ELN criticizes President Gustavo Petro for questioning the guerrillas

The delegation of National Liberation Army (ELN) this Saturday accused President Gustavo Petro of “stigmatizing” that guerrilla by referring to the “illicit economy.”

Petro asked the day before for a “hard-hitting strategy” against the “illicit economy” and assured that “it is necessary to close the tap so that these groups do not buy more weapons and swell their ranks.”

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“We have the ELN negotiating, but it does not mean that the guard has been lowered against its illicit economy. It must be destroyed,” Petro said in a meeting with the military at a Bogotá academy.

The ELN negotiators considered this Saturday that the president’s words are “direct questions” part of a “disrespectful and stigmatizing treatment of our organization.”

“It supposes a fundamental questioning of the political sense of the Dialogue Table and its entire architecture, including the legitimacy of the Government Delegation, the guarantor countries, the accompanying organizations (UN and the Colombian Episcopal Conference) and the accompanying countries,” he stated. that guerrilla

Statement of the ELN in response to accusations by Petro:

In the statement, the ELN asked Petro “urgently” to define “If your government continues to consider that, as stated in the Mexico Agreement signed by the parties and deposited with the guarantors, this is a serious political process.”

He also stated that the Colombian president “contradicts the Mexico Agreement that his own government signed on March 10, 2023 during the second cycle of these talks.”

Said document signed in Mexico includes the road map of this new attempt to bring positions between the two parties closer and reach a definitive peace agreement.

The bilateral ceasefire and the participation of civil society in the peace process are two of the three issues scheduled for this third cycle of dialogues that the Cuban capital has been hosting since the beginning of May. The third topic is humanitarian relief.

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Contacts between the Colombian government and the ELN began in 2017 in Quito under the presidency of Juan Manuel Santos, who had just signed peace in 2016 with the now demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

The following year they continued in Havana, also the headquarters of the previous process with the FARC, but they were suspended by President Iván Duque in 2019 after the ELN attack against a cadet school in Bogotá.

The dialogues were resumed last year, with the arrival of the current Colombian president, Gustavo Petro.