President Gustavo Petro, during the press conference he offered for his first 100 days in office, at the Casa de Nariño, the President’s residence. Ivan Valencia (AP)
Peace talks with the ELN land in Mexico this week. Starting this Monday, the government negotiators and the guerrillas will be discussing the ceasefire that Gustavo Petro is so persistently striving for in the North American country and that he has placed at the center of the agenda. The President is in a hurry to complete a cessation of hostilities which he believes will reduce the number of killings in the regions and lay the stone on which total peace must be established, the project aimed at that all armed actors in the country hand over their weapons.
The parties will also negotiate something as vague and general as “the mechanisms for community participation in peace-building in Colombia.” The challenge is to find out what exactly political participation means and which methods can be used. Unlike the FARC, the ELN has no ambitions to found a political party, but is convinced that concrete changes in society must emerge from this discussion. The negotiators understand that it is a matter of including the opinion of the people in the reforms that the government is conducting. This sounds self-evident, but it is not easy to specify. Petro tried some popular dialogues early in his tenure, much in the style of Álvaro Uribe in his time, which were not very successful. Words are lost along the way.
The negotiators will try to isolate themselves from all outside noise in this second cycle of talks – the first took place in Caracas. There has been much excitement over the past week over the release of the son of La Gata, a woman convicted of her links with paramilitaries and the murder of three people, including a journalist. He was released as a peace mediator. It was understood he was released as a spokesman for one of the criminal groups he will deal with. The government later denied requesting his release, and the peace commissioner in charge of the matter revoked his status as mediator, for which he was sentenced to return to prison. What happened reveals the confusion that sometimes surrounds the process; Without a doubt, this is another of his great enemies.
The delegation of ELN negotiators in Mexico, where the second cycle of negotiations begins. In the middle the leaders of the delegation, Pablo Beltrán, Edwin Restrepo
Internally, as Antonio García, its supreme commander, has publicly stated, the ELN does not want to be compared to other organized armed groups. The guerrilla was founded 60 years ago by a handful of enthusiastic students of the Cuban revolution. Along the way, the organization has faced many situations, including a possible extinction, but has come so far as to be the last active guerrilla in Latin America. Over the past decade, authorities have repeatedly linked her to drug trafficking. However, their leaders emphasize their political character, their spokesperson for civil society, and that is the treatment they wish to receive. In a risque message on Twitter, Petro asked the guerrillas if they wanted to follow the path of Camilo Torres Restrepo, a revolutionary priest, or Pablo Escobar, the drug trafficker who challenged the Colombian state in the 1980s. He was eventually shot dead on the roof of a building in Medellín.
The ELN delegation arrived in Mexico City on Saturday. Pablo Beltrán, the head of the guerrilla negotiators, recorded a video in front of a mural of the priest Hidalgo: “We have just arrived, we have the great Mexican insurgent Hildalgo in the background who gives us courage. We hope that the works of this second cycle will be an affective advance and a support for the process.” Then he made a succinct reference to youth: “The great changes in our country can only be won with struggle, and this struggle comes without the presence of the youth is not advancing.”
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Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard speaks during a press conference in Mexico City, where he said Mexico will guarantee the security conditions for the dialogue between the Colombian government and the National Liberation Army (ELN) last Wednesday. Alex Cross (EFE)
Parallel to the negotiating table with the ELN, the government has started talks with two other groups it recognizes as political, the EMC FARC and the Segunda Marquetalia. They are made up of groups of combatants who did not join the previous peace process – that of the FARC in 2016 – or deserted along the way. They are known as dissidents. Peace commissioner Danilo Rueda has already met the leader of the Segunda Marquetalia, Iván Márquez, who became a guerrilla spokesman in Havana and later returned to the jungle after feeling prosecuted despite his demobilized status. Márquez is currently in Venezuela recovering from an attack that official sources say was carried out by a group of mercenaries who wanted a bounty on his head. According to the same sources, he has lost sight in one eye and some parts of his face are paralyzed.
There is a third assumption for criminal gangs that are not political in nature, such as that of La Gata’s son. They literally open spaces of rapprochement and conversation to create legal mechanisms that allow accountability to society and the destructuring of the economic and criminal motivations that sustain them. This section includes the Clan del Golfo, a paramilitary group dedicated to drug trafficking, the Sierra Nevada Self-Defense Groups, and several urban violence groups. The most obvious example of the latter was found in Buenaventura, where two factions that had been in conflict for years vowed not to assassinate, torture, or make any of their enemies disappear. The drop in violence has been dramatic.
What Petro is aiming for is for this to be expanded across the country. And that is done first and foremost by convincing the ELN that a ceasefire with the army will allow them to continue talks until a peace deal with an immediate reduction in killings. The President wants it done now, now. He feels that many lives are at stake. Mexico is the scenario in which this agreement must take place.
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