COLOMBIA has reached an agreement with the guerilla group National Liberation Army (ELN) on Sunday to allow the indigenous Embera community to return to their lands.

The talks with the ELN, Colombia’s largest remaining rebel group, aims to end the country’s long and bitter conflict.

Speaking in Dabeiba in north-western Colombia on Sunday, President Gustavo Petro said: “The first point of agreement that we reached with the ELN — in barely a week of these dialogues — is the return of the indigenous Embera people to their reservations.”

President Petro did not say when the Embera would be able to return to their lands in Choco and Risaralda in western Colombia.

The Embera had been forced to flee the deadly violence between right-wing armed groups, drug gangs and the ELN.

The displaced Embera have held regular demonstrations in parks in Bogota to demand a safe return to their homelands after many had been exiled in the capital.

Mr Petro, Colombia’s first ever left-wing president and a former member of the M-19 rebel movement, has been pushing hard for progress in the peace negotiations.

After taking office in August, the president has pressed the ELN to secure a comprehensive peace deal, even though no ceasefire had been reached between the two parties.

The ELN had agreed to allow humanitarian aid as part of the peace process framework it signed with the government of then president Juan Manuel Santos in 2016.

That year Mr Santos signed a historic peace deal with Colombia’s largest and oldest rebel group, the Farc, who operate in a different part of the country to the ELN.

Talks between the ELN and the government were called off in 2019 by Mr Santos’s successor, Ivan Duque, after the ELN bombed a police academy in Bogota.