The President of Colombia said that the attack on a military base, attributed to the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla group, "is an action that practically ends the peace process, with bloodshed".
Gustavo Petro condemned on Tuesday the attack on the Puerto Jordán base, in the Arauca department, in eastern Colombia, which caused the death of two soldiers and left 25 injured.
"The consequences of the actions and the flow of history today bring us a dramatic and repeated event in our last years, a truck loaded with explosives, (...) according to the information I have, provided by the ELN with whom we were in peace talks", Petro lamented.
The President compared this attack with another, against the Colombian Police Cadet School in Bogotá, which in January 2019 left 20 dead and 68 injured, suspending the dialogue that the Government had with the guerrilla group.
"And it is like an eternal future, silencing a part of the people and continuing with wars, killing each other over and over again as if this were our history," Petro lamented.
"A negotiating table cannot continue amidst the blood of our wounded soldiers, of the civilian population," the Colombian Interior Minister also said.
"The ELN did not understand the message (...) it lost a historic opportunity to negotiate peace; it insists on violence, it insists on harming Colombians," added Juan Fernando Cristo.
On the social network X (formerly Twitter), the Colombian Ministry of Defense said that "the military and medical equipment continues to transport the uniformed personnel injured after the terrorist attack."
The authorities added that 18 of the wounded were transferred to the capital, Bogotá, while the rest continue to receive care in medical centers in Tame, Yopal and Arauca.
The ministry said 20 of the injured were hit by shrapnel from explosions and seven were “seriously injured” after the base was “attacked with improvised explosive devices thrown from a truck.”
“This terrorist attack, attributed to the organized armed group ELN (...) was carried out near a school, which put the lives of minors at risk, and constitutes a flagrant violation of human rights and a serious violation of international humanitarian law,” the ministry said.
The Colombian government and the ELN began peace talks in November 2022. But the main achievement of the dialogue, a bilateral ceasefire that lasted for a year, ended without a new agreement last August, with the guerrillas resuming attacks.
On Sunday, two soldiers died in a rural area of Tame, in an attack attributed to the ELN that targeted them while they were at a checkpoint.
The guerrillas also recently attacked the Caño Limón-Coveñas and Bicentenario oil pipelines, two of the most important in the country.
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