ELN and Colombia advance on ceasefire rules

MEXICO CITY (AP) – The Colombian government and the National Liberation Army agreed Friday on a roadmap to continue peace negotiations in which the company will have a “binding” participation and which will aim for a ceasefire. progressive, national and subject to evaluation.

At the close of the second round of talks in Mexico City after nearly a month of work, President Gustavo Petro’s government and the country’s last active guerrillas agreed on the rules for a possible ceasefire, not as a condition or a final element, but rather as a process that will develop throughout the talks which will resume in Cuba in mid-April.

The shutdown will be bilateral, national, temporary but intended for continuity and will be the subject of a joint assessment. It also provides for humanitarian actions to reduce the intensity of the conflict, respond to basic social emergencies and generate guarantees in the areas most in crisis, as well as a monitoring mechanism.

However, the agreement specifies that the defensive actions would be maintained once the pact begins to be implemented.

Dialogue with the ELN in an attempt to end six decades of violence resumed in November last year with the new impetus given by the coming to power of Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first left-wing president and who in his youth was a guerrilla member of the extinct M-19.

According to the head of the government delegation, José Otty Patiño, the most sensitive issue was the ceasefire, which is also the most urgent for society, which demands an end to hostilities and killings against the poorest of Colombia.

For this reason, he bets that “the lower the sound of arms, the louder the voices must rise” of those who want to build peace.

The current process, which began in 2017 with the government of Juan Manuel Santos, was suspended for more than three years after the ELN attacked a police school with explosives in 2019, killing 22 people. The United States and the European Union still have the ELN on the list of terrorist organizations.

“We suggested that hopefully they stop carrying out actions with explosives in populated territories,” Patiño said after the official act in a brief meeting with the media.

The Colombian government also hopes that the illicit businesses from which the various armed actors in Colombia usually profit will decrease.

In this sense, the head of the guerrilla delegation, Commander Pablo Beltrán, chose to eradicate “the empire of illegality supported by force”.

The ELN, founded in 1964 under the inspiration of the Cuban revolution, is also willing to submit to the examination of an international commission to determine whether or not it is involved in drug trafficking, according to one of its members, Aureliano Carbonell, in an interview with PA this week.

How the population will participate in the process will be something that will be tried to be clarified in the next round of talks, although Beltrán has called for the help of all sectors to diagnose the situation in the country and the fundamental changes that he needs.

Among the issues that will be addressed in this new roadmap are solutions to poverty, corruption, environmental damage and inequality in land tenure, including care for victims, the eradication of all forms of paramilitarism and guarantees of non-repetition of violence until the end. of the conflict, which includes the ELN’s transition to legality.

In the last point, they will seek to resolve the legal situation of the ELN, both of those who remain in arms and of those who are in prison, as well as to provide guarantees of security and exercise of participation policy – without specifying whether they want a political party or seats -, and a bilateral and definitive ceasefire.

Patiño told the press that the ELN sees the laying down of arms as an “uncertain and not very near future” given that it has based its protection on them for decades. Patiño specified that any peace process must lead to the laying down of arms and that of the ELN would not be an exception.

As a sign of willingness for dialogue, the Petro government lifted the arrest warrants that weighed on the guerrilla negotiators, while the ELN released more than 20 hostages, the last on Wednesday two days before ending the cycle of conversations in Mexico.

The optimism was also reflected in the attendance at the ceremony of Colombian Vice-President Francia Márquez, who has been a prominent human rights advocate, who supported the progress of the talks and called on the parties to do not get up from the dialogue table for the victims of violence.

Unlike the peace process signed in 2016 between the Colombian state and the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the ELN proposes that what the round table agrees on be put into practice immediately, instead of wait for a document that puts an end to the conflict.

Colombia’s six decades of internal conflict have left nearly half a million people murdered, more than 120,000 missing and 7.7 million displaced, according to the Truth Commission report released last year.

Petro offered with his “total peace” policy to reduce the violence that persists in the country through dialogues with multiple armed groups, including the ELN, and drug traffickers, whom he would bring to justice.