Colombia suspends peace talks with ELN rebels after bomb attacks

Police officers and relatives attend the funeral of five police killed the day before in a bomb attack in Barranquilla. (AFP)

BOGOTA: Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos on Monday suspended peace talks with Marxist ELN rebels after a series of bomb attacks over the weekend killed seven police officers and injured dozens.
The government and the National Liberation Army (ELN) have been in talks since February 2017 to end a five decade war but Santos said he will not accept the group’s continued violence after it launched bomb attacks on three police stations nationwide on Saturday and Sunday.
“My patience and the patience of the Colombian people has its limits, so I have taken the decision to suspend the start of the fifth cycle of negotiations, that was scheduled for the coming days, until we see coherence between the ELN’s words and its actions,” Santos said at an event close to Bogota.
Five police were killed and more than 40 wounded on Saturday morning when the ELN detonated a bomb in the northern port city of Barranquilla as officers lined up to receive orders.
Two more died and one was wounded just before midnight on Saturday in rural Bolivar province, and the third attack took place about four hours later in the city of Soledad, close to Barranquilla, injuring five police and one civilian.
“The authorship of these terrible actions is on the head of the National Liberation Army,” Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas said earlier on Monday, adding that the violence raised the question of whether the group wants peace.
The ELN and the government have been in formal peace talks for nearly a year, and the two sides agreed to their first-ever cease-fire in October. But the rebels launched a new offensive when the cease-fire expired earlier this month, killing security force members, bombing major oil pipelines and kidnapping an oil contractor.
Another larger rebel group, the FARC, demobilized under a 2016 peace deal with the government. It is now known as the Revolutionary Alternative Common Force political party.