The representative of the negotiating team remarked that they have a “firm commitment to agree to an end to the armed conflict.”
The head of the negotiating team for peace of the National Liberation Army (ELN), Commander Pablo Beltrán, assured that the delegation had no relation to the attack carried out in 2019 at a cadet school in Bogotá, a fact that led to the breakdown of dialogue. between the guerrillas and the Colombian Government.
Beltrán indicated, in an interview published Monday by local media, that he is focused only on peace negotiations. He assures that he did not know that the ELN was going to carry out the attack carried out with a car bomb against the General Santander Cadet School on January 17, 2019, which ended with 22 deceased soldiers and about 90 wounded.
“We are here, in Havana, on a peace mission and totally cut off from any question of military operations. Neither by communication nor by command do we have to do with it, because it was the commitment we made with the two governments, the Colombian and the Cuban, “he said. “I am apart from that,” he stressed.
The alleged involvement of the ELN peace delegation in the Bogotá attack has served the Iván Duque government to demand his extradition to Cuba, which refuses to hand over to the guerrillas, given their protection by the Rupture Protocol.
The document confirms that “the Government of Colombia undertakes to return safely to our camps, from where we left to make these negotiations, and the guarantor countries, (…) the commitment to accompany us from the moment we leave the site negotiation until we get to a safe place, “Beltrán explained.
The insurgent leader has appreciated that Cuba, as the guarantor of the Colombian peace process, has refused to break said protocol.
“Nobody in the international community is going to do that (…) Otherwise, multilateralism would end,” he said.
The presence of the delegation in Havana has served as a pretext for Colombia to support the United States in including Cuba on two lists of countries that are not collaborating in the fight against terrorism.
In the interview, Beltrán confirmed that “the ELN is in a position of peace, of pursuing a path of political solution,” because the main victims of the armed conflict “are non-combatants” from “the most impoverished and excluded areas.”
“The order of the ELN national leadership is never to leave the negotiating table, no matter how great the obstacles,” Beltrán concluded.
Source: Cuba Debate, Telesur
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