FARC rebels cheer at the concert in their last conference as a rebel army, after signing the peace accord.18 September,2016. Ricardo Mazalan/Press Association. All rights reserved.On a rough count over the month of August, six coups were said to be under way across Latin America. Many of these were reported to be targeting the region’s recent or current left-leaning governments, elected in a spate of victories a little over a decade ago and now the alleged victims of a systematic campaign to eject them from power by any means available. “A new Condor Plan” is afoot, Ecuadorean President Rafael has declared, in reference to the regional extermination campaign against suspected subversives mounted in the 1970s. Polarized politics, frail institutions and economic hardship do not bring back happy memories.
Yet an event of great and undeniable significance sits oddly beside these half-dozen historical flashbacks. In Colombia, the longest-running guerrilla war of the region and the epitome of a Marxist uprising of rural outcasts against the metropolitan elite – in which the United States gave firm support to the latter, first during the Cold War and then in response to the insurgents’ links to drug trafficking and threats to the state – is on the verge of a peaceful and agreed end.
Four years of tireless negotiations in Cuba between government representatives and commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) ended on August 24 with the announcement of a final peace agreement, which will be signed on September 26. It is, without a doubt, one of the most sophisticated, comprehensive and well-wrought documents of its kind, a tribute to the search for compromise on both sides of what has been a pitiless conflict. “They were complicated, sometimes bitter conversations,” the government chief negotiator, Humberto de Calle, said upon announcing the accord, “but the result is sufficient compensation.” ...one of the most sophisticated, comprehensive and well-wrought documents of its kind, a tribute to the search for compromise on both sides of what has been a pitiless conflict.
