Gustavo Petro has spent half his life promoting a peace speech after having been a young and myopic guerrilla who believed in the armed struggle to reach power, more as a dream than as an achievable goal.
A few months ago, he was convinced that he could transfer the transformation that he himself experienced in person to the leaders of the ELN, men with the manners of seminarians who have survived decades hidden in the depths of the jungle.
However, negotiating with them is so arduous that right now he is endangering what Petro has called total peace, the absolute absence of violence in Colombia.
An agreement not to kill each other anymore that is in the air.
The president wanted the dialogue to move forward quickly and that is why he announced a ceasefire on New Year's Eve that did not really exist.
It was neither a confusion nor a misunderstanding.
He believed, and people who work closely with him have told this newspaper, that once the armistice was announced, the guerrillas would have no choice but to abide by it.
It was a bold move, a move that suited his personality, but was nonetheless risky.
It went wrong.
The ELN took three days to deny him and make it clear that no one was going to impose agreements that were off the negotiation table.
Since then, Petro has eagerly awaited the ceasefire while the ELN remains impassive, convinced that it would be suicide to let down their guard in the midst of the war it is waging in their territories.
But after the attack at dawn on Wednesday that left nine soldiers dead and eight wounded, a discussion on the subject cannot be postponed.
This has been made known by the head of government negotiators, Otty Patiño, who gives absolute priority to demanding a ceasefire and hostilities at the emergency meeting that Petro has called for the Monday after the attack.
The ELN, in any case, does not think the same, emergencies are not their thing.
Commander Pablo Beltrán has said that this agreement means remaining like a statue and that puts them at risk.
Beltrán is convinced that the Colombian armed forces are in cahoots with the other armed groups with which the territory is disputed, the Clan del Golfo and other armies derived from paramilitaries.
The matter is key because without an agreement with the ELN there is no total peace that is worth it, everything falls apart.
An agreement with that guerrilla, who has sat down to talk without any success with six other presidents, are the foundations on which the rest must be built, the first stone of the church.
Conditions are unbeatable for the ELN, which faces a left-wing government with which it shares many postulates.
Until now, I had never had such an opportunity. At that negotiating table there are people like Patiño, a former M-19 guerrilla, or María José Pizarro, daughter of the leader of that guerrilla assassinated in the middle of the presidential campaign in the 1990s.
People who have come to the left by similar paths.
This has not been the first crisis that occurs in the negotiation.
The first arose as a result of the ceasefire that Petro fabricated out of nowhere and the second on account of some tweets from the president in which he compared the guerrillas with the drug trafficker Pablo Escobar.
There was a third of lesser depth, a mini-crisis, which was settled with a meeting between the parties due to an interview that Pablo Beltrán gave to this newspaper.
He referred to the government negotiators in very harsh terms, although he began with an enthusiastic statement to the question of why this time it was going to be the final negotiation after six failures: "The novelty is that we have a progressive government that has in his program to achieve peace.
He agrees with us that peace is an emergency for the country and the only thing that makes us viable as a nation.
We are partners in this matter.”
That factor has not yet been decisive, it has not managed to give a boost.
The stakes are high.
Petro yearns for the ceasefire and the ELN delays it.
Until that happens, there can be massacres like that of the military, to which the Army will surely respond with an offensive.
In short, more deaths.
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