For years, a Colombian rebel army operated freely across the border in Venezuela, allowed to traffic cocaine and oversee illicit gold mines under Nicolás Maduro, the country’s former president.
But with Mr. Maduro forcibly removed by the United States and Venezuela’s government under the thumb of the Trump administration, Venezuela’s military last week launched a deadly attack on the group, the National Liberation Army, better known by its Spanish initials, ELN.
The attack, according to four U.S. officials, was carried out on Friday with the help of U.S. intelligence and drones. It was not previously public who had been responsible for the attack.
The joint operation underscores how the Trump administration is increasingly enmeshed in Venezuela’s domestic affairs and how it has embraced an increasingly militarized strategy to combat drug trafficking in Latin America.
The attack was not the first joint operation in the country. In June, a strike by the United States and Venezuela killed a leader of Tren de Aragua, the transnational gang.
The New York Times reported this week that the Trump administration is aiming to establish a long-term U.S. military presence in Venezuela.
A Venezuelan human rights organization, Fundaredes, first alerted the public to Friday’s attack, which took place in the Apure region near the Colombian border, after organizers spoke with survivors and local residents.
At least 23 people were killed and many more injured, the group said, after drones bombed an ELN site that was a known hub for cocaine distribution.
The U.S. officials who confirmed details of the attack requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
For years, the ELN operated freely in Venezuela, viewing the country as a refuge from military attacks in Colombia and a prime location for flying cocaine smuggled from Colombia to other countries. The Venezuelan government was seen as its ally.
On a visit to Colombia in September, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the ELN could no longer be allowed to operate “with impunity” in Venezuela, and that the topic had been raised with the interim government of Delcy Rodríguez.
“We have to confront it,” he said.
While it was not clear who piloted the drones used in Friday’s attack, the type of drone involved is typically operated by U.S. forces, one of the U.S. officials said.
The State Department referred questions about the attack to the Department of Defense, which said questions should be directed to Venezuela’s government. Venezuelan officials did not respond to a request for comment.
On Monday, a senior Venezuelan military official confirmed that the country’s armed forces had carried out the attack on the ELN in Apures. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, asked not to be named. The person had not been personally briefed on the U.S. role.
Representatives of the ELN did not respond to requests for comment.
Juan Francisco García, the Fundaredes coordinator for the Apures region, said residents who lived on ranches near the site of the attack had described hearing two large explosions on Friday morning. They approached and found bodies scattered around the bombed site, which Mr. García, who works in the area, said was known to be used by the ELN for shipping cocaine.
Security analysts say the ELN had consolidated control of much of the Venezuelan border and used air strips there to ship Colombian cocaine by plane to other countries in Latin America, including Mexico.
Mr. García shared photos and videos with The Times he said were taken by residents on Friday. One photo shows, from a distance, a helicopter and several smaller, dark shapes hovering over pastureland. A video shows bodies amid debris.
Mr. García, who said he visited a nearby morgue and saw several victims’ bodies over the weekend, said that many of the corpses had been “mutilated” by explosives.
He said that interviews with survivors of the attack, and relatives of victims, had indicated that not all the victims were fighters.
Those killed included pilots, goods suppliers and the relatives or partners of ELN members, he said. One was a woman in her 60s whom he described as the wife of a pilot.
The ELN is known to recruit members from poor communities where there are few employment opportunities. In areas where the group is the de facto authority, locals say they often feel they have to cooperate.
Mr. García noted that, while less than half of the victims had been identified by Monday, government IDs found on some bodies showed that the victims were Venezuelan, not Colombian.
Since no government officially took responsibility for the attack, theories have swirled in recent days about who was responsible and whether any group leader had been killed.
The attack came on the heels of several bombings against ELN targets in Colombia ordered by the country’s conservative new president, Abelardo De La Espriella, who has vowed to crush armed groups that do not surrender.
After the ELN released a video in September in which a well-known commander defied the new president and said the group would keep fighting, Mr. De La Espriella responded by calling the ELN commander, known as Silvana Guerrero, a “terrorist” who would end up in a body bag.
On Friday, the day of the attack in Venezuela, Colombia’s armed forces reportedly dropped fliers over the border city of Cúcuta offering reward money for the ELN’s top commanders.
Colombian defense officials denied playing any role in the operation in Venezuela.
Security analysts said the military strategy against the ELN — which is said to have around 6,000 fighters — now appears to be to squeeze the group on both sides of the border at once so that it does not have a place to hide.
The attack comes as the Trump administration has designated around two dozen criminal groups in Latin America as terrorist organizations and is launching a military plan to crush Latin America’s “narcoterrorists.” It has also put pressure on leaders to target trafficking groups and to capture or kill group leaders.
Though legal experts say the terrorist label does not confer the authority to use lethal force as a first resort, the label has, nonetheless, been frequently invoked by top Trump administration officials when publicizing military strikes against accused traffickers, including boat strikes that so far have killed 244 people.
“The United States military will treat these organizations like the terrorists they are,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said after a lethal strike last October on a boat allegedly linked to the ELN. “They will be hunted and killed, just like Al Qaeda.”
Formed in rural Colombia in the 1960s, the ELN merged Marxism with Roman Catholic liberation theology. It later resorted to violent tactics like kidnapping and drug trafficking, and in 1997 it was among the first groups to be placed on the State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
The ELN suffered severe setbacks amid a major U.S.-backed military offensive two decades ago, but survived and outlasted other Colombian groups that laid down arms in peace deals.
Analysts say a significant reason for its survival was its ability to seek refuge and expand its territorial control into Venezuela.
U.S. officials have accused the Maduro regime, including Diosdado Cabello, the powerful interior minister, of allowing the group to seize control of large areas along the border. Residents say the state largely overlooked the effects of its illegal activities, including gold mining, on the environment and everyday people.
Venezuelan officials were said to have profited from these activities. The United Nations has long cited reports of the Venezuelan military and ELN fighters working together to smuggle gold.
The United States, in its criminal indictment against Mr. Maduro, also claimed that the former Venezuelan leader and Mr. Cabello partnered with the ELN to send cocaine to the United States.
The ELN also operated as an extension of the Venezuelan military, confronting other criminal groups and enforcing state interests, according to International Crisis Group, an independent organization that has done fieldwork on the border.
As Venezuela became more isolated — and economically desperate — the ELN also filled the vacuum left by the state, providing Venezuelans with work, services and even basic goods.
The Venezuelan military official who said Venezuelan armed forces had carried out Friday’s attack, noted that only after Mr. Maduro had been removed were military units encouraged to attack the ELN.
Anatoly Kurmanaev, Simón Posada and Federico Rios contributed reporting.
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