Colombian ELN ceasefire raises concerns over limits to violence

Bogotá Colombia – On Friday, the government of Colombian President Gustavo Petro celebrated an important step towards peace: a six-month nationwide ceasefire was signed with the National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombia’s largest guerrilla group.

Speaking at a ceremony in Havana, Cuba, the leftist president said, “Ultimately, peace is built by correcting wrong paths and building new ones, because there is nothing more revolutionary… than peace.”

The ceasefire is an important development for Colombia, as the country has only signed a bilateral agreement with the ELN once before. That was in September 2017 and it only lasted 101 days.

“It’s very important to us because it could be the beginning of a scenario where we could achieve much more,” said Mauricio Capaz, a NASA native chief from the Cauca Department, where the ELN has an active presence.

The ceasefire will take effect on August 3 and will last for 180 days. It will be implemented gradually in three phases, allowing for the establishment of protocols, community dialogues and a comprehensive monitoring mechanism.

That oversight will be led by the United Nations mission in Colombia, as well as the Catholic Church, to ensure that international humanitarian law is observed. If both the ELN and the government are happy with the ceasefire at the end of the six months, they can also negotiate to extend it.

“This process can help create conditions for peace that will allow the country to move in a new direction,” Aureliano Carbonell, a senior ELN negotiator, told Al Jazeera from Havana.

‘Ambitious’ bid for peace

The government hopes the ceasefire will play an important role in ushering in an era of “total peace,” one of Petro’s key campaign promises.

Colombia has been ravaged by nearly six decades of internal armed conflict, which has killed at least 450,664 people and displaced millions from their homes. The combatants include right-wing paramilitary groups, criminal networks, left-wing rebels and government forces, all vying for control of territory.

After a 2016 peace deal led to the disarmament of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the ELN took its place as the largest remaining rebel group, with about 3,000 fighters.

This has made the ELN an important constituency in the current peace negotiations. But progress has been erratic at best. The recent ceasefire came about after three rounds of talks in three different countries, dating back to October.

Peace with the rebel group finally seemed imminent on December 31, when Petro announced on social media a New Year’s Eve ceasefire with five armed groups, including the ELN. But days later, the ELN denied any such agreement.

It was a setback for Petro, Colombia’s first leftist leader and himself a former M-19 guerrilla fighter. He had vowed to move away from the militarized approach previous Colombian governments used to deal with the violence, pledging instead to lead the negotiations.

“Petro’s approach to peace is ambitious,” Jorge Mantilla, a Colombian political analyst and conflict scholar, told Al Jazeera. “But for the ELN it is important to bear in mind that there will be no government more open to making peace with them than Petro’s.”

Weaknesses in the negotiations

Despite the significance of the ceasefire, experts worry that the violence in Colombia cannot be fully addressed.

As it stands, the ceasefire is in place to stop all fighting between the state and the ELN. But analysts say tensions between the ELN and the government are no longer a focal point of the conflict, but that the violence is being fueled by warring armed groups.

“The main shortcoming of this agreement is that it is not a cessation of hostilities, which is really necessary to improve humanitarian conditions on the ground. It is strictly a ceasefire,” Elizabeth Dickinson, a senior analyst for Colombia at the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera.

Therefore, Dickinson warned, the ELN could still conduct campaigns of intimidation against other parties, namely the civilian population and competing armed groups. The group’s tactics include territorial clashes, extortion, kidnapping, forcible confinement, recruiting minors and soliciting protection money.

Such actions would be in violation of international humanitarian law governing the ceasefire. And now that the Colombian government is determined to avoid violence with the ELN, Dickinson says state forces can focus more on their efforts to fight rival armed groups.

“It ultimately provides a strategic advantage to the ELN in terms of their ability to consolidate their control on the ground, while doing very little to protect the communities living in these areas,” Dickinson said of the ceasefire .

The ELN leadership has yet to clarify whether it will suspend its hostile activities against other armed groups. Carbonell, the ELN negotiator, told Al Jazeera, “It’s being worked on.”

“You can never really say that a given situation isn’t going to happen,” Carbonell said. “If one party does not comply, the other party is not obliged to either. But we are working to ensure that this process is welcomed by the ELN as a whole.”

The Colombian government did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Lessons from past peace efforts

There are also concerns about the implementation of the new ceasefire, as the country is wary of repeating the mistakes of the 2016 peace deal with the FARC.

Some members of the FARC refused to disarm, instead forming their own dissident groups that continue to fight in the Colombian countryside. And in areas where the FARC has disbanded, rival groups have stepped in to claim drug trafficking routes and abandoned territory, creating lingering obstacles to peace.

Capaz, the leader of Native NASA, echoed Dickinson’s fears that the new ceasefire could allow the ELN to exert its influence without state opposition. But he also worried that a successful ceasefire could encourage rival groups to enter his native Cauca – as happened after the 2016 agreement.

“The ceasefire is very good. It guarantees us some kind of peace, but the reality here is that there is a strong confrontation between the ELN and other armed groups,” he said.

The ceasefire could create “another form of control by the armed groups,” he explained. “That’s the cruel paradox of reality here.”

However, Carbonell said the ELN leadership is keen to “learn from the experience” of the 2016 agreement with the FARC. He added that the armed group hoped the ELN’s process would be “a little different” from the FARC’s.

“In building peace processes, we should try to make them of a higher quality than the previously presented and somewhat difficult results,” he told Al Jazeera. “It won’t be perfect. It may still have shortcomings due to the complexity of this whole process, but we are aiming for much more effective components.”

So far, both the government and the ELN leadership have welcomed the initial ceasefire. However, for rural Colombians living under the shadow of the ELN, their optimism is tinged with caution and the need for broader action.

“We cannot continue to bury our dead or displaced people to discuss these kinds of structural and complicated issues,” Capaz said. “A multilateral ceasefire is fundamental.”