MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

“Exploratory” peace talks with Colombian insurgency

Havana, Cuba will be the location for a “formal exploratory meeting” between Colombia's second largest Marxist oriented insurgency and representatives of the United States backed government leading to a possible |peace process.

The official announcement was done by Colombia's Peace Commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo and Gerardo Bermudez, an ELN chief known as Francisco Galan who was released from prison last September to explore possibilities of beginning negotiations.

The statement also said that Galan's furlough had been extended for another three months.

An earlier joint release from Restrepo and Galan said the talks would be held abroad and would include foreign observers, possibly from Norway, Switzerland and Spain. ELN with an estimated 5,000 foot soldiers is the lesser of the two main Colombian Marxist insurgent groups.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC, which has rejected overtures intended to launch peace negotiations, has an estimated army of 20,000, mostly funded by the drug cartels and kidnapping for ransom.

Agreement to hold exploratory talks abroad came late Monday in a meeting between Restrepo and Galan, but the ELN will be represented in the Havana discussions by its second-in-command, Erlington Chamorro.

ELN has been waging a four-decade-long revolution against a succession of elected Colombian administrations. Several attempts to negotiate peace with the group in the 1990s and earlier this decade broke down after weeks or months of talks.

The President Alvaro Uribe administration said the most recent effort, made last year in talks in Mexico, foundered because the guerrilla group refused to commit itself to end extortive kidnappings.

President Uribe who was elected four years ago in the first round, on a hard line no nonsense approach to the guerrilla and terrorist problem, a few weeks ago managed the approval of a constitutional reform opening the way for his re-election bid next year.

FARC has promised that as long as Mr. Uribe is president there will be "no peace talks" and called on Colombians to fight the "tyrant".