ELN guerrilla spokesmen expressed “positive expectations” after resuming its peace negotiations with the national government, in interviews broadcast on Tuesday by Venezuelan state television, where talks resumed on Monday after being frozen for almost four years.
“We have positive expectations,” he said. Aureliano Carbonell, one of the representatives of the ELN, in an interview in Caracas with the state television station VTV.
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Delegates of the government of Gustavo Petro and the ELN signed a declaration in this city on Monday in which they agreed to “resume with full political and ethical will the dialogue process”, meet the demands of “rural and urban territories that suffer from violence and exclusion” and “build peace” with “tangible, urgent and necessary changes” to be agreed at the table.
That statement, Carbonell argued, “set a course, send a positive message that we are going to do our best for advancing in the changes of Colombia and, therefore, in peace”.
Venezuela, the guarantor country of the process together with Cuba and Norwayis the headquarters of these first contacts, which will last for three weeks.
Petro, the first president of the left in Colombia reactivated contacts with the ELN upon assuming power on August 7.
It should be remembered that the negotiations with the rebel group were suspended in January 2019 by the then president, Iván Duque, after an attack on a police school that left 22 dead, in addition to the attacker. They had been initiated by the government of Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018), which signed a peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas in 2016, demobilized and converted into a political party.
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“We are going to be (in Caracas) until mid-December. We are going to review what was coming, in terms of the agenda, of progress, with the Santos government,” he told VTV. Pablo Beltrán, head of the ELN delegation.
After the talks were interrupted, the insurgent negotiators remained in Cuba for four years.
“The ELN delegation is confined to Cuba because the protocols by the Colombian government that had been agreed for a safe return are not being complied with (…). Recently those protocols were put into practice again and that is what allows us to be here,” Carbonell said.
