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CARACAS, Venezuela — The Colombian authorities and the South American nation’s largest remaining guerrilla group resumed peace talks Monday, breaking a roughly four-year hiatus throughout which the rebels have expanded the territory the place they function.
Neighboring Venezuela, whose authorities resumed diplomatic relations with Colombia only some months in the past, hosted the representatives of the Nationwide Liberation Military and the federal government of President Gustavo Petro. The discussions in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, got here greater than a month after the rebels and Petro’s authorities introduced the resumption of negotiations.
The delegates in a joint declaration said that they had gathered to restart political dialogue “with full political and moral will, as demanded by the folks of rural and concrete territories that undergo from violence and exclusion, and different sectors of society.” They added that they’re keen to “construct peace primarily based on a democracy with justice.”
The Nationwide Liberation Military, generally referred to by its Spanish acronym ELN, was based within the Sixties by college students, union leaders and monks impressed by Cuba’s revolution. The group is believed to have about 4,000 fighters in Colombia, and can be current in Venezuela, the place it runs unlawful gold mines and drug trafficking routes.
The group turned Colombia’s largest remaining guerrilla group after a 2016 peace settlement disbanded the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, often called FARC. Because the historic deal was signed, the ELN has elevated its actions in territories previously underneath FARC management.
The group is understood for staging kidnappings for ransom and assaults on oil infrastructure and has been listed as a terrorist group by the US and the European Union.
Diplomats from Venezuela, Cuba and Norway will help within the negotiations, whereas representatives from Chile and Spain will observe it. Earlier negotiations, some going again to the Nineteen Nineties, have failed.
Petro — Colombia’s first leftist president and a former insurgent himself — is resuming the negotiations as half of a bigger peace effort through which his administration is approaching armed teams, drug gangs and FARC dissidents. It is a important reversal of technique; his predecessor, President Iván Duque, suspended talks with the ELN after the rebels refused to cease attacking navy targets.
Israel Ramírez Pineda, an ELN chief, in an announcement stated the group on this negotiating effort goals to provide “elementary modifications” as demanded by the Colombian folks throughout huge demonstrations in 2021 and in polls this yr by electing Petro, forsaking the custom of conservative and average governments.
“Colombians can’t see one another as enemies, the work we now have is reconciliation,” Ramírez Pineda stated. “We hope that the federal government’s delegation can have an interlocutor in the identical sense.”
He added that the rebels hope the US takes a “proactive and supportive angle” to the dialogues. The U.S. for many years has supported Colombia’s armed forces.
The delegation representing Colombia’s authorities is headed by Otty Patiño, co-founder of the extinct M-19 guerrilla group of which Petro was a member in his youth.
Colombia’s excessive commissioner for peace, Danilo Rueda, stated the steps taken Monday honor the lives of those that have been murdered, disappeared, tortured or kidnapped as a result of violence throughout the nation.
“This peace delegation… has carried out an train to acknowledge variations,” Rueda stated. Though it’s but to be decided whether or not rebels will finally be granted amnesty, Rueda stated that “nothing is predicated on impunity.”
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