The delegation will meet with members of the National Liberation Army (ELN) to discuss the possibility of restarting peace negotiations.
A delegation from Colombia’s new government has traveled to Cuba to assess whether the ELN is really willing to resume peace negotiations, President Gustavo Petros said on Thursday, having already made clear his intention to move. towards this direction.
Peace commissioner Danilo Rueda headed the delegation that will meet with ELN members stationed in Havana starting in 2018.
Mr Petro told the press that he had authorized Mr Rueda to make “contacts” with these rebel leaders to restart peace talks, which had been suspended by his predecessor Ivan Duque (2018-2022).
“We will make an assessment, there are many rumors, announcements, statements in favor of the truce, of the possibilities to restore peace, but now we are going to see if they are true,” explained Colombia’s first left-wing president.
Foreign Minister Alvaro Leyva uploaded a photo on Twitter of himself posing with Mr. Rueda, leftist ruling coalition senator Ivan Cepeda and seven other people “a few minutes before departure” for Cuba.
After the historic peace agreement with the former rebel organization Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016, talks with the ELN had begun the following year, chaired by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018), initially in Quito , then to Havana.
But they were suspended by his successor, the right-wing Ivan Duque, after a bomb attack on a police academy in Bogotá that killed 22 police officers and cadets, in addition to the attacker, in January 2019.
Colombia’s new president has yet to decide whether the new talks will also be held in Cuba. Chilean President Gabriel Boric assured on Monday that his country will be a guarantor of the negotiation process. Other guarantor countries are Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil and Norway.
Despite a 2016 peace deal that led to the disarmament of most of the former FARC fighters, Colombia is experiencing a resurgence of violence, particularly between its defectors and other armed groups, who clash over control of drug trafficking and illegal mining. .
According to authorities, the ELN, an organization founded by radicalized priests inspired by the revolution in Cuba, has about 2,500 members today, up from about 1,800 when peace negotiations were underway. It is a highly decentralized organization and is present mainly in sectors that are wet by the Pacific and on the border with Venezuela.
The civil war in Colombia has been going on for about six decades.
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