International
Petro considers that the ELN attack in Arauca “closes a peace process with blood”
Colombian President Gustavo Petro condemned the attack of the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas against a military base in Puerto Jordán, in the department of Arauca (east), which left two soldiers dead and 27 injured, and assured that “it is an action that closes a peace process with blood.”
“The consequences of the actions and the flow of history today bring us a dramatic and repeated event in our last years, a dump loaded with explosives that injures 27 young people and kills two, within the data I have, put by the ELN with whom we were talking about peace,” said Petro the inauguration of magistrate Claudia Regina Expósito as a member of the Superior Council of the Judiciary.
The president compared the attack to the attack against the Colombian Police Cadet School in Bogotá, which in January 2019 left 20 dead and 68 injured, including an Ecuadorian cadet, and which put an end to the dialogue that the Government was maintaining with that guerrilla at that time.
“And obviously, as happened that time in another place near here, at the Police School, because many police officers died, ensigns who were studying there, because it is practically an action that closes a peace process with blood,” he added.
The Colombian Government and the ELN began a new peace negotiation in November 2022 in Caracas that, however, stalled at the beginning of this year due to the demands of the guerrilla that the Executive remove them from the list of terrorist groups and abandon regional dialogues such as the one it maintains in the department of Nariño (southwest) with Comuneros del Sur, supposedly split from the ELN.
During the negotiations in Caracas, Havana and Mexico City, the parties agreed to a one-year bilateral ceasefire, the longest agreed with that guerrilla, which ended on August 3, after which the ELN resumed its attacks against public force and infrastructure in different parts of the country, especially in Arauca, where it is particularly strong.
“And it’s like an eternal becoming, to silence a part of the people and continue in wars, killing each other again and again as if that were our story,” the president lamented.
The Minister of the Interior, Juan Fernando Cristo, also expressed himself in this line: “You cannot follow a negotiating table in the midst of the blood of our wounded soldiers, of the civilian population. The ELN did not understand the message (…) has lost a historic opportunity to negotiate peace; it insists on violence, it insists on harming Colombians.”
“The ELN, definitely, was left by the train of history,” Cristo concluded.
The mayor of Bogotá, Carlos Fernando Galán, considered that “the decision of the National Government to end the peace process is the right one.”
“Colombia cannot negotiate with those who have not given any demonstration of having a will for peace,” Galán said in his X account, in which he regretted “the attack that claimed the lives of two soldiers and injured another 27 in Jordán, Arauca.”
The action was at the Puerto Jordán military base, in Arauca (east), which “was attacked with improvised explosive devices thrown from a dump mantip.”
According to figures provided by the Ministry of Defense, 27 soldiers were injured, “of which 20 have splinters” and seven are “seriously injured.”
Last Sunday, two soldiers died in a rural area of Tame (Arauca) in an attack attributed to the ELN that shot them while they were at a checkpoint.
This terrorist escalation also includes attacks on the Caño Limón-Coveñas and Bicentenario pipelines, two of the most important in the country.
The Caño Limón-Coveñas pipeline, 770 kilometers long, transports oil from the Arauca wells to Coveñas, a Colombian port in the Caribbean Sea.
International
Trump urges Putin to reach peace deal
On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated his desire for Russian President Vladimir Putin to “reach a deal” to end the war in Ukraine, while also reaffirming his willingness to impose sanctions on Russia.
“I want to see him reach an agreement to prevent Russian, Ukrainian, and other people from dying,” Trump stated during a press conference in the Oval Office at the White House.
“I think he will. I don’t want to have to impose secondary tariffs on Russian oil,” the Republican leader added, recalling that he had already taken similar measures against Venezuela by sanctioning buyers of the South American country’s crude oil.
Trump also reiterated his frustration over Ukraine’s resistance to an agreement that would allow the United States to exploit natural resources in the country—a condition he set in negotiations to end the war.
International
Deportation flight lands in Venezuela; government denies criminal gang links
A flight carrying 175 Venezuelan migrants deported from the United States arrived in Caracas on Sunday. This marks the third group to return since repatriation flights resumed a week ago, and among them is an alleged member of a criminal organization, according to Venezuelan authorities.
Unlike previous flights operated by the Venezuelan state airline Conviasa, this time, an aircraft from the U.S. airline Eastern landed at Maiquetía Airport, on the outskirts of Caracas, shortly after 2:00 p.m. with the deportees.
Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who welcomed the returnees at the airport, stated that the 175 repatriated individuals were coming back “after being subjected, like all Venezuelans, to persecution” and dismissed claims that they belonged to the criminal organization El Tren de Aragua.
However, Cabello confirmed that “for the first time in these flights we have been carrying out, someone of significance wanted by Venezuelan justice has arrived, and he is not from El Tren de Aragua.” Instead, he belongs to a gang operating in the state of Trujillo. The minister did not disclose the individual’s identity or provide details on where he would be taken.
International
Son of journalist José Rubén Zamora condemns father’s return to prison as “illegal”
The son of renowned journalist José Rubén Zamora Marroquín, José Carlos Zamora, has denounced as “illegal” the court order that sent his father back to a Guatemalan prison on March 3, after already spending 819 days behind barsover a highly irregular money laundering case.
“My father’s return to prison was based on an arbitrary and illegal ruling. It is also alarming that the judge who had granted him house arrest received threats,” José Carlos Zamora told EFE in an interview on Saturday.
The 67-year-old journalist was sent back to prison inside the Mariscal Zavala military barracks on March 3, when Judge Erick García upheld a Court of Appeals ruling that overturned the house arrest granted to him in October. Zamora had already spent 819 days in prison over an alleged money laundering case.
His son condemned the situation as “unacceptable”, stating that the judge handling the case “cannot do his job in accordance with the law due to threats against his life.”
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