Bogota (AFP) – Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos postponed peace talks with the ELN rebels Thursday, hours before they were due to open, insisting they first release an ex-lawmaker being held hostage.
Santos, who won the Nobel Peace Prize this month, said the government remained committed to making peace but would not budge from its demand for the ELN to first release former congressman Odin Sanchez.
“The formal installation of the negotiating table with (the ELN) is postponed until they release Odin Sanchez safe and sound,” Santos said in a speech.
He said he had ordered the government’s negotiating team to “suspend” its trip to the Ecuadoran capital Quito, where the talks had been due to formally open at 5:00 pm (2200 GMT).
Earlier, Interior Minister Juan Fernando Cristo said the government was prepared to reschedule the start of talks to Friday, Saturday “or whenever we are certain that Odin Sanchez has been freed.”
The National Liberation Army (ELN) is Colombia’s second-largest rebel group after the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which has been in talks with the government for nearly four years.
The ELN talks are meant to open a new, decisive front in Santos’s efforts to end an armed conflict that has lasted more than half a century and killed more than 260,000 people.
Santos has already signed a peace deal with the FARC, but voters rejected it in a referendum this month — sending negotiators back to the drawing board.
And the ELN talks are shaping up to be even trickier.
– Hostage dispute –
The ELN had promised to free its hostages before the talks — as the FARC did before starting negotiations in Cuba in 2012.
But it bristled last week when the government’s chief negotiator, Juan Camilo Restrepo, gave it an ultimatum to free Sanchez. The ELN accused Restrepo of “torpedoing” the talks.
Since then, there has been no news on the fate of the hostage — or hostages, according to some sources — still being held by the leftist guerrillas.
Sanchez voluntarily went into ELN custody in April to take the place of his brother Patrocinio, a former governor who had fallen ill after three years in captivity.
Sources in the Catholic Church, which has played a part in preliminary negotiations, say the rebels are also holding a doctor named Edgar Torres.
– Down to the wire –
The talks would be the fifth attempt to make peace with the ELN over the years.
The ELN says its negotiating team is already in Quito and ready to begin talks.
Their head negotiator, Pablo Beltran, tweeted that they are “fulfilling everything that was agreed.”
Like the FARC, the ELN formed in 1964 and is blamed for killings and kidnappings during a many-sided civil war.
Both groups have relied on ransom kidnappings and drug trafficking to fund themselves.
Analyst Camilo Echandia of Colombia’s Externado University said the ELN was reluctant to accept the release of hostages as a condition for talks.
“That is the big difference between the ELN and the FARC,” he told AFP. “These negotiations are going to be very complicated.”
– Mistrust –
Frederic Masse, a specialist on armed groups at Externado University, said: “What is still lacking in the case of the ELN is trust between the two delegations” in the talks.
Incidents involving ELN forces have kept tensions high in recent months.
The Colombian army blamed the ELN for a non-fatal explosion at an oil pipeline near the Venezuelan border on Sunday.
Colombian authorities estimate the ELN currently has some 1,500 members, active mainly in the north and west of the country.
Colombia’s territorial and ideological conflict has drawn in various guerrilla and paramilitary groups, drug gangs and state forces over the decades.
The conflict has forced nearly seven million people to flee their homes, according to Colombian authorities.
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