Popular Liberation Army

The Popular Liberation Army (Spanish: Ejército Popular de Liberación, EPL) is a Colombian anti-revisionist Marxist–Leninist guerrilla group created in 1967. Most of its former members demobilized in 1991, forming the Esperanza, Paz y Libertad (Hope, Peace, and Liberty) party, but a dissident faction, formerly led by Megateo, known as "Los Pelusos", continue operating. On June 22, 1994, Francisco Caraballo, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Colombia (M–L) and Commander in Chief of the People's Liberation Army (Ejército Popular de Liberación, EPL), was arrested along with his wife, son and several other EPL members. Víctor Ramon Navarro Cervano, alias "Megateo," the leader of the last faction of the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), was killed in a military and police operation in Norte de Santander department in 2015. On December 15, 2016, Megateo's successor Guillermo León Aguirre, alias “David León,” was captured in Medellín. 40 days after the capture of David León, the body of his successor Jade Navarro Barbaso, alias “Caracho,” was still not found after disappearing.

By 2017, the group was estimated to have only 132 members and only had a presence in 10 municipalities of Catatumbo, located in the department of Norte de Santander. It has also been reported that some people identifying themselves as EPL members were actually FARC dissidents.

The EPL was founded by the Communist Party of Colombia (Marxist–Leninist), PCC(ml), a 1967 offshoot of the main Colombian Communist Party that disagreed with the Soviet Union's ideological tendencies.

The new party created the EPL that same year, and implemented its strategy of promoting socialist revolution from a rural base in the countryside in order to launch a future offensive against urban centers, where it tried to insert urban cells, while simultaneously engaging in sabotage.

The EPL's first military operations were in the Córdoba Department, on the Caribbean, during the late 1960s. Internal dissension and the deaths of some of its key leaders during the 1970s weakened the EPL's operational capabilities.

The EPL's efforts were initially unsuccessful, some of the group's main leaders were killed in military operations during the 1970s, and it apparently did not gain as much intellectual sympathy or recruits as the larger guerrilla organizations (FARC, 19th of April Movement and ELN), even after the group announced in 1980 that it would abandon orthodox Maoism in favor of Hoxhaism. A small splinter group, the Pedro León Arboleda Movement, named after a deceased 1975 commander, had been created in 1979.

The EPL declared a 1984 cease-fire together with several other guerrilla groups that began and maintained negotiations with the government. The 1985 murder of the group's leader Ernesto Rojas lead to the EPL's official breaking of the cease-fire. Unlike the official Colombian Communist Party, the Maoist PCC(ml) did not have official legal status in Colombia at this time.

Military operations executed by the official state armed forces and the actions of private paramilitary groups against the EPL's militants and its political supporters weakened the group and would have forced internal divisions within its structure.