NEWS CENTER – The National Liberation Army (Spanish: Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN) is a Marxist–Leninist guerrilla group involved in the continuing Colombian conflict, which has existed in Colombia since 1964. The ELN advocate a composite communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism and liberation theology. In 2013, it was estimated that the ELN forces consisted of between 1,380 and 3,000 guerrillas. The ELN has been classified as a terrorist organization by the governments of Colombia, United States, Canada the European Union and Venezuela’s National Assembly.
2016 PEACE PROCESS
In 2016 Colombian government and the FARC’s treated a peace deal after 50 years of military confrontations, it was established that the government would provide opportunities to the ex-guerrilla fighters, create a series of social programs and develop the marginalized poor and peasant communities on the country side of the country as well as fight harder the right-wing paramilitary groups that were supported by the Colombian state in the war against the FARC revolutionary goals. However, the process proved itself a total failure.
Colombia’s 2016 peace pact was among the most comprehensive in modern history, earning global applause and a Nobel Peace Prize for Juan Manuel Santos, then president. The United States, which had spent billions of dollars supporting the Colombian government during the conflict, was among its biggest supporters. Since then, more than 13,000 FARC fighters have laid down their arms. Many are integrating into society. The deal also established an ambitious transitional justice court that is investigating war crimes and indicting major players.
Mass killings, mass displacements and the murders of social leaders are all up since 2016, according to the United Nations, making it increasingly difficult for the state to move in. Analysts fault both Mr. Duque and his predecessor, Mr. Santos, for failing to fill the vacuum left by the FARC.
So far 271 former fighters have been killed since the peace deal was signed, according to Comunes, the political party formed by demobilized FARC members. Former FARC fighters who have taken up roles as community leaders are especially vulnerable, the tribunal said. Of murdered ex-combatants, 20% were exercising leadership roles in economic projects, cooperatives or substitution of illicit crops like coca, the chief ingredient in cocaine. Besides the killing of ex-combatants since 2016, over 400 human rights defenders have been killed in Colombia—the highest number of any country in Latin America, according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
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ELECTION OF GUSTAVO PETRO
Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla and longtime senator who is became the Colombia’s first-ever leftist president, calling for a transformation of the economic system with his vice Francia Márquez, 40, an environmental campaigner who has survived at least one assassination attempt.
In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Goldman environmental prize for her campaigning. Márquez’s selection as the running mate of a serious presidential hopeful breaks the mould in Colombia, where since independence, politics has been dominated by wealthy white men.
Afro-Colombians make up nearly 10% of Colombia’s population of 50 million, descending from enslaved people brought from Africa to work on sugar cane plantations, goldmines and the large estates of landowning Spanish colonists. They remain under-represented in business and politics.
Their opponent was Rodolfo Hernández, a construction magnate who has become the country’s most disruptive political phenomenon in a generation, galvanizing voters largely through his outsize social media presence with promises of “total austerity” and a scorched-earth approach to corruption.
At stake in Sunday’s presidential election was the fate of the third largest nation in Latin America, where poverty and inequality have risen during the pandemic and polls show increasing distrust in nearly all major institutions. Anti-government protests last year sent hundreds of thousands of people into the streets in what became known as the “national strike”, whose shadow hangs over Sunday’s vote.
“The entire country is begging for change,” said Fernando Posada, a Colombian political scientist, “and that is absolutely clear.”
ELN STATEMENT
As the country enters a new period with hopes of change, the ELN shared a statement calling the new elected government to search for a real and lasting peace by changing the states policies towards the war on drugs and the killings of social movement leaderships. The statement can be read as it follows:
“On August 7, the inauguration of the first leftist President coincided with a new anniversary of the Battle of Boyacá in 1819, when the army led by the Liberator Simón Bolívar defeated the Spanish empire and gave Colombia its independence.
We welcome President Gustavo Petro’s call for Total Peace, of which fundamental components should be enunciated, such as: 1) international relations of peace and cooperation, 2) an economic model of social and environmental justice, and 3) a culture of dialogue, negotiation and agreements to settle conflicts.
It is obvious that these issues require sustained processes of concretion and that an initial effort will be made in the 4 years of this new Government, in other words, there will be no ‘express solutions’, for the simple reason that all the problems facing the country are old and very complex.
The Liberator said that ‘our resolution of independence or nothing is unshakeable’, this is the first task of Total Peace, to work for Latin America and the Caribbean to be a zone of peace, which implies that Colombia stops complying with the perpetual war plans dictated from Washington, because of them the old regime led the crusade to overthrow a neighboring government, because of them the country was given the collar of NATO partner, because of them the Colombian people suffer the failed War on Drugs, because of them there are military bases and foreign troops on Colombian soil, and U.S. military advisors conduct operations on the ground; the ruling elite forgot the teaching of Simón Bolívar when he said that ‘it is not fair that neighbors and brothers preserve jealousies that may prolong public calamities’.
The popular mandate received by the new Government is to ‘stop in its tracks’ the killing of social leaders, environmentalists, Human Rights Defenders and ex-combatants, another great task of Total Peace is to end this continued Genocide, with which the leadership that opposes the economic model that imposes social inequality and environmental depredation is being dismantled; a task that requires taking violence out of politics and seeking national reconciliation as the basis for a culture of peace.
The task of Total Peace will be achieved if the dominant classes assume their responsibilities and adopt a will of conciliation to serve the national interest, otherwise the new Government will not have interlocutors to make peace.
Comando Central (COCE)”
