‘It’s a miracle my Colombia could never have imagined’
After 60 years of conflict, the truce signed between President Santos and leaders of the Farc rebels has made a nation rejoice
María Jimena Duzán
Saturday 25 June 2016 19.05 EDT
Last Thursday the Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, and Timoleón Jiménez (Timochenko), the head of Las Farc, the largest guerrilla organisation in this hemisphere, decided to sign a truce to put an end to 60 years of conflict.
It was a bloody war that took the lives of 220,000 Colombians, according to the country’s Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica. Those who died were mainly poor people and innocent civilians. More than six million were displaced from their lands and forced to go to the cities, and an authoritative number for those “disappeared” is still unknown. The office of attorney general has said that 45,000 people were disappeared, but according to the International Committee of the Red Cross the toll is higher: 100,000.
For Colombians, the peace accord is not only the best news in years, but a miracle that not even the novelist Gabriel García Márquez could have imagined. After 30 years of unsuccessful negotiations, Colombians became so pessimistic that we took for granted that this war would never end. We thought we were condemned to live with perpetual conflict.
We even drew a red line between cities and the rural territories, as if this country was torn apart. Cities became safe havens when the Colombian army, Latin America’s largest, managed to push the rebels back to their jungle strongholds, and rural Colombia became off-limits for generations of citizens who never dared to go outside the cities. The Farc never was defeated, though, and the war became a way of life.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/25/colombia-truce-farc-maria-jimena-duzan
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