Fidel Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Cuba and its first cadres trained under them before launching their guerrilla war in Colombia in 1964.

Today the 4,000-strong rebel army, with its ally and larger cousin the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), controls 40 per cent of the country.

Unlike the Farc, the ELN is strapped for cash and relies on kidnapping to gather funds necessary to continue its 40-year revolutionary war. In the past three years the ELN has kidnapped more than 2,500 people, many of them foreigners.

The Farc make millions of dollars from the drugs trade, and the ELN is moving into the business, but only after the death in 1998 of its renowned leader Manuel Perez, a defrocked Spanish priest who forbade his fighters to get involved in what he saw as a dirty, unholy business.

The Roman Catholic Church has long had influence with the ELN, as many former priests, not only Perez, joined its ranks, espousing the radical doctrine of Liberation Theology.

This was one of the reasons that the Church was able to mediate successfully to secure the release of Mark Henderson and his fellow hostages. The present commander, Nicolas Rodriguez, alias "Gabino", is another renowned figure who joined the ELN when he was 14 and rose up through the rebel ranks with an almost supernatural ability as a guerrilla fighter.

He repeatedly slipped through the fingers of the security forces for whom he remains a top priority target.

The kidnapping of the foreign tourists was not an action sanctioned by the ELN Central Command, known as the COCE. This can be seen from the fact that the rebels did not ask for ransoms and quickly sought a way to release the tourists and minimise the public relations damage.

Yet the kidnapping has brought the group to the notice of the world once more and allowed it to compete with the Farc, which has long overshadowed the smaller ELN.

The Colombian government has, so far unsuccessfully, tried to use the kidnapping to get the ELN on to the European terrorist list, like the Farc.

The ELN does figure on the American terrorist list, but has been able to count on some support in Europe for their cause and have so far evaded the European terrorist label.

[MonroeDNA]

Hmmmm... alert.