PASTO, Colombia — A insurgent group known as the Commoners of the South has begun handing its weapons over to Colombia’s authorities, the Protection Ministry mentioned Saturday, as a part of peace talks anticipated to result in the group’s disarmament within the coming months.
The group of about 250 fighters operates in Colombia’s Southwestern Nariño province and has been in negotiations with the federal government since final 12 months.
“This can be a historic second,” Protection Minister Pedro Sanchez mentioned in a ceremony within the city of Pasto, the place a number of accords with the group had been outlined by officers.
Sanchez mentioned that over the previous two days, the Commoners of the South have handed over land mines, grenades and rockets to a military unit that’s destroying them.
“Farmers will be capable to stroll with out the concern of coming throughout a minefield,” Sanchez mentioned.
Till just lately, the Commoners of the South was a part of the Nationwide Liberation Military, or ELN, a bunch of about 6,000 fighters that’s nonetheless combating Colombia’s authorities.
PHOTOS: A rebel group begins handing weapons over to the Colombian government as peace talks advance
In Could final 12 months, the Commoners broke away from the ELN and commenced peace talks with the administration of President Gustavo Petro. That angered the ELN’s management and stymied its negotiations with Colombia’s authorities.
Petro, who was a part of a insurgent group in his youth, has been staging peace talks with 9 separate insurgent teams and drug trafficking gangs in Colombia beneath a technique often called “whole peace.”
Most of those negotiations have failed to cut back violence and up to now solely the Commoners of the South have agreed to start a transition towards civilian life.
“The Commoners of the South are solely one in every of 9 issues” confronted by the Petro administration, mentioned Gerson Arias, an analyst on the Concepts for Peace Basis, a assume tank in Bogota.
“And they’re solely a small and marginal section of Colombia’s armed teams,” he mentioned.
Arias mentioned the federal government has been making an attempt to succeed in regional agreements with smaller factions of insurgent teams that may take some stress off the inhabitants, as an alternative of bigger, nationwide accords.
“The talks with the Commoners of the South, are the one ones which will find yourself succeeding” within the Petro administration, Arias mentioned. However he added that some points nonetheless should be resolved, such because the authorized mechanisms by way of which victims of the group will be capable to search justice and reality.
In 2016, Colombia signed a peace take care of the nation’s largest insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, by which greater than 13,000 fighters laid down their weapons.
However the FARC’s withdrawal from some rural areas created an influence vacuum that smaller teams have tried to fill.
Colombia’s authorities is now struggling to offer safety in distant rural areas, the place varied teams are combating over drug trafficking routes and pure sources, whereas they forcibly recruit minors and tax native companies to lift funds.
Earlier this 12 months, greater than 50,000 folks had been displaced from their properties in Catatumbo, a area alongside Colombia’s border with Venezuela, after the ELN attacked villages the place it accused farmers of supporting a rival group.
The Colombian authorities suspended peace talks with the ELN following these assaults, with Petro accusing its leaders of changing into “grasping” drug traffickers who’ve betrayed their revolutionary beliefs.
In Nariño, which is situated alongside Colombia’s border with Ecuador, native officers are hoping that Colombia’s authorities retains insurgent teams away from the world, by offering higher safety and financial improvement tasks.
“If a peace deal is reached between the Commoners of the South and the federal government, we want to know extra in regards to the technique to guard this territory,” mentioned Giovanny Cardenas, a human rights official within the city of Samaniego.
“It will be tragic if this group demobilizes and one other group comes right here to proceed the identical battle.”
