Government and ELN negotiators have been locked up for weeks negotiating a peace agreement to put an end to the last active guerrilla in Latin America. In Caracas, Mexico City or Havana. They discuss every word as if the future of humanity depended on it. Petro’s representatives sometimes go for a walk to get to know the city, but the guerrillas, for security reasons, do not go abroad and spend hours cloistered looking for the magic formula that will lead them to surrender their weapons and at the same time preserve their dignity. The fact is that while they reach that agreement they live in a bubble that sometimes cracks due to the news that comes from abroad.
The ELN has claimed responsibility this Friday for an attack two days ago, when an explosive charge blew up a police patrol that was circulating on the outskirts of Tibú, a city with a strong guerrilla presence near the border with Venezuela. The Government had been seeking for 48 hours to identify those responsible and had offered a reward of $45,000 for the material authors. No further inquiry is required. In a forceful communiqué, the guerrillas take responsibility for the attack in which, according to them, four policemen were killed. In reality there are two, according to the official version, which has released the name and portrait of the two agents.
A citizen, Lucy Katherine Castillo, also died in the explosion, and a second woman was injured. The ELN stands in solidarity with the friends and relatives of both. “This action had no purpose to produce these conditions,” reads the statement made public by the ELN’s Northeastern War Front (FGNO). According to his version, the police in this border area have been presenting themselves as paramilitaries and have generated “anxiety” among the inhabitants. “The national government,” the letter continues, “is obliged to explain to the people of the border the type of operations that its security agencies have been carrying out in the territory that violate human rights and remind the population of terror and death caused by the army and the police during the governments of Andrés Pastrana and Álvaro Uribe Vélez”.
The attack occurs while in Havana the negotiators fail to agree to a ceasefire. Petro came to the presidency with the intention of reaching an agreement with all the armed groups and drastically reducing homicides in the interior areas of Colombia. The principal wanted to sign it with the ELN, but six months after sitting down with them at the table it has not been possible. The guerrillas resist, justifying themselves by waging several wars at the same time with the Army, the FARC dissidents and the Clan del Golfo. Acquiring a passive position, they explain, would be deadly for them. However, these attacks call into question Petro’s total peace, a process with which he seeks to pacify the country by negotiating with all criminal groups. The violence continues.
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