The announcement of the final deal came from negotiators in Havana, Cuba, on Wednesday evening, and was greeted with cheers across Colombia’s capital Bogota and elsewhere.
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Colombia’s guerrilla warfare raged hotly during the 1980s, perhaps its bloodiest decade, in the foreground of a ruthless narcotics industry and several other rebel conflicts in nearby countries, like Nicaragua and El Salvador.
The Colombian government and the largest rebel group in the country on Wednesday reached a historic agreement to end the longest running war in the Americas – an extremely bloody battle that killed nearly a quarter-million people over more than a half century.
“We have finished fighting with weapons and will now do battle with ideas”, said the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia’s (FARC) lead negotiator, Ivan Marquez.
“We are giving the final word to the people”, said Santos as he handed the accords, wrapped in a ribbon emblazoned with the colors of Colombia’s flag, to the president of Congress. The five-decade conflict has killed more than 220,000 people and driven more than 5 million from their homes.
FARC is a Marxist-Leninist, Bolivarian nationalist organization; it gained infamy in Colombia for operating in the country’s dense jungles and for a campaign of kidnappings. The accord will end the longest armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere.
But the FARC have much less popular support and will need to effectively organize in sparsely populated rural areas where they are likely to garner the most votes and among leftists in cities in order to win seats in Congress.
“We’ve won the most handsome of all battles: the peace of Colombia”, the chief FARC negotiator, alias Ivan Marquez, said at the announcement in Havana.
President Obama spoke by phone Wednesday with Santos, congratulating him, according to a White House statement.
The conflict between the Colombian government and the FARC started in the 1960s as an uprising for land rights.
Thursday’s message says the USA will stand with Colombians as they take steps to ensure a “just and lasting peace”.
Santos, an unlikely peacemaker given his role as architect of the military offensive, throughout maintained a steady pulse even as he was labeled a traitor by his conservative former allies and suffered a plunge in approval ratings.
Others are more sceptical about the terms of the agreement, especially the participation of FARC rebels in politics and the fact that they will not serve jail time for crimes committed during the war. That plebiscite is shaping up as a showdown between Santos and his biggest political rival.
Colombians will get a chance to vote on the accord on October 2.
It’s unclear when the signing ceremony will take place, and the peace commissioner’s office couldn’t confirm whether it would be before or after the plebiscite.
Possible low voter turnout is also a concern because a minimum of 13 percent of the registered voters, or about 4.4 million voters, must vote in favor for the accord to be ratified.
The team that spent almost four years negotiating with the FARC in Havana, stressed at their news conference that the government and people from all walks of life must work together to help integrate the fighters into mainstream society. “Now we have to wait, with humility, for the verdict of the people”.
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“It will be the most important election of our lives”, he said on national television shortly after the deal was signed.
