Colombia|The reversal is a bad blow to President Gustavo Petro, who has promised to bring “complete peace” to Colombia.
Colombia The government has withdrawn from peace talks with the left-wing ELN guerilla organization because two soldiers were killed and 27 wounded in a guerilla bomb attack on Tuesday.
The news agencies AFP and Reuters report on the matter.
“Now the peace process is at a standstill. Its viability has been badly shaken, and it can only continue with ELN’s unequivocal peace demonstration,” the government’s peace negotiators wrote on the message service X.
President Gustavo Petro comment already on Tuesday, according to the newspaper El País, that “in practice, this act ends the peace process”.
Turn is a bad blow to Petro himself, because he has promised to bring “complete peace” to Colombia (esp. Paz total) and make even the last guerillas lay down their weapons for the final conclusion of the 60-year long civil war.
The most important guerrilla organization of the civil war, also the left-wing Farc, laid down its weapon as president by Juan Manuel Santos negotiated a peace agreement with it in 2016 – and won the Nobel Peace Prize for it.
The ELN is the most prominent of the remaining rebel organizations, although some Farc guerrillas have also rejected the peace agreement and taken up arms again.
Current ones peace talks between the government and the ELN began at the end of 2022, with six rounds of talks in Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela.
The negotiations had been faltering for a long time because the government had started separate discussions with a group that broke away from the ELN, the ELN had started kidnappings again and the truce had also lapsed. The ELN had again carried out attacks against security forces and oil pipelines, and the Colombian armed forces had also continued their operations against the ELN.
Colombia President Petro, 64, is himself a former leftist. At a young age of 17, he belonged to the urban M-19 guerrilla organization, which claimed its armed resistance as a means of restoring democracy after the fraudulent 1970 elections.
Petro spent 16 months in prison for illegal possession of weapons. M-19 laid down its arms in 1990 and quickly lost its importance as a political party.
The terror of left-wing guerillas was a big reason why Petro became the country’s first clearly left-wing president only in 2022.
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