On Monday, Colombia’s Attorney General, Francisco Barbosa, announced that he had agreed to suspend the arrest warrant against Eliécer Chamorro, aka Antonio García, top guerrilla commander of the National Liberation Army (ELN).

This is because there are “two ongoing peace processes” with the Colombian government.

Speaking to the National Security Summit for the departments, Barbosa assured that he had recently received “a new resolution signed by the President (Gustavo Petro) requesting the suspension of the arrest warrant for Mr. Antonio García of the ELN.”

Faced with this, the prosecution has verified the justice system and “we believe that it is indeed possible to suspend these arrest warrants because there are two ongoing peace processes,” said the prosecutor, pointing out that there are still criticisms of these processes . but “peace is not incompatible with security, peace must be compatible with security”.

“We shook hands, we lifted and suspended the arrest warrants against the ELN and against the dissidents,” Barbosa explained.

Gustavo Petro, the first left-wing president in Colombia’s history, has been negotiating since November 2022 with this guerrilla group, founded in 1964 in the thick of the Cuban revolution, while promoting rapprochement with rebels who deviated from the historic peace pact that disarmed the powerful FARC guerrilla in 2017, with no major progress to de-escalate the armed conflict.

Negotiations with the ELN came to a head in late March when the insurgents launched a long-gun and explosives attack that killed ten soldiers near the Venezuelan border.

However, the parties remained at the dialogue table, which will conclude its third cycle in Cuba next Thursday.

Garcia is one of the most outspoken members of the guerrilla decision-making body known as the ELN Central Command (COCE). Justice needs it for the forced recruitment of 71 minors and their participation in a car bomb attack on a police academy that left 22 dead in addition to the attacker. That operation buried negotiations with Petro’s predecessor, the conservative Iván Duque (2018-2022).