Interrupted since 2019, talks between the Colombian government and the ELN, the last guerrilla still active in the country, resumed Monday, November 21 in Caracas with the promise to "build peace".

The delegates of leftist President Gustavo Petro and the National Liberation Army (ELN) agreed in a joint statement to "resume with full political and ethical will the process of dialogue", initiated in 2017 in Cuba.

It had been interrupted by conservative President Ivan Duque (2018-2022) after a car bomb attack in June 2019 against a police school killing 22 people.

This desire to "build peace" is demanded by "the inhabitants of rural and urban territories suffering from violence and exclusion", insists the text read during a ceremony in the capital of Venezuela, which with Cuba and the Norway are organizing these talks.

He stresses the "need" for "permanent and verifiable commitments that sow the seeds of a new culture of peace".

"Not important"

"We view with hope the process that is taking shape today. Without a doubt, this is an important step towards achieving peace in Colombia," the guarantor nations (Venezuela, Norway and Cuba) said in a statement. statement, also read in public, by the Norwegian representative.

Colombian Peace Commissioner Danilo Rueda said Colombia was "at an almost unique historical moment", "we are going to achieve our goal", "overcome the dynamics of death", he said.

The member of the ELN peace delegation, Pablo Beltran, felt that the time for change" had come and that today "in Colombia we must all change", "Colombians must not see themselves as enemies".

The ELN, the last active guerrilla

The resumption of this dialogue, which should last about twenty days in its part in Caracas, was officially announced on October 4, already in the Venezuelan capital.

The government of President Nicolas Maduro, with whom diplomatic relations severed under Ivan Duque have been restored since the enthronement of Petro, the first left-wing president in Colombia's history, has expressed "its firmest commitment to the process of total peace in Colombia".

Founded in 1964 by trade unionists and students who sympathized with Ernesto "Che" Guevara and the Cuban revolution, the ELN remains to this day the last constituted guerrilla group still active in Colombia, while the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia ( FARC) signed a peace accord in 2016.

The parties did not agree to a ceasefire, but agreed in October to "resume all agreements and progress made since the signing of the agenda" on March 30, 2016.

Plan for "total peace"

Invested in August, Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla himself, is working on a "total peace" plan which aims to end all violence in his country after more than 50 years of internal war.

He affirmed his desire to negotiate with the ELN but also with the dissidents of the ex-Farc (Marxists) who reject the 2016 peace agreement, as well as to discuss with the drug trafficking gangs their surrender to justice.

The government's peace commissioner, Danilo Rueda, has already met with these FARC dissidents to explore the possibility of negotiations.

With AFP

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