ALMOST his entire army career has been devoted to hunting down the FARC, culminating in operations that killed three of the guerrillas’ top commanders in 2008-11. Yet on August 22nd General Javier Flórez, the second-in-command of Colombia’s armed forces, sat down with the FARC’s negotiators in Havana. It was one of the most dramatic moments in almost two years of peace talks between the government and the FARC. And it signalled that the talks aimed at ending half a century of armed conflict in Colombia are moving into what officials hope will be their final phase.

So far the two sides have reached outline agreements on three of the five items on their agenda—on rural development, the guerrillas’ future participation in politics and on policy towards drug-trafficking. The negotiations then survived a near-death experience in a presidential election in June in which Juan Manuel Santos won a second term—but only just, narrowly beating Óscar Iván Zuluaga, who opposed the talks.

Although the government’s five-man negotiating team includes two retired generals, the visit of General Flórez and six military colleagues to Havana marked the first time that serving officers have taken part in the talks. Their main purpose was to start discussions about the FARC’s demobilisation and decommissioning of weapons, so that this can proceed swiftly if and when a final deal is reached. The government hopes that their active involvement will also help to dissipate military wariness of the talks.

It was a significant moment for the FARC, too. Iván Márquez, the guerrillas’ senior negotiator, said it was a chance to talk “warrior to warrior”. Others in Colombia were outraged. Álvaro Uribe, a former president and now senator who is Mr Zuluaga’s political boss, fumed that the meeting was “humiliating” for the armed forces. “There is no worse treatment for soldiers and policemen than to put them on the same level as terrorists,” Mr Uribe tweeted.

Days earlier, another historic encounter took place in Havana. On August 16th, 12 victims of the conflict addressed the two teams of negotiators. This marked the start of talks on the fourth, and trickiest, agenda item, concerning transitional justice (ie, establishing the truth of what happened in the conflict and what kind of penalties the FARC will face for their crimes). According to Navi Pillay, the outgoing UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, this “unprecedented” involvement of representatives of the victims could serve as a model for other conflicts.

Constanza Turbay, who suffered the murder of four close relatives by the FARC when it tried to destroy her family’s political grip on Caquetá province more than a decade ago, described the occasion as “the most transcendental meeting” of her life. Mr Márquez privately asked her for forgiveness for the murders. The regret came “from the heart”, she said. It was a significant gesture from the leader of a group that until only a few months ago refused to recognise that it had committed crimes. But few Colombians may think such apologies are enough.

More than 6.7m people have registered as victims of a conflict which has involved right-wing paramilitaries and a second guerrilla group (the ELN) as well as the FARC and the security forces. Four dozen more victims, some of them of the paramilitaries and the security forces, are due to travel to Havana over the coming weeks.

When around 30,000 paramilitaries demobilised in 2006 under Mr Uribe, some of their leaders who were guilty of serious crimes received “alternative” sentences of up to eight years in prison in exchange for revealing the truth behind thousands of deaths and disappearances and compensating their victims. They are starting to be released, amid indignation. By honouring the promises it made in negotiations with the paramilitaries, the state is sending a “clear and unequivocal message” to the FARC that it “keeps its word with regard to transitional justice”, declared Eduardo Montealegre, the attorney-general, to El Tiempo, a newspaper.

Many Colombians say the FARC’s leaders should at least serve similar jail time. But the leaders say that they do not intend to be the first guerrilla group to be rewarded for laying down their arms with prison sentences. The task facing the negotiators is to come up with an alternative punishment that is sufficiently fitting to persuade Colombians to set aside their scepticism and to approve the overall deal in the referendum which Mr Santos has promised.

In another new initiative, the government has set up a committee of 14 academics—half named by each side—to report on the origins of the conflict and the obstacles to ending it. The FARC see that as a chance to claim the vindication of history for what they insist was a legitimate struggle. Most Colombians see no justification for the guerrillas’ violent assault on democracy. Many victims will be more interested in finding out who killed their loved ones.

Mr Santos says that the talks are in the “last phase” and that he wants a deal by the end of the year. The FARC have warned it will take longer. A lengthy delay risks exhausting Colombians’ patience: the guerrillas are continuing to sabotage oil pipelines and electricity pylons and to ambush police and army patrols. No previous peace talks in Colombia have been so thorough, or got so far. But the last mile may be the most arduous.