This is a first in the history of Colombia. The country announced Tuesday, March 30, the extradition of a guerrilla from the National Liberation Army (ELN) to the United States for drug trafficking.
“There are a total of eleven members of the ELN, four of whom have already been arrested” and seven wanted, said the High Commissioner for Peace, Miguel Ceballos, adding that their extradition “Is part of a broader concern of prosecutors and judges in the United States”.
President Ivan Duque signed the first of these extraditions on Monday, concerning José Gabriel Alvarez, required by a Texas court for drug trafficking and who should be transferred to the United States in ten days.
The ELN, considered the last active guerrilla war in the country since the 2016 peace agreement with the rebellion of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), has denied any involvement. “It is totally false that the character called José Gabriel Alvarez Ortiz is a member of the ELN, as are the three others who will be extradited”, the guerrilla central command said in a statement. The three others already arrested are Yamit Rodriguez alias “Choncha”, Franco Ruiz alias “Motorola” and Henry Trigos.
The talks started with the ELN buried in January 2019
Operating since 1964 and numbering around 2,300 combatants, the ELN claims not to be linked to drug trafficking. Recorded as a group “Terrorist” by the United States, the European Union and the current Colombian right-wing government, it is however, according to Miguel Ceballos, “In the process of being considered internationally as a group of drug traffickers”.
“It is now up to the ELN to tell us clearly whether or not it is prepared to make peace and, if it is, to put drug trafficking aside forever”, he added.
President Duque has buried the talks started with the ELN by his predecessor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Juan Manuel Santos, after the January 2019 car bomb attack on the Bogota Police Academy, in which twenty- two cadets had been killed, in addition to the perpetrator of the attack.
He demands that Cuba deliver the ELN delegation which has since remained on the island, but Havana refuses, invoking the protocol signed by Colombia and the guarantor countries which provides for a safe return of the rebels to their camps.
