Popular Liberation Army - Historical Development

Historical Development

The EPL's first military operations were in the Córdoba Department, on the Caribbean region, 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 groups 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, M-19 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.