After 5 decades of War, Colombia has signed a peace agreement with the country’s largest rebel group on Monday evening.
The ceremony held in Cartagena brought an end to the war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC whose marxist insurgency sparked the last major war in the Americas.
“What we sign today is a declaration from the Colombian people before the world that we are tired or war,” President Juan Santos said in his prepared remarks, “that we don’t accept violence as the means of defending ideas.”
The FARC’s war against the government marked one of the first-winged insurgencies in Latin America, a struggle that will inspire guerilla movements from Cuba to Nicaragua. While the conflict gradually diminished, the group’s fighters in the tent and hammocks, of their hideouts continue to preach Marxist armed struggle until early this year.
Let no one doubt that we will now pursue politics without weapons,” said Rodrigo Londoño, the top commander of the FARC, offering an apology to the war’s victims.