Government of Colombia and ELN guerrillas invite Brazil, Chile and Mexico as guarantors in peace dialogue

The Government of Colombia and the leftist guerrilla National Liberation Army (ELN) agreed to invite Brazil, Chile and Mexico as guarantor countries of their peace dialogue process that seeks to end almost 60 years of conflict, the parties said in a statement on Friday.

delegates of the president, Gustavo Petroa former guerrilla who took office in August as the first left-wing president in the history of Colombia, and the ELN resumed their talks in Caracas on Monday, suspended in 2019.

After a week of discussions, the parties released a statement stating that they have worked in an “environment of trust and optimism” and that they agreed on three points, including inviting Brazil, Chile and Mexico to join Cuba, Norway and Venezuela, as countries guarantors of the dialogues.

They also said that they will invite Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and Spain as escorts and that they will make diplomatic efforts with the United States government to appoint a special envoy to the table.

The second agreement was to resume a point on the agenda on humanitarian relief actions, although they did not specify details. The third and last point was a consensus to have a communication team to report on the work of the roundtable.

The ELN began a peace negotiation in Ecuador in 2017 in the government of the former president Juan Manuel Santos who later moved to Cuba, but his successor, former president Iván Duque, did not continue with the process because the rebel group did not accept demands such as the suspension of hostilities, to which was added a car bomb attack on a police academy in Bogotá that left 22 cadets dead.

The rebel group, to which radical Catholic priests belonged, is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.