Bogotá, June 10 (EFE).- The negotiating team of the Colombian Government with the National Liberation Army (ELN) asked this Monday the commander of that guerrilla, alias ‘Antonio García’, to cease the strategy of “attack” and “personal defamation “against President Gustavo Petro.
The Government’s Peace Delegation stated in a statement that nothing “justifies the strategy of aggression against the president of the republic and members of the peace team” of the Executive, nor “unfounded claims of non-compliance” that the guerrilla has expressed during its sixth congress. .
“It does not contribute to the peace process to use external claims to settle internal contradictions. Once again we ask the ELN commander to renounce the strategy of attack and personal defamation. We invite the entire organization to work, without wasting time, on compliance “of the agreed agreements, the information added.
Last month, Eliécer Herlinto Chamorro Acosta, alias ‘Antonio García’, accused Petro of receiving extortion money when he was a member of the M-19 guerrilla in the 1980s.
“Speaking of illegal economies, which Gustavo Petro likes to talk about, I remember that in the mid-1980s, when he was just a regional leader of the M-19 in Santander (northeast), he asked us to ‘take him ‘in some taxes that the ELN was charging on transportation,” the guerrilla leader then expressed on social network X.
Likewise, ‘García’ published a column this Monday in which he stressed that, according to the ELN, “the peace process being carried out with the Colombian Government is in a state of crisis,” reflected in the fact that there are no new meetings agreed between the parts.
The guerrilla, according to its commander, accuses the Government of “dodging agreements or failing to comply with them, giving it biased interpretations through media manipulation, trying to make people believe that it was the ELN who was failing to comply in order to pressure and vainly get the ELN to accept impositions.”
“The political definitions in the ELN are built collectively, the leadership bodies obey democratic mandates, we have a long political tradition, since the current National Directorate and Central Command have been uninterrupted in their role of strategic leadership for more than three decades,” he added. the head of that armed group.
The ELN announced in May that it was resuming kidnappings for economic purposes, something that the Colombian Government has reiterated is a breach of what was agreed in the last extension of the ceasefire, when that guerrilla promised to stop this practice.
On May 25, the Government of Colombia and the ELN also closed the most recent cycle of talks, in Caracas, with the signing of an agreement on citizen participation in the construction of peace agreements.
The inclusion of citizen participation represents the first point of six that both parties have set on the agenda of the agreements. EFE
jga/jrh
