The Government of Colombia confirmed on Wednesday that the peace dialogue with the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) “is suspended” after the attack by that armed group against an Army military base in the department of Arauca, in the east of the country, which left two dead and 27 injured.

The Government delegation at the dialogue table clarified in this way what was said on Tuesday night by President Gustavo Petro, who declared that the attack “closes a peace process with blood.”

“During these months the Government has sent multiple proposals to the ELN. Today the dialogue process is suspended. Its viability is severely damaged, and its continuity can only be recovered with an unequivocal manifestation of the will for peace of the ELN,” the delegation added in a statement, which did not completely close the door to the process.

In the letter they also expressed their “absolute rejection of the attack perpetrated by the ELN on the military base of Puerto Jordán, Arauca” and showed their condolences to the families of the victims “in the face of this new act of violence that claims the lives of young Colombians.”

The Colombian Government and the ELN restarted in November 2022 in Caracas the peace negotiations with the last major Latin American guerrilla that, however, stagnated at the beginning of this year due to the demands of the ELN that the Executive remove them from the list of terrorist groups and abandon the regional dialogue it maintains in the department of Nariño (southwest) with Comuneros del Sur, supposedly split from the ELN.

During the various cycles of negotiations in Caracas, Havana and Mexico City, the parties reached several partial agreements and agreed on a one-year bilateral ceasefire, the longest maintained 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.

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Petro compared Tuesday’s attack to the attack on 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 having 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.

On that occasion, the government of Iván Duque broke off peace negotiations with the guerrillas.

Tuesday’s attack was at the Puerto Jordán military base, in Arauca (east), which “was attacked with improvised explosive devices launched 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.” Two of the injured died on Tuesday night.

The violent escalation of the ELN left two soldiers dead last Sunday in a rural area of Tame (Arauca) and 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.

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