National Liberation Army (ELN) terrorists ambushed and killed nine Colombian soldiers along the country’s border with Venezuela, throwing doubt on current peace negotiations between the rebel organization and the government.
In a distant portion of El Carmen municipality in Colombia’s Norte de Santander province, a crucial region for coca growing and cocaine manufacture, one of the bloodiest assaults in recent memory happened.
Gustavo Petro, the socialist president of Colombia, restarted peace talks with the ELN last year in an attempt to establish a durable peace in the Andean country. Almost six decades of internal conflict have resulted in the deaths of at least 450,000 individuals.
On Twitter, Petro said that he had scheduled a meeting between the government’s peace delegation and the guarantor countries, naming Venezuela, Mexico, and Chile.
“A peace process must be honest and accountable to the people of Colombia,” Petro said in his statement.
At the end of 2022, the government and the ELN had their first round of peace discussions in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. This year, the second round of peace discussions began in Mexico.
The ELN did not immediately react to demands for comment either the incident or Petro’s desire to meet with the Colombian and guarantor countries’ peace team.
Minister of the Interior Alfonso Prada tweeted, “There is always the possibility of walking away from the table if there are no conditions for negotiations or… launching a complete assault if there is no genuine desire for peace.”
The ELN is Colombia’s oldest surviving rebel organisation, created in 1964 by radical Catholic monks.
The chief of the ELN delegation, Pablo Beltran, and senior commander Antonio Garcia have stated that the group’s fighters support the present talks. Nevertheless, negotiations with the ELN under previous administrations failed owing to the group’s scattered chain of command and internal strife.
