MADRID, 17 Ago. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The now General Secretary of the Comunes and former commander of the disappeared FARC guerrilla, Rodrigo Londoño, alias ‘Timochenko’, has urged the leadership and sympathizers of the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas to reach a consensus with the Government of Colombia for which he has offered to mediate due to his experience in the 2016 peace agreement.
“I welcome the exploratory meeting between the delegation of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the National Government for the resumption of peace talks between that insurgency and the Colombian State.” Without a doubt, it is a fact of the greatest importance from which only positive things can emanate for society as a whole,” Londoño celebrated in an open letter.
“Dialogue has always had to be the route to ending the conflict. That is why I urge the representatives, the ELN comrades, their command, their militancy and their sympathizers to advance decisively towards the conquest of a political agreement to put an end to military confrontation,” he wrote.
Londoño has also proposed to “facilitate” the dialogue between the guerrillas and the Government of Colombia, making use of his experience in the past, when he was part of the FARC delegation in Havana, a city where the representatives of the ELN since 2018, a year before the negotiations were broken with the previous executive of Iván Duque.
“As a signatory and representative of the contracting party to the peace agreement between the Colombian State and the FARC, I make available to the Government and the ELN the collective experience that we peace signatories have to facilitate dialogue and understanding between the parties,” he proposes. .
Londoño, who has had words of recognition and gratitude to the Cuban Government for its “enormous efforts” to promote peace in Colombia, has closed his letter encouraging the “comrades” of the ELN to take the path of peace, because although “they do not it’s easy”, yes “it’s worth it”.
“Know that there is a people waiting for you with open arms, ready to surround you and support you in the struggle to end the armed conflict,” he assured.
A week ago, the president, Gustavo Petro, sent a delegation from his government, headed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Álvaro Leyva, to start a new rapprochement with the guerrillas. A peace agreement with the ELN is one of the points that the new president promised that he would carry out if he managed to reach Casa Nariño.
Since Petro’s victory in the June 2022 elections, the ELN leadership, including its top leader, Eliécer Chamorro Acosta, alias ‘Antonio García’, has shown interest in resuming peace agreements, which began in February 2017 in Quito. Later they moved to Havana, where the last meeting took place in August of that year without progress.
The talks were interrupted after the ELN did not agree to the demands of the Duque government, which finally suspended any type of dialogue indefinitely in January 2019 when there was an attack on a police cadet school in which they died. about twenty people.
