Colombia, Rebel Group Agree to Open Peace Talks April 1

The government and the country’s main guerrilla group signed an accord Friday to begin talks April 1 toward permanently ending a 16-year-old insurgency.

President Virgilio Barco Vargas, in a nationwide television address Friday night, called on the country’s other leftist guerrilla groups to follow suit.

The accord was signed in the mountain town of Santo Domingo, 180 miles south of Bogota, by Minister of Interior Raul Orejuela Bueno and Carlos Pizarro, commander of M-19, or the April 19 Movement.

A joint declaration said four meetings that led to the accord were held in Colombia and Mexico after the leftist guerrillas declared a unilateral cease-fire eight months ago.

The declaration said both sides agreed on talks beginning April 1 that would “lead to full democracy” and reintegrate the insurgents into society.

The talks are to finish before legislative elections set for March, 1990, in which M-19 probably will participate as a legal political party, officials said.

The agreement did not say when the guerrillas would have to give up their arms.

An estimated 10,000 leftist guerrillas operate in Colombia. They are blamed for more than 2,000 deaths and nearly 500 kidnapings in 1988 alone.

M-19’s bloodiest operation was seizing the Supreme Court building in Bogota in 1985. The army retook the building, but 11 Supreme Court justices and 85 other people were killed.