Colombia’s government and ELN guerrillas will resume peace talks starting Monday in Caracas, Venezuela, after a nearly four-year hiatus, the parties said in a statement on Friday.
The resumption of this dialogue “will be Monday, November 21 in the afternoon in the city of Caracas”, according to a joint press release by the Commissioner for Peace Danilo Rueda and the member of the ELN peace delegation Pablo Beltran, posted on Twitter.
Negotiations with the ELN were interrupted by conservative President Ivan Duque (2018-2022), after the rebels attacked a police school with a car bomb in January 2019. The attack left 22 people dead, in addition to the assailant.
Half a century of conflict
For now, the government and the insurgents have not released the full list of negotiators, although Petro has already appointed the chief cattle rancher and opponent of his government, José Félix Lafaurie, as part of his delegation.
“We are aware of the deep desire of the Colombian people (…) to move forward in a process of peace and the full construction of democracy,” Beltran and Rueda added in their press release. Colombia has suffered more than half a century of armed conflict between the state and various groups of left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and drug traffickers.
End the violence
President Gustavo Petro, who in August became Colombia’s first-ever left-wing leader, has pledged to take a less belligerent approach to ending violence perpetrated by armed groups. The new talks were announced in October and were to be hosted by Venezuela, Cuba and Norway in turn.
Founded in 1964 by trade unionists and students who sympathized with Ernesto “Che” Guevara and the Cuban revolution, the ELN remains to this day the only constituted guerrilla group still active in Colombia.
On Wednesday, the guerrillas freed two soldiers they had kidnapped near Venezuela earlier this month as part of a “humanitarian gesture”. The parties did not agree to a ceasefire, but agreed in October to “resume all agreements and progress made since the signing of the agenda” on March 30, 2016.
“Tackling the causes”
According to the authorities, the ELN currently has some 2,500 members and is mainly present in the Pacific region and on the border with Venezuela, which is 2,200 kilometers long.
Antonio Garcia, the commander-in-chief of the ELN, stressed in October that the way to achieve peace is “to address the causes of armed conflict, which are inequality, lack of democracy, inequity “. President Petro has affirmed his desire to negotiate with the ELN but also with the dissidents of the ex-FARC (Marxists) who reject the 2016 peace agreement. He also wishes to discuss with the drug trafficking gangs their surrender to justice .