The delegation that traveled to Cuba, before its departure, in Bogotá, on August 11, 2022.rrss
A delegation from the government of Gustavo Petro traveled to Havana this Thursday to begin rapprochements with the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) in order to resume the peace talks, stalled between 2018 and 2022. On Monday of this week, Petro , in his first meeting with the press, assured that the talks with the guerrillas would resume at the same point and in the same place where they left off four years ago.
This Thursday, Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva confirmed the visit with a photo of the delegation that traveled to Havana: "Total peace is not only national but goes beyond borders," the foreign minister wrote.
The first visit of the Petro Government in search of resuming the process, key to its commitment to "total peace", is led by Leyva, the High Commissioner for Peace, Danilo Rueda, and the Senator of the Historical Pact, Iván Cepeda.
In the image, shared by the foreign minister, Carlos Ruiz Massieu, Special Representative of the Secretary General and Head of the UN Verification Mission in Colombia, John Otto, Norwegian special envoy for peace and Javier Caamaño, Ambassador of Cuba in Colombia, also appear. Colombia.
The presence of the entourage on the island is the first step in a rapprochement that already has the disposition of the guerrillas.
This Tuesday, the commander of the ELN, Antonio García, has defended resuming the peace negotiations through a "splice".
“Very surely we will have to contextualize what was agreed upon at that moment, because we also have to make a kind of connection.
Does the new government have someone to make this connection with?
We understand that the Duque government was very reluctant to receive his predecessor, ”Garcia wrote in a message posted on his Twitter account.
"Both the new government and the ELN have expressed willingness and mutual interest to resume talks," he added.
The ELN, which has grown in strength in recent years, has shown its desire to return to the dialogue table with the new government.
“The one who broke it [the peace negotiation] was the Government of Duque, now the Colombian State must save itself from said non-compliance.
It's the basics.
Therefore, it must be the starting point to restart the talks,” said the guerrilla chief in an interview with the CM& newscast.
The government's negotiations with that guerrilla began in 2017 in Quito, during the government of Juan Manuel Santos, and in 2018 they were transferred to Havana.
In 2019, the dialogue was suspended after the attack on the cadet school in Bogotá, which left 22 dead and more than 50 injured.
With information from the EFE agency.
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