National Liberation Army (ELN)
Years of civil war left Colombia’s rural communities in a particularly destitute position in the 1960s. Two brothers, Fabio and Manuel Vasquez Castano, and other devotees of Cuban revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Che Guevara founded the ELN in 1963 after completing training from Castro in Cuba and returning to Colombia. They sought to replace the Colombian government with one more representative and responsive to the people, including the country’s rural majority. The founding ELN...