Colombia and Rebel Group Begin Cease-Fire After Decades of Combat

A cease-fire between the Colombian authorities and the nation’s largest remaining insurgent group took impact on Thursday, the longest halt to hostilities the group has agreed to and a milestone in efforts to finish the nation’s 60-year inner battle, which has killed roughly 450,000 individuals.

While the cease-fire is meant to final six-months, it may pave the best way for a everlasting truce with the leftist group, the National Liberation Army, a guerrilla group often called the E.L.N. that operates within the countryside and has helped gasoline the violence that plagues components of rural Colombia.

The settlement with the rebel group was a prime precedence for President Gustavo Petro, who took workplace final yr promising to ship what he known as “total peace’’ with all of the country’s armed groups. Mr. Petro, himself a former member of a rebel group, is the country’s first leftist president.

The cease-fire applies to combat between the E.L.N. and the state, but allows the group to defend itself if it is attacked.

Government officials hope the agreement will protect the “civilian population that has been so affected by the actions of the illegal armed organizations,” Iván Velásquez, Colombia’s protection minister, mentioned on Wednesday.

The group’s lack of a unified command has made it tough to barter with previously. Individual factions typically act autonomously — at instances over the objections of excessive commanders.

Previous discussions between the E.L.N. and the federal government have collapsed a number of instances because the Marxist-Leninist group was based in 1964. The most up-to-date negotiations have been suspended in 2019 after the group bombed a police academy in Bogotá, the capital, an assault that killed 22 police cadets.

A newly created entity made up of the officers from the Colombian navy and authorities, the United Nations and spiritual teams will monitor the enforcement of the brand new settlement.

The cease-fire was introduced in June following three rounds of personal negotiations in Cuba, Mexico and Venezuela.

“Hopefully it will bear fruit,” Mr. Petro mentioned of the settlement in a speech on Tuesday. “It will depend more on them than on us.”

The E.L.N.’s prime commander, Eliécer Herlinto Chamorro, identified by his nom de guerre Antonio García, known as on combatants to adjust to the cease-fire in a video on Monday and mentioned that additional discussions with the “participation of society” would transfer ahead “to make Colombia a fairer, more democratic and inclusive country.”

Colombia’s inner battle erupted within the late Nineteen Fifties as a battle between the federal government and a leftist insurgency group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, know because the FARC, however finally grew extra advanced and concerned different left-wing rebels, right-wing paramilitary teams and drug cartels.

The authorities reached a landmark peace accord with the FARC, the biggest insurgent group, in 2016 following an arduous five-year course of.

But the E.L.N., which has round 5,800 members, in response to Colombia’s protection ministry, is taken into account extra ideological than the FARC and fewer hierarchical. The FARC’s disarmament left an influence vacuum for different armed teams to fill, together with the E.L.N., which has almost doubled in dimension since 2016.

The totally different teams typically compete for management of territory and the nation’s drug commerce, trapping harmless civilians within the center.

The E.LN. has carried out kidnappings for ransom, extortion and assassinations, and is understood for bombing oil pipelines and concentrating on authorities and navy infrastructure. In many areas with little authorities presence alongside the Pacific Coast, in addition to the border with Venezuela, they successfully act because the state.

If the cease-fire holds, it could be a serious victory for Mr. Petro, who’s dealing with a political disaster after his son was accused of laundering cash from drug traffickers.

It may additionally probably result in different agreements with the E.L.N. that will particularly name for a halt in violence towards civilians, mentioned Elizabeth Dickinson, a Colombia-based senior analyst for International Crisis Group.

“The hope is that the negotiations will have advanced far enough that we can think about other steps,” mentioned Ms. Dickinson. “The priority for our communities and really the general population would be a cessation of hostilities.”