Colombian Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva enters a room accompanied by the peace commissioner, Danilo Rueda, in Havana, in August 2022. YAMIL LAGE (AFP)
Neither Spain nor Chile will host the peace talks between the Colombian government and the ELN guerrillas.
According to the foreign minister, Álvaro Leyva, both countries will accompany the process, but they are not considered as venues.
“I have the Spanish Minister of Relations in front of me and I want to answer a question about your participation in the Colombian peace process: you are, and I am telling you officially, an accompanying country,” Leyva assured this Thursday, and also mentioned Chile in this task.
Gustavo Petro and his peace team, led by Leyva, commissioner Danilo Rueda and senator Iván Cepeda have been working for months on the conditions for the return of the ELN to a negotiating table, after in 2019 Iván Duque, then president, closed any possibility of dialogue and ask for prison for the negotiators who were already in Havana.
Duque had as an argument to refuse dialogue, the brutal attack by the guerrillas on a police school in Bogotá that left 23 dead and 87 wounded.
Foreign Minister Leyva has taken advantage of his speech this Thursday at the CELAC summit, which is being held in Buenos Aires, to thank Cuba for "facilitating its territory to make peace in Colombia."
The first week of November will resume talks between the Petro government and the ELN, which for the first time sits down to negotiate with a left-wing president.
Both sides have shown signs of wanting to move forward.
Cuba will host the negotiations, and Venezuela will share the category of guarantor country with Spain and Chile.
The leaders of these last two countries had offered to host the talks in two visits they made to Bogotá when Petro was already president.
The possibilities for the table to open in one of these two countries were, however, remote.
The president had said that the decision would also depend on the guerrillas and on what was agreed with his negotiators, who have been waiting for years in Havana.
Finally, the Government chose to maintain the dialogue on the island, where the previous phase had already taken place.
The Government and ELN spokesmen announced at the beginning of October, from Venezuela, the date and the new rules that this process brings.
This time, a UN verification mission will be present at the talks.
Petro seeks to demobilize the last active guerrilla in the country, in a task that has been impossible for his predecessors in the last 50 years, who have tried.
The tone of the dialogue is expected to be favorable for it to move forward.
Petro has shown signs that he is willing to make up for time lost while talks were frozen.
In his first days as president, he announced withdrawing the search and arrest warrants for the guerrilla negotiating delegation in Havana, for which Duque was asking for jail.
For the first time, the ELN has as its counterpart a leftist government and a demobilized president from a guerrilla group, with whom it could understand better, but it has been critical of Petro's idea of "total peace."
“La Paz, calling itself “total” to disguise dialogues with criminal gangs, drug traffickers and paramilitaries, distances itself from the political nature of the armed conflict;
This confusion may end up affecting the true meaning of peace,”
Antonio García
, the first commander of the ELN, who will be part of the talks table that is about to be set up, said a few days ago.
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