BOGOTA, (Reuters) – Colombia’s peace talks with leftist FARC guerrillas to try and end Latin America’s longest-running insurgency will begin next month in Norway before moving to Cuba, President Juan Manuel Santos said yesterday.
Unlike past failed negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebels, however, there will be no ceasefire this time, Santos said in a national TV address.
“I ask the Colombian people for patience and strength,” Santos said, announcing the talks would start in the first half of October. “There’s no doubt it’s time to turn the page.”
While Colombians are hopeful Santos will succeed, he faces a monumental task to reach peace with the FARC, which has holed up in Colombia’s jungle territory since 1964 and imposed tough demands in past peace negotiations.
In a video message broadcast to journalists in Cuba, the FARC’s bearded leader Rodrigo Londono, known by his war alias Timochenko, urged a “civilized dialogue” to end the bloodshed.
Santos, 61, who is at the mid-point of a four-year term, had repeatedly said he would consider talks with the FARC only if he was certain the drug-funded group would negotiate in good faith.
“There are people like me that don’t know a single day of peace,” said Santos, son of one of Colombia’s most influential families that founded the daily newspaper El Tiempo. “We have to take the dream of living in peace and make it a reality.”
Established almost five decades ago as a communist-inspired peasant army, which later came to depend on drug-trafficking, the FARC joins talks this time from a severely weakened position.
Battered by a decade-long U.S.-backed Colombian military offensive, the rebels have lost as much as half their fighting force, reducing their ability to launch major attacks on the government. The rebels number around 8,000 fighters now.
Still, they are by no means spent and in recent months have stepped up assaults on economic infrastructure like oil and mining installations in a bid, some analysts say, to come to the negotiating table from a position of relative strength.
“HOW MUCH DEATH?”
Santos said Venezuela and Chile would support talks that would take place “without interruptions,” although they would end if there were no advances.
Critics of the peace process are worried the rebels could use the time to build strength and prolong the war.
“The government has arrived at this dialogue from a position of weakness and terrorism from a position of resurgent strength,” said former President Alvaro Uribe. “Security has deteriorated significantly in the last two years.”
In the video shown in Cuba, Timochenko said Colombians deserved better than more years of conflict.
“How much death and destruction, how much pain and tears, how much useless bereavement and abuse, how many lives and smiles must be cut before we finally conclude that the end to this isn’t conflict but civilized dialogue?” he said, dressed in an olive green uniform.
