The Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, has accepted this Saturday the invitation of the Colombian Government to participate as a companion in the dialogues of Gustavo Petro’s team with the National Liberation Army (ELN) taking place in Caracas.
The Colombian High Commissioner for Peace, Danilo Rueda, made the news public by sharing the letter sent by Guterres himself in which he accepts the invitation and designates his representative, who will be Carlos Ruiz Massieu, head of the UN Verification Mission in the country.
«We celebrate the positive response of Antonio Guterres to the invitation to participate as a permanent accompanier in the peace talks between the Government of Colombia and the ELN,» Rueda wrote on Twitter.
In the letter, the representative also congratulated all the parties «for having reached this first essential stage» and expressed the firm support of the United Nations to «accompany the parties in the search for peace that the Colombian people yearn for».
The dialogues with the ELN have Venezuela, Cuba and Norway as guarantor countries, in addition the parties invited last month Chile, Brazil and Mexico to join in that capacity, and the United States, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and Spain as accompaniers, as well as the UN Secretary General, in the framework of the «total peace» process promoted by Petro.
