Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

COLOMBIA: Government and Rebels to Continue Exploratory Talks in Havana

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Feb 28 2006 (IPS) - The second round of exploratory talks in Havana between delegates of the Colombian government and the insurgent National Liberation Army (ELN) aimed at designing an agenda for formal peace talks ended with an agreement to continue meeting in April.

The Feb. 17-27 talks ended “satisfactorily,” according to a joint statement released Monday by Luis Carlos Restrepo, right-wing Colombian President Álvaro Uribe’s peace commissioner, and top ELN military commander Antonio García.

“We cannot yet formally state that talks have begun,” said García, who explained that “we are still in an exploratory phase”.

But Restrepo said it was “very important” that both sides were able to listen to each other and become familiar with the viewpoints of the other side, in order to prepare for a third round with “more elaborate documents” that “will eventually allow us to make progress towards agreements.”

“That is how these processes work: first the different sides listen to each other, in order to take steps forward and determine what points are agreed on and what route can be taken together,” said the peace commissioner.

On Friday, Restrepo and García broke the silence surrounding the conversations to announce that the Uribe administration had granted the ELN delegates provisional legal status, in order to create a climate of mutual confidence and trust necessary for the preliminary talks – which began in December 2005 in the Cuban capital – to move ahead.

The decision involved the suspension of the arrest warrants for García and another ELN negotiator, Ramiro Vargas, while ELN spokesman Francisco Galán, who was temporarily released from prison last September for the talks, will stay out of jail.

The two delegations also agreed to create a complementary alternative mechanism to the talks which will deal with specific problems that arise, in order to allow the negotiators to focus exclusively on the core issues.

The two decisions helped the talks achieve a degree of stability after moments of tension in the first few days of the meeting, regarding which neither Restrepo nor García provided details.

Restrepo said progress had been made to the extent that “we were able to tackle touchy issues, bring stability to the preliminary talks, establish a working routine, put into effect specific procedures to enrich the dialogue process and gradually build trust in order to move forward.”

García said the first round, in December, had basically been “an expression of the willingness” of the ELN and the government to begin moving towards formal peace talks, while “in this second phase, we advanced towards giving stability to the dialogue process.”

He also said the government’s recognition of the ELN delegates as political actors would allow the rebel group to have more fluid communications with civil society and other sectors in Colombia, and with the international community.

He clarified, however, that he had no immediate plans to travel to Colombia. “For now I will continue to focus on activities that form part of the peace process, discussing a few issues that have to do with consolidating the process,” said the insurgent leader, known as the hard-line voice within the ELN.

The exploratory talks were closely followed by diplomats from facilitator countries Norway, Spain and Switzerland, and were preceded by bilateral meetings between García and delegations of students, trade unionists, small farmers and other sectors of Colombian society.

“We are calling for a political solution to the conflict, and we have come here to be heard,” Iván Fernando Aguilar, a 23-year-old industrial engineering student at the Bolivarian Pontifical University in the northeastern Colombian city of Bucaramanga, told IPS.

Aguilar traveled to Havana along with three other university students, who became involved in the process through the Casa de Paz (Peace House), an initiative based in the northwestern city of Medellín which facilitated contacts between the ELN and sectors of society.

It also served as the initial meeting-ground for Restrepo and ELN spokesman Galán, who agreed on holding preliminary talks abroad monitored by international facilitators.

The 4,500-strong ELN is the second largest rebel group in Colombia after the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), whose estimated 18,000 members operate in roughly half of the national territory.

Both leftist groups were founded in 1964, but they have different origins. The FARC, which has deep roots in peasant struggles going back to the 1940s, was formally created by the Communist Party, while the ELN was inspired by the Cuban revolution and Roman Catholic liberation theology, and many of its members are urban intellectuals.

The ELN admits that a large part of its funds come from kidnapping. But unlike the FARC and the right-wing paramilitary groups, it is not involved in the drug trade.

Also active in Colombia’s four-decade civil war are death squads with close ties to drug traffickers, which in the late 1980s joined together in the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), the paramilitary umbrella group currently involved in demobilisation negotiations with the government. Some 10,000 paramilitaries – half of the total – have laid down their arms as part of that process.

The United Nations as well as leading international human rights organisations blame AUC for 80 percent of the massacres and other atrocities committed in Colombia’s armed conflict.