By Julia Symmes Cobb
BOGOTA (Reuters) – A warning from the Cuban embassy in Colombia about a possible attack in Bogota by National Liberation Army (ELN) rebels is inaccurate, the guerrilla group said on Thursday, accusing the Colombian government of planning attacks on civilians.
Cuba’s ambassador earlier this week wrote to the Colombian government to alert it to a supposed attack being planned by the ELN’s Eastern Front.
Cuba was the site of brief peace talks between the Marxist ELN and the Colombian government, which collapsed after the ELN bombed Bogota’s police academy in 2019, killing more than 20 people. The rebel peace delegation remains in Havana.
“After verifying with all the guerrilla organization of the National Liberation Army, we clarify that the information received by the Cuban embassy in Bogota is not part of the ELN’s military plans,” said the statement, dated Feb. 10 and posted to the ELN’s website on Thursday.
“We alert the public that the state’s armed forces are planning to carry out terrorist actions against the population to cast blame on the ELN, to intensify international pressure against our delegation in Cuba.”
Asked for his reaction to the ELN’s statement, Defense Minister Diego Molano responded with a modified version of a local idiom about thieves mocking their victims.
“After thief and terrorist, buffoon.”
The ambassador’s two-paragraph letter said the attack was planned for the coming days, but added the embassy could not evaluate the “verisimilitude” of the information.
Colombia has repeatedly urged Cuba to extradite the ELN negotiators on charges related to the police academy bombing.
The delegation, which had told the ambassador it had no knowledge of the supposed planned attack, does not participate in military decision-making, the ELN said.
The ELN, founded by radical Catholic priests in 1964, is widely considered to be less centrally controlled than the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebel group, which inked a peace deal with the government in 2016.
(Reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
