ELN wants a commission to verify its lack of ties to drug trafficking

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The negotiating delegation of the Colombian National Liberation Army (ELN) that remains in Cuba proposed Friday to create an international commission to verify the alleged links with drug trafficking the Colombian government accuses them of and which they deny.

In an interview in Havana, Victor Orlando Cubides – aka Aureliano Carbonell – said they are willing to agree to a bilateral and temporary ceasefire with the authorities so that the commission can “go to the field” to verify “if we are really telling the truth or not”.

The guerrilla commander assured that the mentioned cessation of military operations would also help to improve the response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Colombian insurgent group took up these ideas in letters sent last year to the U.S. State Department, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, and the Colombian Attorney General’s Office. Still, according to the interviewee, they have only received silence for an answer.

“The ELN has no crops, no laboratories, no tracks, no routes, no chemical precursor businesses, much less do we build, nor do we take care of tracks or infrastructure that has anything to do with drug trafficking,” according to a fragment of one of the letters to which Efe had access.

Carbonell says that the government of Ivan Duque “covers up” the problem of drug trafficking by accusing the guerrillas of “being committed to the business,” something that, he reiterated, “is absolutely false.”

“The only thing that is charged is a tax to those who buy what others produce in the territories where our units move,” he alleged without specifying the type of products.

TALKS STALLED IN HAVANA

The ELN began peace negotiations in February 2017 in Quito with former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018). In May 2018, they were transferred to Havana, where the last round of dialogue concluded without progress in early August of the same year when current President Iván Duque took office.

Colombia requested the extradition of the insurgents after the attack against a police academy in Bogotá in 2019 that left 22 cadets dead. Still, Cuba, the guarantor country of the peace talks, has repeatedly rejected this request, considering that it would violate the international protocols that protect the negotiations.

In this regard, Carbonell argued that they would remain on the island as long as the Cuban government does not comply with the conditions established at the beginning of the negotiations to guarantee the safe return of the negotiating group, which includes the ELN’s top commander, Nicolás Rodríguez, alias “Gabino”, and the head of the peace negotiations team, Israel Ramírez, alias “Pablo Beltrán”.

LEARNING FROM WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FARC

When asked why the ELN insists on resuming peace negotiations in the face of a counterpart that is asking for their extradition and has not responded to their communications, Carbonell assured that he is convinced that peace is the solution to the problems in Colombia. “We are willing to generate a first meeting and look for solutions,” he said.

He spoke, without losing sight of the lessons left by the peace dialogues with the now demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a process that also took place in Havana and culminated in 2016. “We cannot repeat the same experience of the FARC,” the commander stressed as he criticized that the key elements of that process “are at zero.”

The ELN negotiator maintained that almost five years after signing peace with the Colombian government, there are still murders of former combatants who were reintegrated into civilian life, social leaders, and neither has the long-demanded agrarian issue or political reform been resolved.