Petro suspends dialogue with the ELN: ‘what it has committed are war crimes’

He President Gustavo Petro announced this Friday the suspension of the dialogue process with the ELNconsidering that the guerrilla group has no desire for peace.

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“What the ELN has committed in Catatumbo are war crimes. The dialogue process with this group is suspended, the ELN has no desire for peace”said the head of state, through his X account before traveling to that region, the scene of an armed confrontation between the ELN and a FARC dissident that has left more than thirty dead, according to the Ombudsman’s Office. .

The head of the Government delegation in the dialogues, Vera Grabe, reaffirmed the president’s decision in a press conference, ensuring that the negotiation is suspended “until the ELN definitively decides to walk towards peace” because “This country can’t stand these ups and downs anymore”.

The two parties had planned to meet next week to reactivate the dialogue table, which the Petro’s government resumed in November 2022 and has been frozen for months due to disagreements between the parties.

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“The peace process has had different moments, a peace in which we reached important agreements with the ELN, including the first point on the agenda and advancing a ceasefire, but starting in May we entered into a suspension that decreed the ELN in the first place and that, despite the efforts made by the Government, time and again we came across decisions and actions of the ELN that prevented progress.”lamented senator and peace negotiator Iván Cepeda.

Dialogues that do not go back

This new suspension comes after in recent weeks it seemed that the dialogues could be reactivated again in a meeting that was going to take place after the November ones in Caracas when Grabe and the ELN’s chief negotiator, ‘Pablo Beltrán’, met, something they had not done since May 26 and a stormy year.

At the beginning of last year, the Government began in the department of Nariño, bordering Ecuador, approaches with the Comuneros del Sur, an alleged split from the ELN – of which this guerrilla says that they are really infiltrators of the Government to weaken them – and whose head is Gabriel Yepes Mejía, known as ‘HH’ or ‘Samuel’.

This has worried the ELN, which demanded that Grabe and his men comment on whether they were negotiating at the state or local level.

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In fact, this same week the advisor commissioned for peace, Otty Patiño, sent a letter to Beltrán showing that they were not going to stop negotiating with the Communeros and warning the guerrillas that the Government’s patience was not infinite. Likewise, a veiled reference was also made to the fact that the ELN has continued to perpetrate attacks throughout this time: from the kidnapping of the father of soccer player Luis Díaz in October 2023, to the attack in September 2024 on a military base in the department of Arauca that left three soldiers dead and almost thirty injured.

Petro then said that this latest attack was “practically an action that closes a peace process with blood,” although the Government delegation later clarified and stated that it meant that they were going to freeze the table, since they were always going to be willing to negotiate.

Now comes this one “military operation that the ELN is carrying out, with units that it has moved from the department of Arauca to Catatumbo, with the purpose of having the combatants attack the population”in the words of Cepeda.

“The main victims are civilians, social leaders, people who have laid down their weapons and are in the process of reincorporation after the 2016 peace agreement. These are war crimes”assured Cepeda, making known the distance that seems hardly irreconcilable between the Government and the ELN.

EFE