Colombia agrees ceasefire with main armed groups: President

President Gustavo Petro proclaims ceasefire with the 5 largest armed teams to help peace talks.

Colombia’s authorities has agreed to a six-month ceasefire with the 5 largest armed teams working within the nation, President Gustavo Petro introduced on New Yr’s Eve.

Petro, the nation’s first left-wing president, has pledged to finish the Andean nation’s inner battle, which has run for nearly six many years killing a minimum of 450,000 folks between 1985 and 2018.

“This can be a daring act,” Petro wrote on Twitter. “The bilateral ceasefire obliges the armed organisations and the state to respect it. There will probably be a nationwide and worldwide verification mechanism.”

Among the many teams are the leftist armed group the Nationwide Liberation Military (ELN) in addition to dissident teams run by former members of the now-demobilised Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Segunda Marquetalia and Estado Mayor Central.

The truce was the primary goal of Petro’s “whole peace” coverage geared toward ending the nation’s armed battle, which has persevered regardless of the dissolution of FARC in 2017.

The armed teams nonetheless working in Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer, are locked in lethal disputes over drug trafficking revenues and different unlawful companies, in line with the Institute for Growth and Peace Research (Indepaz), an unbiased think-tank.

Regardless of the federal government’s efforts to barter with Colombia’s varied armed teams, which embody a mixed whole of greater than 10,000 fighters, it has to this point did not comprise the spiral of violence engulfing the nation. Indepaz recorded almost 100 massacres final yr.

The ELN, the final recognised insurgent group within the nation, has been negotiating with the federal government since November.

The Segunda Marquetalia and Estado Mayor Central teams – splinter factions of FARC which broke from the 2016 peace pact – have held separate talks with the federal government.

AGC, the nation’s largest drug gang, is made up of the remnants of maximum right-wing paramilitaries that demobilised within the early 2000s.

The federal government is providing the teams “benevolent therapy from the judicial standpoint” for the armed actors “in change for a give up of property, a dismantling of those organisations and the chance that they cease exercising these illicit economies”, Senator Ivan Cepeda lately informed AFP information company.

Some dissidents refused to put down their arms alongside their FARC comrades six years in the past, when the fearsome insurgent group signed the take care of Bogota to finish greater than 5 many years of battle.

Colombia has suffered greater than 50 years of armed battle between the state and varied teams of left-wing fighters, right-wing paramilitaries and drug traffickers. There are presently about 90 political and legal teams working within the nation, in line with Indepaz.