Petro accuses ELN of “sabotaging” Colombia peace talks by kidnapping military officer

ELN guerrillas reported Sunday that they are holding a Colombian army sergeant, which President Gustavo Petro called a sabotage of the peace negotiations his government is advancing with the insurgents.

“I condemn the kidnapping of Sergeant Libey Danilo Bravo of the National Army. These are facts that sabotage any possibility of peace,” the president said on Twitter after the ELN’s Eastern War Front released a statement on the retention of the soldier in the department of Arauca (northeast).

The rebels claim that the non-commissioned officer was “detained” on February 14, one day after the government and guerrilla delegates sat down in Mexico to begin the second round of talks.

“He is receiving the treatment that corresponds within the framework of human rights and in accordance with the reality of the war that is currently being lived in Arauca,” bordering Venezuela and a historic bastion of the insurgency, added the National Liberation Army (ELN).

The army had already attributed Bravo’s kidnapping to the country’s last recognized guerrilla group, which is negotiating a ceasefire without agreeing to a ceasefire and amid tensions.

On January 1, President Petro, a former 19 April Movement (M-19) guerrilla, announced that his government had agreed to a six-month truce with five armed groups, including the ELN.

However, three days later, the rebels denied the agreement.

Finally, the Colombian government suspended the ceasefire it had declared.

On January 30, the army killed nine alleged ELN rebels in an “offensive operation”, in the hardest blow against this guerrilla group since Petro resumed last November the talks that his predecessor, Iván Duque, kept suspended for almost four years.

After closing a first round of negotiations at the end of last year in Venezuela with agreements to improve the conditions of ELN prisoners and the sending of a “humanitarian caravan” to areas in the southwest of the country where the civilian population lives confined by the war, the parties arrived in Mexico City with the ceasefire as their main objective.

With some 3,500 fighters, the ELN guerrillas have a federated structure, with relative independence among their fronts, which makes an eventual agreement difficult, according to experts.

With information from AFP