Bogotá (EFE).- The Central Command of the guerrilla of the National Liberation Army (ELN) said that the Colombian Government intends to make impositions on issues that have not been agreed upon at the negotiating table, such as the ceasefire, and insisted in which all their fronts are united and they will comply with what is agreed.
“At the beginning of the year they wanted to impose a multilateral ceasefire on us through the media without having agreed at the dialogue table, now they intend to impose it in the same way,” says the ELN in a communication posted on social networks dated April 4 in the “mountains of Colombia”.
The need for a ceasefire for the dialogues
Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced on December 31 a bilateral ceasefire with five armed groups, but the ELN withdrew because that was not agreed upon at the dialogue table between the government and that guerrilla.
They also failed to come out with a ceasefire agreement from the second round of negotiations in Mexico, which took place last month, despite the fact that Petro urged the negotiating delegation to push for it.
The High Commissioner for Peace, Danilo Rueda, assured that they worked on an “architecture” to achieve “a national bilateral cessation with the possibility of extension,” which in his opinion is better than what has been achieved on other occasions with this guerrilla.
Now, after the attack last week attributed to the ELN in Guamalito, a corregimiento in the municipality of El Carmen (Norte de Santander), where nine soldiers died, the Government seeks to accelerate said ceasefire and be able to leave the next scheduled meeting in the next few weeks in Havana with a ceasefire agreement.
“It is planned in the next cycle in Cuba to be able to work on the point referring to the participation of society and a bilateral ceasefire. It will be at the table where we will discuss them, we will not play the game so that issues at the table are conditioned by media pressure, there are some agreed protocols and norms that must be respected”, the guerrillas now pointed out.
Union against ELN dissidents
After the attack on April 29, the guerrilla’s Omar Gómez Western War Front, which operates in the department of Chocó, in the Pacific, issued a statement in which it exposed “some questions” about the peace negotiation.
Omar Gómez questioned whether this peace model “includes the structural transformations of the State necessary to build a fairer country” and insisted that they do not see “this peace process favorably, and every day we have more questions and uncertainties.”
In this sense, the ELN Central Command denied internal differences to emphasize that they are united and ensure that at the end of 2022 and the beginning of this year they held a meeting with national and regional commanders and with the delegation that is negotiating peace where the results of the first cycle carried out in Venezuela and “all decisions were made for the continuity of the process”.
“These conclusions are of a totally unitary nature in the ELN and therefore we all share or consciously abide by them, here there is no imposition, but deliberation and construction of political consensus,” the ELN asserts.