This is how ‘Uriel’ fell: a university student gave him in exchange for $ 500 million and a young woman who visited him was his ‘Achilles heel’

After being killed on October 25, details of the operation against Andrés Felipe Vanegas, alias ‘Uriel’, third in command of the ELN’s Western War Front, continue to be known. Two young men were key in the capture of the leader after a 12-month intelligence operation by the Public Force in Chocó.

According to the investigative unit of the newspaper El Tiempo, there was a list of events that revealed the exact whereabouts of ‘Uriel’. To begin with, the excesses in Bogotá last September after the death of lawyer Javier Ordoñez, as a result of the abuse of force at the hands of the National Police. Those days were key.

After the indiscriminate burning of Immediate Attention Centers (CAI) by the citizens, ‘Uriel’ attributed to himself, and to his men, actions corresponding to the demonstrations, “Our urban militia participated as one more (…) We must end those centers of torture and death,” explained the dejected member of the ELN.

A young student at a prestigious university, according to El Tiempo, He was responsible for the purchase of the items used by the infiltrators in the September demonstrations. Among those objects, overalls and hoods, and that same young man had been recorded by the authorities in charge of the operation leaving the jungle area of ​​Nóvita (Chocó), the place of the events.

The young man was followed by intelligence officers who saw him take a speedboat to go to Buenaventura, “This time, I was going to take ‘Uriel’ part of the day of riots, in which they destroyed an electronic teller machine and installed potato bombs on Barranquilla avenue, in Medellín”one of the officers told the outlet.

The young man was joined by a woman who, because of a distinctive and pronounced tattoo on her back, it was easy to recognize as one of Uriel’s allies. The woman of average height, brown hair, light eyes and a slim build, frequently visited the guerrilla’s camp, apparently she was one of his partners.

Thanks to his constant movements in the area, an infiltrator of the authorities, who was for several months within the Western War Front, He managed to find the camps where the young student attended, in which there were more young university students from Pereira, Medellín and Bogotá, who arrived there to receive ‘militia workshops’, a hotbed to belong to urban cells.

This responds to one of the crimes that President Iván Duque accused him of when he announced to the country that ‘Uriel’ had been discharged: recruitment of minors. The leader was in charge of the general direction of the ELN to recruit young people through social networks to, in the end, joining them to the ranks of the terrorist structure or, as they called it within the organization, “virtual revolutionary work and study groups”.

“Its mission was outlined in the scheme of ‘popular uprisings’, which seeks to transfer the confrontation to 10 cities: Bogotá, Cali, Medellín, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Cúcuta, Bucaramanga, Barrancabermeja, Popayán and Neiva”, argued an intelligence officer who agrees with the version of the authorities that says that what ‘Uriel’ did with the young people was “Wash the face of drug trafficking to ELN commanders, with their speeches politicians “.

The young student, who had bought the overalls and hoods for the September riots for the first time, was intercepted by the Police to offer him a reward of 500 million pesos that would give them the exact location of Vanegas, “We knew that their weakness was the entry of students and logistical contacts to the camps. For this reason, the student was the key element to reach him, protecting the minors, ”said an officer of the operation.

And it is that according to the investigators of the case, Uriel received children from the age of 12 to take them to their camps and begin an indoctrination of the illegal organization. To these are added the children that he used as human shields before the authorities, who, for the most part, were indigenous and children of other guerrillas.

In turn, the intelligence men in charge of Uriel’s discharge had clues to his hiding place with the help of his own actions, Among which were shipments and receipts of provisions by students from various areas of the country, the use of communication antennas, radios and computers and their frequent activity on social networks.