It has been little more a month since the Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos (pictured) and Timochenko, the nom de guerre of the leader of the FARC, the oldest guerrilla group in the world, proclaimed a cease-fire.
It was in La Habana, on 23 June, when the two concluded four years of negotiations to end the 50 year old Colombian civil war, the longest armed conflict in the western hemisphere.
'The time to shut the gate of violence has arrived,' pronounced Timochenko when the negotiations began in Oslo, in 2012. And last month in La Habana Santos declared: 'Our time to live in peace has arrived.'
Since Colombian peace attempts are nothing new — the first serious attempt to resolve the conflict goes back to 1982 under the presidency of Belisario Betancur — these statements are audacious but they are also hopeful.
The peace conditions won't be easy to meet. First of all the FARC — the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — will have to be disbanded. They will have to dispose of the arms and there is a date for this; January or February 2017.
There is also an amnesty clause that will make sure not one of the guerrilla fighters will end up in jail and should the FARC be able to become a political party, it will have a seat in the senate.
And there is more. The peace accord will have to deal with the economic and moral reparations to the massive casualties of war. And by massive I mean more than 200,000 deaths; 6.6 million displaced people; and 25,000 disappeared. The majority of these victims are civilian.
The war that the FARC, a rural left wing communist guerrilla, has waged against the central government goes back to the 1960s. It broke over a historical problem; wealth and unequal rural land distribution. As the Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate, the late Gabriel García Márquez, said: 'The main problem of Colombia is its inability to find ways to overcome economic inequality.'
"Those who want to keep the fight going — and reject the peace deal — are ideologues with a misty-eyed view of Latin America's revolutionary 1960s."
The enemies of Colombian peace are many and mighty. One of them — and perhaps the most instrumental — is former president Álvaro Uribe. A hard-line right wing and devoted Opus Dei, Uribe is leading the opposition against the peace agreement, an agreement that will be subject to