Colombia agrees ceasefire with ELN guerrillas and other armed groups

The Colombian government has reached a six-month ceasefire with the five main armed groups in the country, President Gustavo Petro announced on Saturday night (31), early on Sunday in Brazil.

“We have an agreement with the ELN [Exército de Libertação Nacional]the Second Marquetalia, the Central General Staff, the AGC [Autodefesas Unidas da Colômbia, na sigla em espanhol]and the Sierra Nevada Self-Defense Forces from January 1st to June 30th, extendable according to progress in the negotiations,” the Colombian leader said in a post on Twitter on New Year’s Eve.

Petro, the country’s first leftist president and a former guerrilla, has vowed to end the civil conflict in the Andean nation, which has lasted nearly six decades and left at least 450,000 dead between 1985 and 2018.

Thus, the bilateral truce was the main objective outlined by the government as part of its “total peace” policy, through which it intends to end the armed conflict that persists even with the dissolution, in 2017, of the powerful FARC guerrilla (Forças Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

“This is a bold act,” wrote the president, also on the social network. “The ceasefire obliges armed groups and the state to respect it. There will be a national and international verification mechanism.”

The ELN, the last recognized insurgency in the country, has been negotiating with the government since November. In early December, the guerrillas declared a nine-day unilateral ceasefire over the Christmas period and completed a first cycle of peace talks between the two parties in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas.

The groups Segunda Marquetalia and Estado Maior Central —which distanced themselves from the peace pact signed by the FARC— held separate “exploratory dialogues” with representatives of Petro.

The AGC, in turn, led in the past by capo Otoniel, extradited to the United States, is the largest group of drug traffickers in Colombia. Like the Autodefensas de Sierra Nevada, they are made up of remnants of the far-right paramilitaries that demobilized in the early 2000s.

All these groups add up to more than 10,000 armed men involved in disputes over control of drug trafficking and other illicit businesses in the world’s largest producer of cocaine, according to the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (Indepaz), a center for independent research.

The government offers “benevolent treatment from a judicial point of view in exchange for the delivery of goods, the dismantling of organizations and the possibility that they stop carrying out these illicit activities,” Senator Iván Cepeda, Petro’s ally, recently told the AFP news.

Despite advances in dialogues with the different armed groups, the government has so far failed to contain the spiral of violence engulfing the country. Indepaz recorded nearly 100 massacres in 2022.