The Colombian government and a delegation from the left-wing guerrilla group National Liberation Army (ELN) will resume peace talks in Caracas on Monday, which have been suspended since 2019, the parties said on Friday.
The resumption of negotiations “will take place in the afternoon of next Monday, November 21, in the city of Caracas,” according to a statement posted on Twitter, signed by Colombia’s High Commissioner for Peace, Danilo Rueda, and ELN Peace Delegation member Pablo Beltran, was signed.
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.
President Gustavo Petro, who became Colombia’s first ever left-wing leader in August, has vowed to take a less bellicose stance in seeking an end to violence perpetrated by armed groups.
The new talks were announced in October, with Venezuela, Cuba and Norway acting as guarantors.
The dialogue 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 laid down their arms and formed a political party.
The ELN is the last recognized rebel group to operate in Colombia, although FARC dissidents who refused to sign the 2016 peace accord remain active.
Talks were cut short by conservative then-President Ivan Duque in 2019 after a car bomb attack on a police academy in Bogota that killed 22 people.
The ELN delegation for peace talks spent four years in Cuba, barred from returning to Colombia.
They left Cuba for Venezuela in October to begin new talks promised by Petro, himself a former urban guerrilla.
The government and ELN have yet to release full lists of negotiators for the talks, which begin Monday in the Venezuelan capital.
Colombia and Venezuela recently resumed ties after a rupture in 2019 caused by Duque’s refusal to recognize President Nicolas Maduro’s re-election the year before in a vote widely condemned as a sham by the international community.
Duque had accused Venezuela’s socialist leader of providing shelter to rebels across the border.
But since Petro came to power, he has resumed diplomatic ties with Caracas and allowed the Maduro government to facilitate peace talks with the ELN.
The ELN, founded in 1964, has around 2,500 members, around 700 more than at the time the negotiations were broken off.
It is mainly active in the Pacific region and along the 2,200-kilometer border with Venezuela.
