In a joint statement, Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, said they have overcome the last significant obstacle to a peace deal by settling on a formula to compensate victims and punish belligerents for human rights abuses.
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Santos and Timochenko will hold their first-ever meeting at 5:00 pm (2100 GMT), said a source in the Marxist rebel group’s delegation in Havana.
Cuban President Raul Castro also indicated that he would participate in the historic meeting between Santos and Timochenko.
Further cementing expectations of a deal, the FARC declared a unilateral cease-fire in July and has been working with Colombia’s military on a program to remove tens of thousands of rebel-planted land mines.
“I will make a stop-over in Havana for a key meeting with negotiators with the goal of accelerating the end of the conflict”. He said growers who abandon coca will get assistance to support alternative crops.
Both sides have reported progress on the justice issue, which includes the thorny question of whether guerrillas will face prison time for kidnappings, use of child soldiers, cocaine trafficking and other crimes.
Santos said Wednesday that the government and the FARC have agreed that the signing of the final peace accord will occur within six months “at the latest”.
Santos’s trip means that “a deal on transitional justice has been reached”, predicted political analyst Jorge Restrepo, director of CERAC, a research center on the Colombian conflict.
The issue of how to demobilize combatants and end the conflict will remain on the agenda. Santos has repeatedly rebuffed their demands for a bilateral ceasefire, but has suspended air strikes on rebel positions.
The apparent breakthrough comes after Pope Francis, in a visit to the communist-led island this week, warned the two sides that they didn’t have the right to fail in their best chance at peace in decades.
Present at the announcement were also all the members of Bogota’s and the FARC’s negotiating teams, along with representatives of the guarantor nations of the peace process – Cuba and Norway – as well as representatives from Venezuela and Chile.
Negotiators had previously reached agreements on agrarian reform, political participation and fighting illegal drugs, and still need to agree details on the end of the conflict and the implementation of the deals.
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Santos said on Tuesday that an accord on justice will not please everyone, but that it will be positive in the long term. Decades of clashes between the two sides have left more than 200,000 people dead and over six million others displaced.
