Colombia and ELN Announce That Peace Talks Will Resume

The ELN was founded in the 1960s and currently counts around 4,000 fighters in its membership. It became the largest guerilla group in Colombia when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) laid down their arms in a 2016 peace deal.

The government of Colombia and the National Liberation Army (ELN), the country’s largest remaining guerilla group, have announced that they are resuming peace talks for the first time since 2018.

The two sides met in Caracas, Venezuela. After the meeting, both sides released a statement announcing that a date for the talks would be announced after the first week of November. Cuba, Norway, and Venezuela will act as guarantor states during the talks, ensuring that negotiators are protected.

No venue for the talks was announced, but Antonio García, a commander for the ELN who participated in the initial discussions, says that they could be done in stages across Cuba, Norway and Venezuela.

Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s newly elected leftist president, promised to seek peace with the ELN and other groups. Petro was once a member of a guerilla group, M-19, though sources differ on whether he participated in actual fighting. After helping negotiate a peace deal between M-19 and the Colombian government, he moved into politics. He served for two decades in Colombia’s Congress before being elected mayor of the Colombian capital, Bogotá, in 2011.

It is not clear what the ELN wants in exchange for laying down their arms, but García gave some hints that it will involve addressing inequality in the country. “The way to look for peace is not just by thinking about weapons but by attacking the root causes of this conflict, which are inequality and the lack of democracy,” García said.

Petro made it a major part of his platform to address the root causes of inequality in Colombia, which has some of the highest wealth inequality in Latin America.

In the 2016 peace deal with the Farc, that guerilla group got 10 seats in Congress, the ability to form a political party, and the government agreed to finance land titling schemes and rural development projects.

The previous peace talks between the ELN and the Colombian government fell apart in 2018 after Petro’s predecessor, Iván Duque Márquez, ended them in response to an attack by the ELN on a Colombian police station. Those talks took place in Havana and used Cuba as a guarantor. After the attack, Márquez demanded that Cuba break from its obligations as a guarantor – against the recommendations of the team that negotiated the peace deal with the Farc – and extradite the ELN negotiators. Cuba refused and in response, former US President Donald Trump redesignated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism. Many feared at the time that Márquez’s actions would prevent the ELN from ever coming back to the negotiating table and discourage other countries from acting as a guarantor.