From the top of the mountain that surrounds all of Caracas, Venezuela, and staying in the most luxurious hotel in that city, the 34 members of the negotiating table with the ELN debated for 21 days the key points of the protocol and the agenda with the They want to reach peace. Behind the scenes and kept under the greatest political secrecy, official and unofficial meetings were held that the country knew little regarding. So what happened during those three weeks?
From the beginning, finding out what was happening inside the Humboldt Hotel was a mystery to the press and public opinion. Only three exclusive groups climbed to the top of that mountain: the negotiators and guarantor countries, the hotel workers and the Bolivarian National Guard. Any additional guests had to have the permission of the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry, the Government of Colombia and the ELN.
Thus, the only ones who knew what was happening inside the hotel was a small group of less than 50 people who also had an agreement not to use cameras or audio or video recorders inside the facilities.
So much so, that this newspaper learned that the work meetings were held without personal electronic devices. Before entering the rooms, the negotiators had to leave their cell phones outside. “To call the wives or the family or even to answer WhatsApp, you had to leave. It was regarding respect for the issues that the table was dealing with and with the intention that nothing that might be harmful to the process was leaked”, says one of them.
The three subcommittees
To negotiate, the table determined a methodology that until now also remained under reserve. The negotiations work similar to the Congress of the Republic: there are some subcommittees that are in charge of debating specific issues and generating the documents and, with that done, the agreements are debated at a main table.
The subcommittees are three. “The commission in charge of general issues such as the institutionalization of the Roundtable and the Dialogue Agenda, humanitarian actions and dynamics, and the tasks of Communication and pedagogy for peace,” as one of the roundtable members recounted.
These subgroups function equally, which means that there are equal members and equal power for the negotiators that make it up: “If there are two elected officials, there are two from the Government, and so on. They are subcommittees with between 2 and 7 members on both sides”.
In them, the negotiators were located according to their specialties. Although the names of each commission are still a mystery, it is known that Admiral Orlando Romero Reyes is in the Humanitarian Actions subcommittee, due to his experience with the ceasefire and de-escalation of the conflict; and that men like Senator Iván Cepeda, Otty Patiño and the president of Fedegán, José Félix Lafaurie, occupy the Agenda, the key point where decisions are made.
When these subcommittees have a draft of the issue they are dealing with ready, it is presented to the “plenary” of the table, a point that includes the negotiators and the guarantor and accompanying countries. The meetings were so extensive that a couple of times they stayed up until 11 pm discussing the red lines of both delegations.
Already in the “plenum”, the documents were projected on a giant screen and read line by line. “In black the points already agreed were indicated and in yellow those that still needed to be debated. This is how each document was shredded until both parties were comfortable (…) what I can tell you is that we tried to maintain a cordial atmosphere. There were no large-scale disagreements,” said a negotiator.
But collective decisions were not voted on as in Congress. In the “plenum” everyone had a voice, but no vote. When there were hard points or decisions on specific handling, each delegation had its “heavyweights” in charge of defining.
On the ELN side, the two tough ones are Pablo Beltrán, the guerrilla’s chief negotiator; and Aureliano Carbonell, also a commander. For the Government, the calls for difficult talks are Lafaurie, Cepeda, Patiño and the High Commissioner for Peace, Danilo Rueda. Although if Rueda was not there, the other three had autonomy.
Among the tense points, as was known in the corridors of Humboldt, was the designation of the women who would come to the negotiating table. In that part, it was the ELN that insisted until the end that more female participation was necessary.
On the latter comes the last secret of Caracas: despite the fact that women like María Jimena Duzán and Mabel Lara were appointed as negotiators, they never appeared in this first negotiation cycle. Why? That is a question that not even the main negotiators have answered.
