Colombia freezes peace talks with rebels after attacks
BOGOTA: Colombia’s president on Monday froze peace negotiations with the ELN rebel group and ordered a stepped-up military response after weekend bomb attacks blamed on the guerrillas killed seven police officers.
The developments threw into peril efforts to definitively end Colombia’s half century of conflict that until recently had appeared close to resolution.
“I have taken the decision to suspend the start of the fifth cycle of negotiations that were scheduled for the coming days, given that ELN is not matching its words with actions,” President Juan Manuel Santos said in an address.
He ordered security forces to act, ‘with maximum determination’, against the ELN.
They will be “fighting terrorism vigorously, as if there were no peace negotiations,” Santos said.
Santos’s government reached a historic peace agreement with Colombia’s biggest rebel group, the FARC, in November 2016, but a similar deal with the smaller ELN — estimated to number 1,800 fighters — has still not been reached.
When a ceasefi re with the ELN expired on Jan 10, the government said it was suspending talks with the rebel group, which returned to targeting security forces and oil installations.
Colombia’s military has in turn carried out an offensive that has resulted in dozens of deaths and arrests.
The US condemned the attacks in Colombia and another, apparently unrelated one near the border in neighbouring Ecuador that left 28 police and civilians wounded.
“The US stands with the people of Colombia and Ecuador and will help both countries in any way we can in response to these attacks,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement expressing condolences the families of those killed and hurt. Over the weekend, three bombs went off at police stations in three locations: two in the Caribbean port city of Barranquilla and one in Santa Rosa, in the department of Bolivar.
The ELN claimed responsibility for the worst of the attacks, which killed five officers and wounded 41 in Barranquilla on Saturday as police were assembling for rollcall.
Defence Minister Luis Carlos Villegas put the blame for all three of these ‘terrible acts of terrorism’ on the ELN.
He hinted that Santos could respond by ordering the military to go on the offensive against the rebel group.
A 31-year- old suspect in Saturday’s blast was taken into custody, with Villegas saying: “This person has a very clear record with the ELN.”
Five police officers were injured in the second Barranquilla bombing, which exploded at another police station early Sunday.
Two more police officers were killed when a bomb went off late Saturday at their outpost in Santa Rosa. Santos, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016 and who is due to step down in August after serving two mandates, had hoped to make peace with the ELN to end a long conflict that has drawn in drug traffickers and right-wing paramilitary groups as well as the leftist guerrilla forces. — AFP