The Eastern War Front Commander in Chief Manuel Vásquez Castaño of the National Liberation Army (ELN), considers and reports that:
Since the Spanish invasion there has been an imperialist war, which the Latin American Creole oligarchies continue to maintain in order to perpetuate themselves in power at the expense of the suffering of the people, developing a system of domination, exploitation and oppression.
From the struggle of aboriginal resistance, we move on to the struggle and independence ideas of Simón Bolívar, achieving the expulsion of the Spanish and in part the construction of the great Colombia, then the Creole oligarchies betray that legacy and generate a new regime of domination of the capitalist system, alienating independence and sovereignty to the North American empire.
As a consequence of the above and the need to build an alternative system, Marxist ideas arose, which gave rise to socialist guerrillas in Latin America, some of which triumphed through armed means and others in alliance with movements that remain in power.
In Colombia, for various reasons, several of these insurgencies ended up giving in, betraying the people by placing themselves at the service of the narco-paramilitaries and the regime forces.
Today, these renegades and pseudo-revolutionaries, hand in hand with the bourgeois oligarchic elites and imperialist plans, seek to delegitimize us and attack us by all means, with the purpose of annihilating us, so that we do not exercise the legitimate right to defend and fight for the emancipation of the peoples.
The ELN remains united, firm and unwavering in its political project, therefore, as the Eastern War Front we stand in solidarity with our comrades from the Northeastern War Front and other war fronts; we will be ready to support in whatever is necessary in the confrontation that the regime is posing to us with its alliances and instruments of dirty war and state terrorism.
Petro and the current government will go down in history as just another member of the dominant capitalist system; a puppet that governed for the interests of the empire and the extreme right, betraying the people who enthusiastically and hopefully elected him, and just another of the many that the ELN has had to defeat.
Only a revolution that transforms the structures of the dominant system can end the political, economic, social and cultural slavery of our people.