“For the Government of Colombia and the ELN, the participation of society in this process is essential in the changes that Colombia needs to build peace,” they specified in the statement read prior to a press conference in the Venezuelan capital, where the ELN delegates arrived over the weekend from Cuba.
Rueda traveled to Havana to meet with ELN representatives just days after Gustavo Petro’s inauguration in August as the South American country’s first leftist president. “Since Caracas, the peace talks are officially resumed between our government and the ELN, together with the guarantor countries of Venezuela, Cuba and Norway,” Petro said on his Twitter account.
Beltrán affirmed that the intention is to resume the process after the first week of November and maintain the system of rotating venues for its meetings between the three guarantor countries: Cuba, Venezuela and Norway, although it has not yet been decided where that first meeting would take place. Previous attempts to negotiate with the ELN, which has some 2,400 combatants and is accused of financing itself through drug trafficking, illegal mining and kidnapping, did not advance due to its radical positions, a diffuse chain of command and dissent among its ranks. .
Petro assured after his inauguration that he was willing to re-establish the negotiation with the ELN from the point at which the administration of former President Juan Manuel Santos left it and said that he recognized the protocols agreed upon with the support of guarantor countries. We think that, on this occasion, the new political circumstances in Colombia have made it possible to restart the negotiations,” said García, the first commander of the ELN.
The ELN began a peace negotiation in Ecuador in the Government of Santos, which later moved to Cuba, but his successor Iván Duque did not continue it because the group did not accept demands such as the suspension of hostilities, to which was added an attack with a car bomb to a police academy that left 22 cadets dead.
Source: Ambito
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