Colombia’s Interior Minister on Tuesday said a delay in peace talks with the FARC was due to “technical” difficulties, attempting to calm down lawmakers who showed displeasure about the last-minute delay.
“There are no fundamental problems,” Minister Federico Renjifo told reporters in Bogota. “It was technical circumstances. As you can imagine you have to construct an entire stage for this, especially in regards to public relations and the media, and we didn’t succeed in getting the whole mechanism working in time.”
According to the minister, the technical difficulties have to do with “information platforms, websites, things like that.”
The negotiations in Cuba between the government of President Juan Manuel Santos and Colombia’s largest rebel group, the FARC, were supposed to begin Thursday, but were delayed until Monday, the delegations announced Tuesday.
The delay was rebuked by the presidents of Colombia’s Senate and House.
The peace talks are the first since 2002 and aim to end the almost 50-year conflict between the Marxist guerrillas and the state.