President Alvaro Uribe's government and a commander of Colombia's second biggest rebel group will hold their first talks as early as next week aimed at ending the group's decades-old war on the state.

A statement issued by both sides on Tuesday said preliminary meetings between the government and Antonio Garcia, a top commander of the 5,000-strong National Liberation Army, or ELN, will take place on or after Dec. 12.

A government source told Reuters the meetings will be held in Cuba.

"For this formal exploratory meeting we have requested the accompaniment of Norway, Switzerland and Spain among other countries," the government's written statement said.

The ELN and the much larger and stronger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, have waged a war of Marxist insurgency since the 1960s that kills thousands and forces tens of thousands more from their homes each year.

While the prospect of talks with the 17,000-member FARC seem remote, the ELN has been hit hard in recent years by a U.S.-backed military campaign.

"Unlike the FARC, the ELN no longer represents a strategic military threat to the state. They realize they cannot win, so it makes sense for them to negotiate at this point," said analyst German Espejo of the Seguridad y Democracia thinktank in Bogota.

'MAIN OBSTACLE TO PEACE'

"It is very significant that Uribe is authorizing this meeting because he has in the past accused Garcia of being the main obstacle to peace with the ELN," he said.

The ELN has been linked to few recent acts of violence. But it continues kidnapping for ransom, its main source of income, despite government demands it halt illegal activity as a condition for peace talks.

Uribe, a close Washington ally elected in 2002 on promises to crush the Andean country's Marxist insurgency, has already started peace talks with far-right paramilitaries.

Those talks have been criticized by human rights groups for offering soft treatment to the paramilitaries, whom landowners and cocaine traffickers organized in the 1980s as private armies to protect themselves from the rebels. They are guilty of some of the worst massacres and other atrocities of the war.

Uribe's father was killed in a botched kidnapping by the FARC and he is eager to show progress toward peace with the leftist rebels as well as he seeks reelection next year.

If the ELN decides to end its armed struggle, it could follow the lead of the former left-wing guerrilla group M-19, which in 1989 negotiated a deal to disarm, allowing its members to reenter civilian life. Former M-19 members helped write a new constitution in 1991 and one is now a prominent senator and candidate in next year's presidential election.

Washington has provided Colombia with more than $3 billion in mainly military aid since 2000, principally directed at its huge cocaine industry, but also at the FARC and ELN.

Wall Street hails Uribe as a market-friendly leader, but Colombia's economy is still growing too slowly to significantly reduce the 60 percent poverty rate that fuels the conflict. (Additional reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta)