Colombian Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva announced that Colombia aspires to resume peace negotiations with the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN), suspended in 2019 by the previous government.
“Since the 1980s, without interruption, Cuba has welcomed delegates from Colombian governments on its territory who have tried to achieve national peace with armed rebel groups (…) We aspire to resume talks with the Army of Liberación Nacional (ELN), in this land of peace in order to begin the path proposed by President Petro Urrego to achieve total peace,” Leyva said Thursday, in a statement to journalists, from Havana, accompanied by his counterpart Cuban, Bruno Rodriguez.
The Colombian president, who took power five days agopromised to seek “total peace” in Colombia.
“Total peace is not only national but goes beyond borders,” Leyva said on Twitter.
The foreign minister arrived in Havana, at the head of a delegation made up of the new high commissioner for peace, Danilo Rueda, the congressman of the Historical Pact and president of the Senate Peace Commission, Iván Cepeda, as well as Carlos Ruiz Massieu , special representative of the Secretary of the United Nations for Colombia and a representative of the Government of Norway.
For his part, the Cuban foreign minister affirmed that “regarding the negotiations with the ELN, we see an opportunity to resume dialogue and advance towards peace in the manner in which the parties decide.”
Earlier, President Petro said that he had delegated to the peace commissioner, Danilo Rueda, “at this moment it is necessary to examine the maximum extent of the violence in Colombia to what extent the possibility of peace processes, of accepting justice in many cases, of restarting negotiations, of bilateral truces that could substantially reduce the violence in Colombia”.
Delegates from the leftist ELN, who announced their intention to advance in a negotiationafter Petro’s triumph, they remain on the island.
On the other hand, Leyva rejected the designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism by the United States government: “Colombia rejects the classification of sponsor of terrorism with which it has been tried to disregard Cuba’s commitment to peace.”
During his presidential campaign, Petro announced his intention to re-establish peace negotiations with the ELN, founded in 1964 under the influence of Marxism.
These negotiations began in 2017 during the government of Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018). However, after an attack by the guerrilla group against a Cadet School in Bogotá, which left 22 fatalities, the Colombian government of former President Iván Duque suspended the talks in early 2018.
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