HAVANA, Jan 21, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Colombia’s leftist ELN rebels claimed
responsibility on Monday for the bombing of a police academy in Bogota that
killed 20 people as well as the attacker, and derailed peace talks being held
in Havana.
The National Liberation Army said Thursday’s car bombing, which sparked
nationwide protests, was a reprisal attack after the government of President
Ivan Duque failed to respect a unilateral ceasefire declared by the rebels
over Christmas.
“The operation carried out against these installations and troops is
lawful within the law of war, there were no non-combatant victims,” the ELN
said in a statement on its website.
It added the academy was a military installation where cadets received
training to become intelligence operatives and conduct military operations.
“The president did not respect the gesture of peace” and “his response was
to carry out military attacks against us,” it said.
Specifically, the ELN said Colombian troops bombed a camp on December 25,
affecting a family of peasants who were nearby.
“It is then very disproportionate that, while the government is attacking
us, we cannot respond in self-defense,” the statement added.
The attack was a major setback to two years of peace talks with the
National Liberation Army (ELN) — first hosted by Ecuador and currently by
Cuba — that failed to go beyond the exploratory stage before stalling when
Duque took power in August 2018.
In its wake, Duque announced that he was reinstating arrest warrants for
10 ELN members who are part of the group’s delegation to the Cuba talks and
said he was revoking “the resolution creating the conditions that allow their
stay in that country.”
Thousands of people marched throughout Colombia on Sunday to condemn the
car bombing, the deadliest attack with explosives in Bogota since 2003.
Protests were held in several cities around the country, with marchers in
white waving Colombian flags and chanting slogans like “cowardly killers” and
“life is sacred.”
The peace talks had been aimed at ending more than five decades of
insurgency by the Marxist-inspired guerrillas.
Colombia has experienced several years of relative calm since the 2016
peace accord signed by then-president Santos and the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas.
With the landmark agreement turning the former rebels into a political
party, the smaller National Liberation Army is considered the last active
rebel group in the country.