The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, assured this Monday in Bogotá that for the moment Cuba will not be removed from the list of countries instigating terrorism, in which it is at the request of Colombia for hosting guerrilla negotiators from the National Liberation Army (ELN), but said they will continue to consider it.
“We have clear criteria, clear laws, clear requirements and we will continue to consider it and see if Cuba continues to deserve such a designation,” said Blinken, who is visiting Bogotá, at a joint press conference with Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in the Casa de Nariño (headquarters of the Executive).
For his part, Petro clearly told him that the fact that Cuba is on that list is “an injustice,” since it was the Colombian government of Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018) who asked the island to first host the negotiations on peace with the FARC, which even the US government, then led by Barack Obama, supported, and later with the ELN.
But with the arrival of Iván Duque to power in Colombia and Donald Trump in the US, Bogotá asked Washington to declare Cuba a country that stimulated terrorist activities, with which the Caribbean island was once again included in that relationship. in 2021, which carries penalties.
“That is called an injustice. Therefore, in my opinion (…) it must be corrected,” said Petro, who is trying to reactivate the peace negotiations with the ELN, after four years paralyzed by clashes and misunderstandings between the parties.
Precisely this Sunday, the ELN dialogue delegation left Havana to “return” to Colombia or the areas where they have a presence, as part of these negotiations.
The leadership of the ELN, including its leader, Eliécer Herlinto Chamorro, alias “Antonio García”, and members of the Central Command (Coce), such as Israel Ramírez, alias “Pablo Beltrán”, were in Cuba from the beginning of the talks and their return to the guerrilla camps is a step foreseen in the protocols so that he can reconnect with his ranks in the face of the negotiation.
To this end, one of the first steps taken by the Petro government when announcing its intention to resume talks was the suspension of the arrest and extradition orders against the ELN negotiators who were in Cuba so that they could travel.
The dialogues with the ELN began in February 2017 in Quito, from where they were transferred to Havana the following year, but they were stalled and officially detained in 2019 in the Government of Duque (2018-2022), after an attack by that guerrilla against the Police School in Bogotá in January 2019, where 23 people died and nearly a hundred were injured. (EFE)
