The Colombian government and the National Liberation Army (ELN), the country’s last recognized rebel group, resumed formal peace talks in Venezuela on Monday for the first time since they were suspended in 2019.
The talks are a push by President Gustavo Petro, who in August became Colombia’s first-ever left-wing leader and has promised a less belligerent approach to ending violence by armed groups, including left-wing guerrillas and drug traffickers.
At their first meeting, the parties agreed to “resume the dialogue process with full political and ethical will,” according to a joint statement.
They added that the talks are aimed at “making peace” and making “tangible, urgent and necessary” changes, and stressed the need for “lasting compromises”.
The first round of talks lasts 20 days.
For more than half a century, Colombia has suffered armed conflicts between the state and various groups of left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and drug traffickers.
The ELN began as a left-wing ideological movement in 1964 before turning to crime, focusing on kidnapping, extortion, assault and drug trafficking in Colombia and neighboring Venezuela.
It has around 2,500 members, around 700 more than when negotiations were last broken off. The group is primarily active in the Pacific region and along the 2,200-kilometer border with Venezuela.
Dialogue with the group began in 2016 under ex-President Juan Manuel Santos, who signed a peace deal with the larger rebel group, the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which subsequently gave up arms and formed a political party.
But talks with the ELN were broken off by conservative ex-president Ivan Duque in 2019 after a car bomb attack on a police academy in Bogotá killed 22 people.
Petro – himself a former guerrilla fighter – approached the ELN shortly after taking power as part of his “total peace” policy.
The ELN delegation for peace talks spent four years in Cuba after being prevented from returning to Colombia by the previous government.
They traveled to Venezuela last month, where the new round of talks was announced.
Colombian Defense Minister Ivan Velasquez warned that the negotiations do not mean a “suspension of operations” against the ELN.
“If there is an encounter with someone who has a warrant, they must be arrested… There is no truce,” he said.
– “We must all change” –
Colombian Peace Commissioner Ivan Danilo Rueda hailed a “historic moment” for the country after the meeting.
“We are here to honor life, the life of so many beings who are no longer here,” said Rueda. “Murdered, gone.”
ELN delegate Pablo Beltran said he hopes the dialogue is “an instrument of change… and we hope we don’t fail”.
“In Colombia, we all need to change” and “break the dynamic of death,” he said.
Caracas is hosting the first meeting, and talks will alternate between the other guarantors, Cuba and Norway.
A statement from the Guarantee Nations said Monday’s meeting was “an important step in achieving peace.”
The special envoy of UN chief Antonio Guterres in Colombia, Carlos Ruiz Massieu, called on “the parties and Colombian society to seize this historic opportunity”.
“I reiterate the Secretary-General @antonioguterres’ support for this process,” he wrote on Twitter.
Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro praised the process at a rally in the capital as a “message of hope for a peaceful Latin America and the Caribbean”.
