Representatives of the Colombian government and members of the so-called Central General Staff of the extinct FARC-EP dissidents, held an exploratory meeting to assess the return to peace talks.
In a joint statement they detailed that the exploratory meeting took place in the department of Caquetá with the accompaniment of the representative of the UN Verification Mission in Colombia and another from the Norwegian government.
According to the document, they expressed the willingness and need for these dialogues to be set by a bilateral ceasefire, whose execution must be verified.
The High Commissioner for Peace, Danilo Rueda, explained at the meeting the concept of President Gustavo Petro’s Total Peace policy, its constitutional and legal framework, and its territorial approach, the criteria for building trust, as well as the dialogue presuppositions.
“A central issue in the government’s response to Total Peace is the binding substantial citizen demands and the rights that must be guaranteed to transition to the Social and Environmental State of Law,” the text states.
For their part, the delegates of the insurgency presented their initial proposals to advance this objective and put an end to the internal conflict in the country. Among them, they pointed out that Total Peace for the FARC EP means the eradication of the causes that generate the social and armed conflict.
They determined in the meeting that a first step for a second rapprochement should be the declaration, as soon as possible, of a bilateral ceasefire agreed by the parties, thus avoiding more pain in the Colombian family and added that for the start of dialogue they will be consulted. all its structures.
Finally, they stressed the importance of the participation of neutral third parties as a guarantee in the dialogues.
The parties agreed to sign a confidential protocol to guarantee a meeting of the commanders of the Central General Staff of the FARC-EP.
“We believe that, as never before, in the history of our country, the conditions are being created to leave decades of fratricidal violence behind forever,” concluded the statement signed by High Commissioner Danilo Rueda and members of the guerrilla: Calarcá Córdoba , Alonso 45, Ermes Tovar and Erika Castro.
“The dialogue begins,” Petro wrote on his Twitter profile, a phrase that he accompanied with two photos and that attest to the meeting of the delegations to advance the Total Peace policy, a transversal axis to all his government programs to achieve change. In colombia.
(With information from Prensa Latina)