An armed dissident group of Colombia's disbanded FARC guerrillas has said it was "ready" to start peace talks with the government next month in an apparent boost for leftist President Gustavo Petro's quest for "total peace."
The EMC dissident grouping, which rejected a 2016 peace deal that disarmed the FARC, announced at a meeting in the country's rural south "that our delegates to the dialogue table with the Colombian government... are ready for May 16."
Mr Petro - a former member of the urban guerrilla group M-19 - pledged to end six decades of an armed conflict that has left more than 450,000 dead by signing peace or surrender agreements with rebels and criminal gangs, in addition to fully implementing the pact with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
The EMC is one of two breakaway factions of the FARC and is made up of former leaders and fighters who did not accept the peace deal, which allowed in 2016 the reincorporation into civilian life of 13,000 people who formed a political party and received ten seats in Congress.
"We announce before the whole world that our delegates to the dialogue table with the Colombian state, headed by the national government, are already ready for May 16 of this year," Ángela Izquierdo, spokeswoman for the armed group, told journalists.
EMC leaders have been meeting on a farm in the southern San Vicente del Caguan region since the beginning of April to plot a strategy for peace negotiations.
That included consultations with local communities under EMC control and members of the allied so-called "farmers' guard."
The leaders included top commander "Ivan Mordisco", who the government erroneously claimed to have killed last year.
Mr Mordisco today spoke of his "conviction and hope that... we can begin to build the road map that will allow Colombia to eradicate the causes of the conflict."
There were no immediate comments from government officials.
Attorney General Francisco Barbosa suspended arrest warrants against more than 20 EMC members in early March, which facilitated the start of peace talks to be held in the Llano del Yari, on the border between the departments of Meta and Caqueta, in the south of the country.
The group, made up of 3,530 people - 2,180 combatants and1,350 auxiliaries - has maintained a bilateral ceasefire withthe Colombian government since the beginning of the year.
The other dissident FARC faction is the Segunda Marquetalia, which in August 2019 returned to the armed struggle, claiming that the state failed to comply with the peace agreement.
Mr Petro's government reestablished peace talks with the rebels of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the two parties seek to advance towards a bilateral ceasefire agreement in a third round of talks to begin soon in Cuba.
