The commander of the National Liberation Army (ELN), Eliécer Herlinto Chamorro, alias Antonio García, said this Thursday that the peace process with the Colombian government can continue despite the fact that there is no ceasefire since the Executive suspended it after the attack by that guerrilla group on a military base in Arauca that left two dead and 27 wounded.
“Even in the midst of military operations, peace processes can continue; different governments have done this at various times, and now cannot be the exception,” the guerrilla leader said on social media.
The Colombian government confirmed on Wednesday that peace talks with the ELN “are suspended” following the bomb attack carried out on Tuesday by the guerrilla group against an Army military base in Puerto Jordán, in the department of Arauca, in the east of the country, which left two soldiers dead and 27 wounded.
The government delegation at the dialogue table thus clarified what President Gustavo Petro said on Tuesday night, who declared that the attack “closes a peace process with blood.”
Alias Antonio García also said today: “The ELN has been the target of military operations against it by the Police and the Armed Forces, but we have never said that the peace process is broken” and he assured that “the one who breaks (the dialogue) is President Gustavo Petro with his statements.”
He also attacked Petro again, saying that the peace process “is frozen due to the government’s failure to comply with agreements.”
He also recalled that the one-year ceasefire, which expired on August 3, “could not be extended and in the context of seeking solutions, the Minister of Defense and the Commander of the Armed Forces ordered the resumption of offensive operations against the ELN.”
In November 2022, the government and the ELN restarted peace negotiations with the last major Latin American guerrilla group in Caracas, which, however, stalled at the beginning of this year.
The reason was the ELN’s demands that the Executive remove them from the list of terrorist groups and abandon the regional dialogue that it maintains in the department of Nariño (southwest) with Comuneros del Sur, a group supposedly split from the ELN.
||EFE
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2024-09-20 08:14:51
