In Colombia, peace talks advance despite crises Back-channel communications have also begun with a smaller rebel group, the National Liberation Army, or ELN, which may lead to official peace negotiations in months, said Aldo Civico, a Rutgers University expert on the ELN who has spoken to people involved in the discussions. "I do think it's going to happen," said Francisco Galan, a former ELN commander. I think the stars are aligned. Both the ELN and the FARC are down to about 12,000 armed fighters. That is substantially weaker than before the start of a decade-long government offensive, which relied on billions of dollars in U.S. military equipment and intelligence that helped Colombia's security forces kill top rebel commanders and triggered mass desertions. And the nine months of official talks between President Juan Manuel Santos's government and the FARC have advanced further than any of the three previous negotiations that Colombian governments had held with the rebels. But there are crises. On Friday, the FARC said it would "pause" negotiations after criticizing Santos for having presented a bill to Congress that would permit a referendum for Colombians to vote on any peace accords. Hours later, the group said it would return to talks Monday. But Santos still ordered half of his negotiating team back to Bogota for consultations, saying, "In this process, the one who declares pauses and puts conditions is not the FARC." Although government officials said the entire team would be back in Havana on Monday to resume talks, such squabbles have given ammunition to opponents of the talks and soured millions of Colombians on the possibility that peace will ever come to this country of 47 million people. On Saturday, news that a guerrilla ambush in the country's eastern plains had killed 13 soldiers further outraged Colombians. A poll published in July showed that 54 percent of Colombians surveyed were pessimistic about the talks, up from 41 percent in September 2012. "I think there is a repudiation of the whole notion that people in the FARC should be treated other than war criminals," said Cynthia Arnson, an expert on Latin American peace processes at Washington's Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Critics of the talks, meanwhile, include powerful figures capable of influencing the public, among them former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe. He argues that the talks pose a threat to democracy by opening the door for political participation to a group of terrorists. "The only thing that is clear is they want to take us to Castro-Chavismo," Uribe said Friday, referring to the radical and authoritarian governments of Cuba and its ally Venezuela, whose late president, Hugo Chavez, had assisted the FARC.