Petro has called for consultations with those responsible for the negotiation, although it assures that the measure “does not imply a freezing” of the talks
He peace dialogue carried out by the Colombian Government and the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) got compromised this wednesday after that guerrilla attack in the Catatumbo region that killed nine soldiers and left nine more wounded.
The reaction of the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, before the attack carried out with bursts of rifles and explosives, was to call for consultations with the government delegation that is negotiating with the ELN. “I have summoned the government delegation to the ELN table, guarantor and accompanying countries for consultation. A peace process must be serious and responsible with Colombian society,” the president announced in a message on his Twitter account. This call “does not imply a freezing of the dialogues”, explained the Presidency, nor that the Government is going to “leave the table”, but it does imply a meeting for next Monday “with negotiators and guarantor countries to evaluate decisions regarding the facts recent”.
The Army reported that the attack occurred in Guamalito, a hamlet in the municipality of El Carmen, in the department of Norte de Santander, against soldiers from the Special Energy and Road Battalion No. 10, who were going to carry out patrols to take care of the oil infrastructure, target of infinity of ELN attacks. In the attack, a second corporal, a third corporal and seven soldiers who were doing compulsory military service died, all of them young people between the ages of 18 and 25. Regarding the wounded soldiers, the scientific director of the Duarte de Cúcuta Medical Clinic, Marta Isabel Pérez, said that eight of the patients are in “recovery and one of them with a guarded prognosis.”
Petro had already blamed the attack on “those who today are absolutely far from peace and the people,” without referring to the ELN but implying that the attack could have consequences at the dialogue table. For his part, Defense Minister Iván Velásquez told the press that the attack is an act that “contributes very little to peace.”
no cease fire
The ELN has carried out other attacks against public forces in Catatumbo and in the department of Arauca since it returned to talks with the government in November, but today’s is the most serious of all.
The peace talks are taking place at a traveling table that has already passed through Caracas, Mexico and is expected to settle in Havana after Easter, if there are no changes after what happened.
Despite the government’s insistence, in these talks has not been agreed Ceasefire, one of the points that attracted the most attention in the round of Mexico and of which there is not much more than an “architecture” to achieve “a bilateral cessation of a national nature with the possibility of extension,” according to the High Commissioner for Peace, Danilo Wheel. “The continuation of the violence benefits the interests of the conflict. The ELN is not listening to the people: communities throughout Colombia want peace with social justice and that the brothers stop seeing themselves as enemies,” the Office of the Alto said in a statement. Commissioner.
On the other hand, the head of the Colombian government delegation for the peace talks with the ELN, Otty Patiño, assured today that he will request a ceasefire with the guerrillas in order to advance on other points of the negotiations. “My position in the meeting that we will have on Monday with the president will be to make the demand for a ceasefire and hostilities a priority as a necessary condition to advance the participation of civil society in this process and the development of relief in areas where the ELN can interfere or affect humanitarian actions and dynamics,” Patiño said in a statement.
The government’s chief negotiator regretted that in addition to these attacks, the guerrillas have harassed the civilian population of the convulsed departments of Cauca, Arauca, Chocó and Nariño “with a flagrant violation of the norms of International Humanitarian Law” that it claims to abide by. “This hurts the confidence of the citizens in the ELN’s will for peace and deeply damages the cordiality in the talks and in the implementation of the agreements,” she added.
widespread rejection
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Different political sides condemned the attack, among them the Minister of the Interior, Alfonso Prada, who assured that “there is always the possibility of getting up from a table when there are no conditions for dialogue” or “suspend a ceasefire and order a total offensive when there is no there is a real will for peace”.
Senator Iván Cepeda, one of the government’s negotiators and president of the Peace Commission, assured that “neither with explosive attacks against soldiers nor with the blowing up of oil pipelines perpetrated by the ELN will we advance peace.” The voices of condemnation were joined by the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General in Colombia, Carlos Ruiz Massieu, who stated: “Violence in all its manifestations undermines efforts to consolidate peace.”