BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Colombia on Wednesday suspended peace talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN) after blame the rebel group for an attack in which two soldiers were killed and more than twenty wounded.
“Today, the dialogue process is suspended,” the government’s peace delegation said in a statement. “Its viability has been seriously damaged and its continuity can only be restored with an unequivocal manifestation of the ELN’s will for peace.”
This is the deepest crisis in peace negotiations with the ELN since November 2022 and after President Gustavo Petro became the first leftist president to come to power and began talks with it and other armed groups under a policy known as total peace.
The National Liberation Army, or ELN, an end to a ceasefire in August with the Colombian government, but was still involved in peace talks aimed at ending more than five decades of conflict.
The military said Tuesday that the group fired homemade rockets from a truck parked at a base in Puerto Jordan, a small town in Arauca province.
The rebel group has not claimed responsibility for the attack.
The ELN was founded in the 1960s by union leaders and university students, inspired by the Cuban Revolution. The group has an estimated 6,000 fighters in Colombia and Venezuela and finances itself through drug trafficking and illegal gold mining.
Recently, the ELN has been spreading into rural areas abandoned by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the major rebel group that signed a peace deal with the Colombian government in 2016.
Two soldiers were killed and 26 wounded in Tuesday’s attack, according to the latest report from Defense Minister Iván Velásquez.
Most of the wounded were flown by helicopter to a military hospital in Colombia’s capital Bogotá, where Petro visited them on Wednesday. According to the hospital’s medical report, 13 remain in “stable condition,” most with soft-tissue injuries, while five are in intensive care.
Authorities on Wednesday announced a reward of up to $23,700 for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for the attack. They also confirmed a reward of up to $948,000 for the ELN’s top leaders.
Petro compared the attack in Arauca to another attack carried out by the ELN in 2019 on a police school in Bogotá, which killed 22 people and wounded dozens more. That attack also led to the suspension of the rebel group’s peace talks with the government of Iván Duque, president from 2018 to 2022.
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