During his inauguration in August 2022, Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla and Colombia’s first leftist president, told a crowd of 100,000 onlookers that, while the country has struggled with internal conflict for over half a century, peace was possible.

“This is the government of life and peace,” he said at the time. “It shall be remembered as such.”

Now, just over halfway through his four-year term, President Petro’s “Total Peace” strategy — which created legal pathways for the government to negotiate with Colombia’s armed groups — has stalled.

Ceasefires have been broken, security conditions have fluctuated and, in some rural areas, kidnapping and extortion rates are on the rise.

In fact, during the first year of the Total Peace policy, 189 social leaders were murdered and 94 massacres were documented, according to the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (INDEPAZ).

But government negotiators are pointing to a degree of success with one armed group, the Comuneros del Sur. They believe the negotiating tactics forged with the Comuneros could serve as an example of how to reinvigorate talks with other armed actors.

Some experts, however, caution that the gains made with the Comuneros may be short-lived — and that the tactics that work with one group may not be applicable to all.

Established in 1992, the Comuneros del Sur formed as a regional extension of Colombia’s largest Marxist rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN).

The group operates in the southwestern department of Nariño, near the border with Ecuador, where they have maintained territorial control over as many as 10 municipalities.

Approximately 200 fighters make up the Comuneros’ ranks, and they have historically funded their operations through extortion, drug trafficking and illegal mining.

In May, the Comuneros announced their rupture from the ELN after the larger group said it would resume kidnapping for ransom, a source of its profits. That, in turn, caused peace talks between the ELN and the government to falter.

“We have decided to split from the central command because we do not accept the policy of aggression and the current model of leadership,” the Comuneros stated at the time.

The Comuneros emphasised their willingness to engage with the government, separate from ELN leadership.

“We remain committed to the negotiation process between the Comuneros del Sur and the national government under the Total Peace policy of President Gustavo Petro,” they wrote in their statement.

After an initial meeting in July, government delegates and the Comuneros established a working plan for negotiations, and in August, Colombia’s Security Council recognised the rebel group as independent, paving the way for negotiations.

The peace talks with the Comuneros, which officially began on September 13, focus on three agreed-upon areas: the de-escalation of violence, territorial transformation and transitioning armed fighters to civilian life.

Andrei Gómez-Suárez, a delegate for the Colombian government in the negotiations, credits the concept of territorial transformation — or “territorialising” — with allowing strides to be made.

Colombia is a country with vast socioeconomic divides. A 2014 report by the OECD found regional inequalities in Colombia were five times higher than in the United States or Canada, and 42 times higher than in Australia.

Much of the country’s population is concentrated in dense, urban centres, but nearly two-thirds of its provinces, including Nariño, are largely rural.

With terrain that ranges from Andean mountains to thick rainforests and coastal mangroves, each province has unique demands and pressures.

Gómez-Suárez explained that working specifically with the Comuneros gave the Colombian government the opportunity to tailor their negotiations to specific, place-based needs.

“This is the first effort, after the commitment to Total Peace began, in which we have explored what territorialising peace entails,” Gómez-Suárez said while sipping Earl Grey tea in front of a huge bookcase inside his Edinburgh apartment.

He has been travelling back and forth from the Scottish capital to the mountains of Nariño since July, juggling his role as a chief negotiator with his position as a visiting scholar at the University of Edinburgh.

Gómez-Suárez considers the “territorialising” of the peace process “innovative” because it draws on the participation of many stakeholders. It brings local politicians, Indigenous leaders and regional armed fighters into dialogue with their national government.

“If we don’t work together, transforming this territory will be impossible,” Gómez-Suárez said.

This grassroots approach is something Petro’s government is betting on to achieve nationwide peace in Colombia.

In July, Petro told the United Nations Security Council, “We don’t have a national conflict but have regional conflicts in the same geographical areas as they have been for many decades.”

For Gómez-Suárez, if Colombia’s conflict is regional, then the solution should be too.

He draws a contrast between his approach to the Comuneros and the way the Colombian government previously negotiated peace with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), once the largest rebel group in the country.

In 2016, under then-President Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia signed a historic peace deal with the FARC that promised rural reforms and development in exchange for the nationwide demobilisation of the group’s fighters.

The negotiations that led up to the deal, however, were fraught — and some parts of the FARC splintered off into dissident groups rather than agree to the terms.

Gómez-Suárez argued his region-specific approach could be more efficient.

“With previous agreements, namely that with the FARC guerrillas, there was this idea that nothing is set until everything is agreed, which implied that the parties would only begin implementation after a final document was signed,” Gómez-Suárez said.

“Our case is impressive because sometimes we have even implemented before agreements are formally reached.”

He pointed out that the Comuneros proposed a unilateral ceasefire even before their first meeting with the government’s delegates, as a sign of good faith.

Since then, the parties have signed two agreements and plan to begin the Comuneros’ transition to civilian life before the next presidential elections in 2026.

The first agreement comprises four points, including a definitive bilateral ceasefire, the gradual destruction of the group’s weapons and a collaborative programme to remove land mines throughout Nariño.

The second establishes safety guarantees for the Red Cross, a humanitarian nonprofit, to operate in the Comuneros’ territory.

In addition, the deal calls for the creation of a team composed of Comuneros members who will be trained and tasked with searching for people who have gone missing during the conflict.

In return, the government has pledged funding for constructing roads, aqueducts, schools and universities in the territory, to help address poverty and infrastructure shortcomings in Nariño.

But some conflict monitors caution against interpreting these short-term gains as signs of long-term success.

Jeremy McDermott, co-director of the organised crime monitoring group InsightCrime, said the Comuneros may be willing to negotiate with the Petro government simply because their political views align.

“The Comuneros del Sur do not want to change the political system. Therefore, the negotiations are infinitely more feasible,” McDermott told Al Jazeera.

That does not necessarily indicate the Comuneros are willing to lay down their arms forever, McDermott added, underscoring the political nature of their fight.

One of the looming questions is what happens when Petro leaves office in two years: Colombian presidents are currently limited to a single term.

McDermott anticipates that, because Petro has failed to deliver on a number of key policy issues, Colombia could see the return of a right-wing government in 2026. That may spur the Comuneros to abandon peace negotiations and continue their fight.

“The question is: Under what framework will the Comuneros del Sur negotiate? Is it truly demobilisation?” McDermott asked.

He added that this kind of reversal had happened before. In 2018, for instance, Ivan Duque replaced Santos as Colombia’s president, and peace talks sputtered under his administration, despite the historic gains made in 2016.

“So, the issue of whether these negotiations would continue and survive, and under what terms, are very much open for debate,” McDermott said.

Further complicating negotiations is the fragmented nature of the armed groups in Colombia.

Since 2016, multiple FARC dissident factions, including the Central General Staff (EMC), have re-armed and control territory in the country.

Other armed groups like the ELN and the Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AGC) have filled the power vacuum left in some formerly FARC-controlled regions.

The case of the Comuneros, too, prompts questions about the efficiency of negotiating with armed groups prone to internal fragmentation. After all, it only recently splintered off from a larger group itself.

Sergio Guzmán, the director of the consulting firm Colombia Risk Analysis, views this fragmentation as a warning sign.

“The government might think that dividing groups will make it easier to negotiate peace, but I think it makes it more complicated because it means more agreements and more points to overview and implement,” Guzmán told Al Jazeera.

He added that, while the government has been able to “stop the confrontations between the illegal groups and the army”, they haven’t been able to stop the “clashes between the groups themselves”.

Already, the government’s negotiations with the Comuneros have raised tensions with the ELN.

Following the Comuneros’ split from the ELN in May, the larger group denounced the government talks with the Comuneros. It said the new negotiations were established to pressure the ELN to continue its own talks with the government.

On November 7, the government and ELN announced they would indeed resume peace talks in Venezuela.

Although the negotiations with the Comuneros focus on bringing peace to a relatively small portion of Colombia — 10 municipalities in Nariño — Gómez-Suárez hopes their early success may influence peace talks with other armed groups, too.

Currently, nine negotiations are under way between the government and major armed groups like the ELN and the AGC.

“I have heard that the talks with the Comuneros have had a positive impact on other (negotiations) that were stagnant and are now picking up speed again,” Gómez-Suárez said. “This has injected a dose of urgency, but it is something that (was) not calculated at the start of the peace dialogues.”

For some analysts, the talks with the Comuneros are among the most promising in the current context of Colombia’s armed conflict.

Daniel Medina, a research associate at the Institute for Integrated Transitions, a Barcelona-based think tank, believes achieving peace with the Comuneros could be attainable during President Petro’s term.

“It is not a secret that, in the context of an open and complex peace, the negotiation with the Comuneros del Sur could be the most advanced one in terms of signed agreements, and might be the only one to achieve a final deal in the next two years,” said Medina.

He too believes the outcome of one peace talk could shape the outcome of the others, for better or worse. Failure to follow through on a given deal could be a setback for all the negotiations.

“Both the nine negotiations and the 2016 peace agreement implementation are interdependent because the lack of implementation or stagnation of one could impact the others,” Medina told Al Jazeera.

But to tackle the wider problem of Colombia’s armed conflict, Gómez-Suárez is doubling down on his smaller-scale “territorial” approach.

“Peace does not wait for a final agreement,” he said. “We cannot allow the window of opportunity (for peace) to close because the government owes this to the communities. The government bets on territorial peace, and at this moment, the opportunity is there.”