Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla group said a Russian-Armenian citizen it held hostage for six months was in April killed while trying to escape, a startling admission that risks throwing the group’s ongoing peace talks with the government into jeopardy.
In an interview, a commander of Colombia’s last active guerrilla group said that ransoms from kidnappings were necessary to keep its fighters in the field and that peace would be impossible without state funding to feed and clothe the rebels.
The ELN seized Arsen Voskanyan in November.
The group claimed that he was collecting endangered, poisonous frogs in the jungles of Choco department in the northwest and accused him of wanting to smuggle wildlife overseas.
After his lengthy captivity, Voskanyan was shot when he grabbed a hand grenade in a bid to escape, according to the ELN commander, who would only give his nom-de-guerre, Yerson.
“The grenade exploded... Several of our boys were wounded, the entire unit of five boys. He fled, he was shot and killed... The issue of his body will be negotiated,” Yerson said, adding that the death took place within his unit.
Yerson supplied no evidence to back up his assertions.
Another person with knowledge of the matter also confirmed that Voskanyan had been killed.
Colombia’s government said it knew nothing of the ELN’s claim and the last it knew was that Voskanyan had escaped.
“The responsibility is with the ELN,” the senior official said, asking not to be named.
The ELN’s practice of kidnapping civilians is a key issue at peace talks taking place in the Ecuadorean capital of Quito. That Voskanyan was killed as talks progress and the ELN failed to inform the government may complicate already tricky negotiations to end 53 years of war and make the need to agree a ceasefire more pressing.
“It makes it urgent to get a bilateral, verifiable ceasefire as soon as possible so this does not keep happening,” said leftist Colombian Senator Antonio Navarro Wolff, who once belonged to the now-demobilized urban guerrilla group M-19.
Yerson and his troops said they are not optimistic a peace agreement can be reached, because neither side will give ground on kidnapping.
The ELN has refused to stop taking hostages for ransom, launching bomb attacks and extorting foreign oil and mining companies while talks are ongoing.
The government has said it will not move forward on issues like a bilateral ceasefire until it does.
Talks with the ELN are being held as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), until this year the biggest rebel group, has demobilized, formed a new political party and ended its part in a civil war that killed more than 220,000 people and displaced millions over five decades.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who meted out some of the most crushing military blows against the FARC and earned a Nobel Peace Prize last year for his efforts at peace, has had less success with the ELN, which moves in mobile units of four or so fighters.
Inspired by the Cuban revolution and established by radical Catholic priests in 1964, the ELN was close to disappearing in the 1970s but steadily gained power again.
By 2002 it had as many as 5,000 fighters, financed by “war taxes” levied on landowners and oil companies. It is now believed to have about 2,000 fighters, but Yerson, who would not confirm the number, said the group is heavily recruiting.
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