In a surprising fact, the Government negotiators sitting at the peace talks table with the ELN have addressed Gustavo Petro through a public statement. It is signed by the two main figures in that negotiation: the head of the delegation, Vera Grabe, and Senator Iván Cepeda. Both are close to the president and are expected to have direct contact with him. However, now the head of state and they have radically different visions on how to approach this peace process and this Saturday it was made explicit in case anyone had any doubts. While Grabe and Cepeda sit down to talk with the guerrilla's chief negotiator, Pablo Beltrán, the president has sent Otty Patiño, the high commissioner for Peace, to reach agreements in parallel with a rebel ELN front that has left to receive orders from your management.
In some ways, the last active guerrilla in Latin America runs the risk of splitting in two. The front declared in rebellion is called the Southern Comuneros Front and operates in Nariño, on the border with Ecuador. Right now, that faction is the one with the greatest firepower and in recent months, according to Beltrán, it has not stopped recruiting combatants. By negotiating with them separately, Petro encourages this schism. This is his way of urging the ELN to reach an agreement that, in his opinion, is taking forever. The guerrilla created by some Colombian students who were caught in Havana by the Cuban missile crisis has spoken with five previous presidents, without success. Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla who blindly believes in the abandonment of weapons and the democratic path as a political expression of the left, seems like the ideal ruler with whom to reach an agreement, but the ELN has its own internal knots. , very complex demands and a sense of time similar to that of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez: life is an eternal discussion – generally in one direction.
Thus, this confrontational way of approaching a negotiation is the one used by an impatient Petro, fearful that his mandate will end in just over two years and he will not have reached an agreement that Juan Manuel Santos did reach, the president who demobilized the FARC, an armed group much more powerful than the ELN. Of course, Petro does not want to be less than Santos. But perhaps the difficulty lies in the fact that the FARC wanted to take power by force of arms and the ELN only seeks to reform a “regime”, the current one, which it does not consider democratic, but rather an imitation of a system that the elites manage at will. The second process is more complex and, therefore, more involved. Dividing that ELN, dismantling it, they think in Casa de Nariño, is a simpler way to approach this macro-agreement.
Petro's tactics have led Pablo Beltrán to despair, who in an explosive interview with this newspaper hit him where it hurts most: he said that it was easier to talk with Santos, Álvaro Uribe and Iván Duque rather than with him. Big words. Beltrán believes that the peace process is in mortal danger and that if the president does not change his attitude soon they will have no choice but to get up from the table. His words started a fire on the table. Petro does not seem to have taken Beltrán's ordeal seriously, and he has not changed course. However, the main negotiators, Grabe and Cepeda, take it seriously and have urged the president this Saturday to take a definitive course. “It is clear that the Government cannot carry out a negotiation process in two instances with the same organization; in this case a national dialogue table like the one that exists today with the ELN, and another in a process with a guerrilla front. “Such a circumstance is legally and politically unfeasible,” says the statement signed by Grabe and Cepeda.
Cepeda says by phone that only the two of them signed the letter, but that the rest of the negotiators at the table – such as Senator María José Pizarro and livestock leader José Félix Lafaurie – also agree. The text appeals directly to Petro: “Requests the president as head of state to make the decision he considers regarding continuing to develop the work of the national dialogue table with the ELN, or to advance a dialogue table with the Nariño structure, or determine that said structure has ceased to be part of the organization with which it is negotiating at the national level to develop an autonomous process with it.”
The rebel front has expressed itself and challenged the official leadership of the ELN through an interview with Gabriel Yepes Mejía, known as H H either Samuelwhat have you done Santiago Rodríguez Álvarez for The Empty Chair. “We are autonomous in proposing peace in the territory,” says HH. When asked if he feels that his life is in danger at the hands of the ELN Central Command (COCE), he responds: “I think it would be a mistake. Part of my family became linked to this insurgent process. Here I had two sons in the guerrilla, one remains today (…). I would never in my life go against any member of this organization, because I am part of this Eleno dream. So, if at some point the COCE were to commit any aggression against me, against my family, against the front, I think they could be wrong, they would be murdering a revolutionary.”
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The Government negotiators are loyal to Gustavo Petro, without a doubt. Even Lafaurie, a man of the right, president of the cattlemen's union, has supported the president in many of his policies. But a statement like this still sounds like a criticism of the president, at a time when Petro is in friction on many fronts. This seems to be one more. That is not the reading that Cepeda makes of the situation, who appears much more cautious. “It is as simple as there cannot be two processes. There is one of territorial peace, that is great, but there cannot be two identical ones with the same group, it is time to make a decision,” says Cepeda on the other end of the line.
24 hours earlier, statements by Cepeda circulated on social networks that many have interpreted as criticism of the president. The senator, a Petro bishop, an expert in the political and institutional structures of the State who shows the most serious and executive face of the Historical Pact, the coalition of left-wing parties that united around Petro's candidacy, grabbed a microphone and He spoke about the way in which Petro is managing the country's governance. AND, spoiler, was not at all condescending: “If there is any valid criticism of the current Government (…) it is that it has not been persevering enough in achieving that (national) agreement, despite the fact that the president has stated that that is why It is this Government. Why did we make a historic pact if that's not what it was for? So it is not possible to do two things at the same time: be absolutely radical in Congress, in the streets, and in the national debate, and seek political agreement. As well as the idea of a Constituent Assembly, I do not agree that we are here for that today, but we are here to agree on the basics.”
Over the hours, Cepeda has reaffirmed his loyalty to the president. He is convinced that if Petro wants to go down in history he must do so as the architect of a great historical pact. And that also happens by not dismantling the ELN and getting its leadership to sign the peace agreement.
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