BOGOTÁ, Colombia (AP) — Colombia’s largest remaining insurgent group introduced a unilateral truce on Sunday, to final till Jan. 3, the primary for the reason that earlier ceasefire broke down in August.
In a press release posted on X, the Nationwide Liberation Military stated that it’ll halt assaults on the navy because the nation celebrates Christmas and New 12 months’s.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro shared the truce announcement on his X account, with a message saying that “the top of warfare, is the nation’s objective for 2025.”
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The group, identified in Spanish because the ELN, was based within the Sixties by college college students, monks and union leaders impressed by the Cuban revolution.
It at the moment has 6,000 fighters in Colombia and Venezuela in response to Ministry of Protection estimates, and funds itself via unlawful mining, extortion rackets and the drug commerce.
The ELN has elevated its affect in some rural areas of Colombia by entering into an influence vacuum left by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia after that group signed a peace take care of the Colombian authorities in 2016.
Two years in the past, the ELN started to stage peace talks of its own with the Petro administration, which resulted in a ceasefire that started in August of final yr.
However peace talks stalled resulting from disagreements over when the ELN would cease kidnapping and taxing civilians. ELN commanders had been additionally angered by the federal government’s transfer to arrange separate negotiations with an ELN offshoot within the southwest of the nation.
The ceasefire broke down 4 months in the past, and since then the ELN has stepped up its attacks on navy targets and oil infrastructure alongside Colombia’s border with Venezuela.
The Petro administration has tried to stage peace talks with a number of armed teams in rural pockets of the nation, below a method often called complete peace. ELN commanders have criticized the Petro administration for making an attempt to chop offers with a few of these teams, as a substitute of persecuting them.
