Development: On 12 February, Colombia's judiciary issued 21 arrest warrants for guerrillas in the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), including five members of its central command (Coce).
Significance: The arrest warrants underpin the assertion by President Juan Manuel Santos that resuming his government’s peace negotiations with the ELN will be “very difficult”. With only six months left in office, Santos no longer has the political capital he enjoyed at the outset of his government’s peace negotiations with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) guerrillas in Cuba, and the majority of presidential aspirants ahead of May’s presidential election are now opposed to pursuing talks with the ELN in view of the violence unleashed by the guerrilla group since the expiry of the bilateral ceasefire on 10 January.
- The attorney general’s office has opened 27 investigations in relation to the four-day ‘armed strike’ being carried out by the ELN in eight departments in Colombia, which is due to end this evening.
- A soldier was killed in the municipality of Valdivia in the north-western department of Antioquia in a clash with ELN guerrillas on the third day of the armed strike yesterday. An ELN guerrilla was killed in a separate incident in the east-central department of Boyacá.
- The arrest warrants issued by the judiciary include not only ‘Gabino’ (Nicolás Rodríguez Bautista), the maximum leader of the ELN, but also ‘Pablo Beltrán’ (Israel Ramírez Pineda), the guerrilla group’s chief peace negotiator in Ecuador, although in the latter’s case it has been suspended because he remains in Quito.
- One of the cases being investigated by the attorney general’s office is the abduction and murder of three demobilised Farc guerrillas, whose remains were found on 5 February in a rural area in the southern border department of Nariño. The attorney general’s office is holding the ELN’s Coce responsible for this incident. It is also probing the forced recruitment of 45 indigenous minors.
Looking Ahead: Unless the ELN makes a significant gesture in the near future the prospects for a resumption of the peace process with the Colombian government in Ecuador look bleak.