Colombia And FARC Rebels Sign Revised Peace Deal

“This is the definitive one”, said President Juan Manuel Santos, after signing the deal on Thursday with FARC leader Rodrigo Londoño, known as Timochenko. It comes after a previous peace deal was narrowly rejected in a popular vote in October.

Both the government and FARC have made efforts in the last two years to end the region’s longest-running conflict that has left more than 220,000 people dead and several millions displaced.

Congress is likely to adopt a “fast track” method to ratify the modified peace agreement, starting the countdown towards FARC demobilization, according to Sandra Borda, the dean of the Social Sciences Department at Bogota’s Jorge Tadeo Lozano University.

Santos said the cost of the conflict was too high and too painful, especially for the families of the disappeared and the injured, adding that this new, better peace deal is definitive.

However his chief rival, ex-president Alvaro Uribe, has rejected even the revised deal.

That fear, although less prevalent than in the darker days of Colombia’s half-century conflict, has become more urgent with more than a dozen human rights defenders and land activists in areas dominated by the FARC being killed by unknown assailants since the first signing ceremony in September.

“We made our positions more flexible, but not our principles, the bulk, the fundamental structure of the (first) accord”, he said of the process that followed the defeat of the original peace pact in an October 2 referendum that saw less than 37 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. Members of Uribe’s party, however, who wanted harsher punishment for FARC rebels, are calling for “protests to denounce what they say is a ‘blow against democracy, ‘ ” the AP said.

He spoke after an urgent meeting with top officials to tackle a recent wave of alleged political killings in southern Colombia.

“What we have here remains total impunity”, he told RCN television.

Uribe, however, complained it still did not satisfy his key demands, notably punishing FARC leaders for their crimes.

Many of Colombia’s largely conservative residents are outraged because, like the original agreement, the new document offers no jail time for FARC leaders who committed war crimes like kidnappings and massacres, and it allows them to hold political office.

Cynthia Arnson, director of the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said that strategy makes sense since congress can speak for the Colombian people.