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Coronavirus: ELN in Colombia proposes a three-month cease-fire

2020-07-09T12:41:36.984Z


The Covid-19 has killed 4,300 people in the country and contaminated 124,000 people since March 6.The last active guerrilla warfare in Colombia, the National Liberation Army (ELN), proposed a three-month bilateral ceasefire to the government due to the Covid-19 pandemic in a statement released Tuesday, July 7. The organization offers Colombian President Iván Duque to " accept a 90-day bilateral ceasefire ", in response to the UN's call to end hostilities in countries in conflict to facilitate ...


The last active guerrilla warfare in Colombia, the National Liberation Army (ELN), proposed a three-month bilateral ceasefire to the government due to the Covid-19 pandemic in a statement released Tuesday, July 7. The organization offers Colombian President Iván Duque to " accept a 90-day bilateral ceasefire ", in response to the UN's call to end hostilities in countries in conflict to facilitate the fight against new coronavirus.

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" Our delegation to the dialogue which is in Havana is empowered to deal with all the operational details ", added the ELN in its press release. Faced with the spread of the virus, which has left more than 4,300 people dead in the country and contaminated 124,000 people since March 6, the ELN announced the suspension of its operations for the entire month of April and proposed to the government to negotiate a ceasefire -the fire, " a proposal that has been neglected, " according to the guerrillas.

The organization says the truce " would create a climate of humanitarian relaxation, conducive to the resumption of peace dialogue ", suspended for over a year. President Iván Duque replied on Twitter that he " will never fail to comply with the constitutional duty to tackle crime throughout the territory ", calling the ELN a " terrorist group ".

Broken negotiations

The ELN, inspired by the Cuban revolution and which appeared in 1964, has some 2,300 combatants and is present in 10% of the 1,100 Colombian municipalities, according to independent surveys. After the signing of a historic peace agreement with the ex-guerrillas of the Farc (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in 2016, negotiations had been started with the ELN the following year by the previous government, first in Quito in Ecuador, then in Havana.

But they were interrupted by President Duque after an attack on the police academy in Bogota, in which 22 cadets were killed in January 2019. The Colombian president conditioned his return to the negotiating table upon the release of the hostages held by the ELN and the suspension of all its " criminal activities ".

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2020-07-09

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