Bogotá, Aug 9 (EFE).- The National Liberation Army (ELN) requested for this Wednesday “an extraordinary meeting of the Monitoring and Verification Mechanism” of the bilateral ceasefire after the Prosecutor’s Office denounced an alleged attack plan by the guerrilla against the attorney general, Francisco Barbosa.
“The ELN has requested for today an extraordinary meeting of the Monitoring and Verification Mechanism to examine the situation created by the prosecutor’s false accusations, which generate great difficulties in the development and trust of the process,” said the Delegation for dialogues of this guerrilla, in a message on his Twitter account.
The Prosecutor’s Office denounced yesterday that the National Liberation Army (ELN), which has a 180-day ceasefire with the Colombian government and which will be verified by the UN, is training its members “to carry out an attack with snipers” against Barbosa.
However, the ELN defended itself by saying that the news is “false” and that the prosecutor “is trying to sabotage the dialogue process that is taking place between the government and the ELN.”
For his part, Barbosa responded to the ELN today, in statements to journalists, that the ELN is not going to recognize the alleged plan to attack him: “One cannot be so stupid as to say that an act like this is being attributed, I do not know the first time that the ELN or any organization of a criminal nature comes to say or attribute a fact”.
He also indicated that an investigation is underway for this fact and recalled that he is not an “enemy of peace” since he has issued more than 19 arrest warrants against members of the ELN and another 70 with FARC dissidents.
MONITORING MECHANISM
The Monitoring and Verification Mechanism, made up of the verification mission of the UN, the ELN, the Government and the Catholic Church, is in charge of monitoring and evaluating the “incidents” of the ceasefire that began on August 3 and will last 180 days.
Among its functions is precisely to inform and prevent these “incidents”, analyze “in an impartial and objective manner the facts that are presumed to be non-compliance” and bring them to the dialogue table, to decide on a possible rupture of the cessation.
“The protocols exist precisely to avoid false and tendentious information. It will be the Monitoring and Verification Mechanism that classifies, verifies, evaluates and qualifies any fact or alleged incident that threatens the Cessation (sic),” recalled the guerrilla.
