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News > Latin America

Colombia's Cuban-Inspired Guerrilla Group Follows FARC's Path Toward Peace

  • The members of the ELN will transition into a political entity in Colombia if a deal is reached with the government.

    The members of the ELN will transition into a political entity in Colombia if a deal is reached with the government. | Photo: Reuters

Published 7 February 2017
Opinion

Colombia's second-largest rebel group begins formal peace negotiations with the government Friday in talks hosted by Ecuador.

As Colombia continues to make major strides toward peace after a landmark deal with the the country's largest rebel army, the FARC, the government is scheduled Tuesday to move forward with a formal negotiation process with the second largest guerrilla force, the ELN. 

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The opening phase of these talks will be held in Quito, Ecuador, and will bring government representatives and ELN peace delegates to the negotiating table to work through a six-point agenda. Negotiations were initially scheduled to start on Oct. 27, but President Juan Manuel Santos called off the meeting at the last minute, just hours before the event was set to begin, citing as the sticking point the ELN's failure to first release a key hostage, former member of Congress Odin Sanchez.

The move revealed differing interpretations of preliminary agreements, as the ELN maintained it planned to release Sanchez once talks were underway and also asked the government to pardon two ELN prisoners in a show of reciprocity. 

The ELN released Sanchez last week, fulfilling the government's central precondition for advancing talks. At the same time, the governmend handed over to the ELN two pardoned rebels who had been in jail. 

The National Liberation Army, or ELN, has confirmed its willingness to begin peace talks with the government but stressed that the rebel group would want to see a different process than the one carried out with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The government and the FARC unveiled a final agreement at the end of August after nearly four years of dialogue in Havana, Cuba, and later revised the deal after Colombian voters narrowly rejected it by less than half a percentage point in a plebiscite on Oct. 2. Congress approved the updated agreement on Nov. 30, triggering the beginning of the implementation phase. 

Founded in 1964 and inspired by the Cuban revolution and its iconic leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the ELN is smaller and less well-known than the FARC, which consolidated the same year in a different part of the country. The ELN currently has between 2,000 and 3,000 active members since declining from its heyday of between 4,000 and 5,000 rebels in the late 1990s. The FARC, on the other hand, reached a force of nearly 20,000 at its peak and now has an estimated membership of 7,000. 

In the early 1960s when armed struggle emerged as the strategy for these groups, Colombia was living the aftermath of a brutal ten-year conflict between Liberals and Conservatives known simply as “La Violencia.” The civil war decimated mostly rural areas of the country and gave way to a crackdown on self-organized communist communities that were seen as a threat to elite interests. While the FARC emerged directly from these rural roots as a group of armed campesinos in the Tolima department, southwest of Bogota, the ELN was formed by left-wing intellectuals, students, and Catholic radicals in the northern department of Santander.

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Among the ELN's founders were five Colombians who had traveled in the early 1960s to study revolutionary strategy in Cuba, where in 1962 they founded a liberation brigade named after the Colombian colonial-era insurrectionist, Jose Antonio Galan. They were later joined by several priests who adhered to liberation theology, and the brigade founded in Cuba influenced the ELN's ideology and revolutionary methods.

In spite of their differing origins, the FARC and ELN's political programs have overlapped considerably from the outset, with a focus — despite some ideological differences — on revolutionary Marxist demands to fight inequality and imperialism on behalf of the rural poor and marginalized.

According to the first ELN commander, Nicolas Rodriguez Bautista, known by his nom de guerre Gabino, the group was created with the aim of "fighting alongside the oppressed and exploited in Colombia and continuing to confront the challenges of the oligarchs." The ELN opted for an armed struggle model after all other options were taken off the table by a repressive and murderous Colombian state. Similar to the FARC, it aimed to fight in favor of the social needs of the population while standing against exploitation. One important difference is that, like the Cuban revolution it emulated, the ELN stated from the beginning that its goal was to seize state power — an objective that the rural-based FARC did not incorporate into its agrarian-focused political program until decades later. 

Gabino and FARC commander Timoleon Jimenez, known by his alias Timochenko, have long called on the government "to advance discussions with all the insurgency" to end the Colombian conflict. Like the FARC, the ELN has attempted peace talks with past governments to no avail. Negotiations in 2001 with then-President Andres Pastrana's government quickly broke down, and three rounds of attempted talks with the subsequent government of far-right President Alvaro Uribe in the early and mid-2000s also failed. Both rebel groups seek to transition from military-style formations into political parties through peace agreements to trade their weapons for participation in sanctioned political arenas. 

FARC leaders and many analysts have insisted that Colombia will only be capable of building stable and lasting peace if an end-of-conflict deal is also reached with the ELN. The ELN has commended the government and the FARC on the historic rapprochement, celebrating it as an important step toward peace, but also stressed that a peace process with its own ranks will be marked by key "sovereign" differences. In particular, ELN leaders have stressed the importance of the democratic participation of Colombian people, especially marginalized groups. 

The peace process will be officially inaugurated Friday in Quito after months of delays. Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said his country will host the talks and play the same role as Cuba did for the talks between the government and the FARC. The first round of negotiations will last 45 days, with a total of 22 rounds expected, not only in Ecuador but also in other countries that have offered to host the talks and mediate between both sides.

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Juan Camilo Restrepo, former minister of agriculture, has been designated as lead negotiator for the government, while Pablo Beltran will be the lead negotiator on behalf of the rebel group.

"We are convinced that peace is the force that can unite all Colombia, multicultural and diverse,” said Beltran during a press conference where both sides announced the dates of the talks planned to start in October.

The talks will cover six major points, already agreed to in preliminary negotiations, which are: the participation of civil society in the peace-building process, democracy for peace, transformation for peace, victims, ending the conflict, and implementation of the agreements. The roadmap overlaps considerably with the cornerstones of the agreement between the government and the FARC, highlighting the root causes of inequality underlying the conflict. 

The rebel army and the government agreed in Caracas, Venezuela, on March 30 to launch a peace process, marking a major breakthrough after two years of secretive exploratory talks. But no further steps had been taken after that until after the signing of the peace deal with the FARC last month. The ELN had announced that the public phase of the talks would begin last May, and said it is willing to work together with government officials to achieve a peace agreement, but according to Beltran the government had tried to modify those agreements.

Colombia’s five-decade armed conflict has claimed some 260,000 lives and displaced at least 7 million people. Estimates suggest that right-wing paramilitaries are responsible for up to 80 percent of the violence and human rights abuses that took place during the 52 years of conflict.

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