On the frayed, far south-western outskirts of Bogotá, the largest, poorest and most violent barrio in the Colombian capital stretches into the haze up the mountainside as far as the eye can see. No one knows how many people live in the redbrick and pebble dash dwellings along the pitted streets of Ciudad Bolívar; estimates range from 700,000 to more than a million.

Many of the barrio’s citizens arrived to occupy the land upon which they built their homes after being displaced, often more than once, by a four-sided war that has involved narco cartels, rightwing paramilitaries, the leftist guerrilla Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the Farc), and the government army. The conflict is the world’s longest continuous war, causing the internal displacement of around 5 million people. But these are momentous times for the country, as epic peace talks convene on neutral ground in Havana, determined, against the odds, to broker what for many has become an impossible dream of peace and with it some kind of justice.

Last Sunday, processions marched through Bogotá and other Colombian cities to support this process, incorporating the entire political spectrum – apart, that is, from the far right. “We need to unite all Colombians,” President Juan Manuel Santos pleaded before hundreds of thousands massed in Bogotá, “and put an end to the conflict.” Also marching was a former Farc hostage, Consuelo Gonzalez de Perdomo, who said that after seven decades of war, “the only thing Colombians long for is a peaceful and reconciled future”.

In Ciudad Bolívar, a different kind of peace process is under way: Jorge Garcia runs a project called Youth in Peace, which teaches young people from some of the poorest and most violent shanty slums in the world basic lessons in what he calls “self-respect and citizenship for change”; a defiance of gang violence and violence by the police – deliverance rather than destruction, life rather than early death.

He chats to some lads as they take a break from football – inspired by the magnificent Colombian national team – and then addresses a crowd of youths in an upstairs room on how “the only way you can take responsibility for the things around you is to take responsibility for yourself”. Youth in Peace was launched last December, aiming to bring in and train 5,000 “peacemakers” off the streets, but privately expecting 400. “So far, we’ve got 1,500 willing to get involved,” says Jorge.

In the breeze block classroom young people sit for a lesson in governance and the peace process. The girls, for the most part, listen attentively, bursting with questions afterwards, while some of the boys act cool, caps backwards, wearing shades, though it is a boy who asks about victims’ rights. Jorge talks about how “peace processes tend to produce a sort of “peace jet set! On all sides. That’s not us. Here, we have the freedom of being ignored, [allowing a possibility for] a real peace process in your real lives, [lived] close to violence, close to crime”.

Jorge García, an M-19 guerilla in the 80s, now heading a project called Youth in Peace in Ciudad Bolívar.

There is a twist to Jorge’s involvement here, with implications for the peace talks in Havana. He was once a guerrilla himself, with an armed group called M-19 – an umbrella of Marxists, nationalists and catholics influenced by liberation theology. But 25 years ago this spring, M-19 “came in” from their urban cells and mountain bases to engage in politics – a template for what the Colombian government hopes the Farc will do. This project in Ciudad Bolívar is run by the mayor of Bogotá, Gustavo Petro, who was also a guerrilla with M-19 and was then elected, in 2011, as the representative of a leftwing alliance called Progresistas.

In the 1980s, Jorge was among a group of M-19 members who hijacked a milk tanker, with a view to distributing its contents in the poor barrios. They were ambushed by the army and most of the team killed, apart from four survivors, including Jorge, who was arrested. He was taken to a police barracks, “my head put in a tank of water, and questioned: ‘Who are your comrades?’ ‘What is your rank?’ They beat me senseless about the face, testicles and joints. They put me in a cell with some transvestites, who were amazed to see my face broken, bones broken. There was this one man, Lieutenant Suarez, who told me they were going to wake me every half hour for interrogation while I was all fucked up…”

And so it went on, “until your body can hold out no longer”. “If they’d found out I was leading the action at the milk truck, I would not have known what it was like to be in jail. But I lived, even survived in my way, and 25 years later, I have my clarity back.”

The stakes could not be higher around the table in Havana: the country has been at war since 1948, when the so-called “violencia” began – then between military wings of the Liberal and Conservative parties – and tore Colombia in two. The issues: land rights and ownership, and the assassination of the reformist Liberal candidate for election that year, Jorge Eliécier Gaitán.

This savage war lasted 10 years, pausing briefly only to reignite, after counter-insurgency intervention by the US, in 1959 and the so-called Plan Lazo, which led to the creation of a paramilitary force, Triple A (American Anti-Communist Alliance), and in 1964 their opponents the Farc. Other guerrilla groups, including M-19, joined in. For four decades, the Farc, the army and paramilitaries – claiming respectively to represent the peasantry and proletariat, the state and the landowning classes – fought for terrain and terrorised and drove out those upon it as they advanced or retreated. Cooperation between the army and paramilitaries – who later formed themselves into the AUC, or self-defence forces – was assumed by their opponents. No one knows the actual death toll; estimates range from 70,000 in some US newspapers to 200,000, according to Agence France Presse.

Into the maelstrom came a fourth force: narco-traffic, and the rise of Pablo Escobar’s murderous Medellín cartel, which waged total war on the state and many of its people, often in coalition with the paramilitary movement. Escobar was finally killed in 1993, and the paramilitaries disarmed – between 2003 and 2006 – under the direction of the man often accused of being their sponsor in politics, President Álvaro Uribe; the decommission was internationally criticised for widespread amnesty and lack of due process for victims.

Slowly, the reckoning emerges. Only last month, a grave containing about 60 bodies was found in the south-western province of Nariño, victims – apparently – of the paramilitaries. In 2010, a mass grave containing 2,000 bodies was found near La Macarena army base, south of Bogotá; the military admitted responsibility for burying the dead, who it insisted were guerrillas, while human rights groups accused the government and US of covering up the grave’s existence. An activist who had tried to alert visiting British MPs, Johnny Hurtado, was assassinated soon after doing so. The latest issue of Bogotá magazine El Malpensante investigates the so-called “false positives” scandal, in which the army under President Uribe claimed – to justify US aid – that civilians killed in cold blood were actually dead guerrillas.

President Santos was re-elected last year with a popular mandate to pursue peace talks, against an “Uribista” hard rightwing opposed to them, backed by those once aligned to the paramilitaries. Santos’s starting point had been: “Nothing is agreed until everything has been agreed.”

A policeman stands guard after burning a cocaine laboratory in Puerto Concordia in 2012 as part of Operation ‘Republica 73’, aimed at destroying labs that belonged to the Farc. Photograph: John Vizcaino/Reuters

Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantatas drift down a staircase leading up to a rented room, with a view of the Caribbean sea, in which Sergio Jaramillo is staying before boarding a flight back to Havana to carry on negotiations. Jaramillo led the very first secret talks with the Farc five years ago; he is on the phone to Britain’s former chief negotiator of the Northern Ireland peace deal, Jonathan Powell, when I arrive – the Irish settlement is regarded as part maquette, part cautionary tale on both sides of the table in Cuba; former IRA commander Martin McGuinness has visited Colombia to support the peace process here, and Powell shares what he knows of Britain’s experience in Northern Ireland.

Jaramillo – a philosopher, philologist and diplomat – oozes courtesy and severity; he studied at both Oxford and Cambridge, he explains, “in order to get out and move on”. His grandparents on both sides of the family had been Colombian diplomats in Germany before the second world war: a grandfather was expelled as ambassador by the Nazis, while his grandmother on the other side of the family was subject to the embarrassing attentions, at social galas, of one Joseph Goebbels. Apparently he was besotted by her Latin beauty.

Jaramillo served as Santos’s deputy when the current president was minister of defence in a government led by the man who is now, ironically, a sworn enemy of the peace process: ex-President Uribe, godfather of the hard right. When Santos was made president, Jaramillo was appointed national security adviser with a clear, new brief: peace with the Farc.

The Farc had been founded as a military wing of the Communist party to continue the leftist struggle during the violencia and combat US intervention in Colombia’s affairs. It was inspired by the Cuban revolution, and is the last guerrilla organisation of its kind in the world. It calls itself an army – a mainly peasant army – of Marxist-Leninists, but is labelled terrorist by the US and EU. Ever since its foundation, the Farc has battled Colombian authorities and paramilitaries, and still controls vast tranches of territory.

In September 2010, recalls Jaramillo, “no one had talked or thought about peace for eight years”. He was tasked, however, to head a peace commission, “legally allowed to talk to terrorist groups”. But, he explains, “we didn’t want to make any noise. Peace back channels were opened, similar to Northern Ireland. We spent December in contact with Farc’s security people, to whom the president said: ‘We’re prepared to meet, so long as it’s secret, serious and abroad’.”

The start of 2011 was spent “fixing the meetings, the place, back channels back and forth”. Jaramillo was head of the government delegation at the first encounter in Havana that February: “We’d been extremely nervous, but it was a very serious meeting and there was a window.” Six months of “secret negotiations” followed, during which both sides “went to extreme measures not to be noticed. It was very tense, very intense – talks about talks, which are actually more important than the talks themselves. By December 2012, the president was able to signal to the country that the delegations were ready. Farc appointed their top people – Iván Márquez to lead, with [the veteran leader] Pablo Catatumbo – they could not have gone higher”(though a third leader, Timoleón Jiménez, known as “Timochenko”, remains in the jungle as military commander until a peace deal is signed).

A demonstrator waves a Colombian flag at last week’s march in favour of peace talks. Photograph: EITAN ABRAMOVICH/AFP/Getty Images

Jaramillo issues a stark warning that “this is our last chance. This is the last generation of Farc that is both military and political, the last of Farc as a university-educated political movement with Marxist politics we disagree with, but they are at least politics. The generation coming up behind them know only jungle and war.”

A five-point peace plan has been agreed. One: rural reform in a country where land, land rights and ownership of land are the quintessence of politics and power. Two: a framework for political participation by the Farc. Three: an agreement by the Farc to cease cocaine production to fund its war. Four: ceasefire and decommission. Five: a framework for post-war justice.

On the first three, says Jaramillo, “solid agreement” has been reached. On land: “We have to engage in 21st-century rural development projects. Bring infrastructure into the countryside, roads, irrigation. Technical capacity and credit lines for small farmers – also access to land.” Separate legislation has guaranteed a right of return for Colombia’s 5 million displaced – only many have died trying to claim what is theirs. “We try to argue that land restitution,” says Jaramillo, “would be far easier in the context of a peace process.” Under item two, he says, “the peace process means Farc will participate in the politics of this country, and have a role in the reconstruction of Colombia”.

Agreement one overlaps with item three when it comes to any deal over “land that is used illicitly to raise drug money through drugs”. What is in it for “narco Farc”, rather than “political Farc”? While the latter may be ready for political participation, what’s in it for the men who run a successful business and don’t want to be a mayor? Jaramillo is confident that “Farc has a traditional and formidable organisational capacity. They’re strict and enforce their decisions. I think they can deliver on what they agree.” He adds: “We won’t solve the supply-demand drug market, but we can work with Farc to solve the problems of farmers on the ground who are trapped into an illegal economy which is also a poverty trap.”

Mauricio Rodríguez, the man who served as Colombia’s ambassador to the UK then returned as a special adviser to the peace process, takes a slightly different view: “OK, so 20% of them just become narco barons. But that is simpler: they become criminal bands with no ideology and we fight them as criminals.”

The fourth and fifth items present, as Jaramillo puts it, “the issues we have to work on”. Progress on the fourth was given a boost last week by an order from President Santos to cease the bombing of Farc positions. “This is not just demobilisation of an armed group,” says Jaramillo. “This is a recalculation of Colombia, changing things on the ground – and that is going to be a very, very delicate process. Last time Farc came into politics, they kept the guns – Armalite and ballot box – and their political people got wiped out. This time, we need security guarantees for them that are sufficiently robust they understand they cannot keep their weapons.” It’s a delicate process connected to the gorsebush of item five: justice and the victims.

“Victims’ rights were less of an issue in Ireland than they are in Colombia, and you cannot neglect something so serious,” says Jaramillo. The options for “transitional justice” are endless: South African-style truth and reconciliation, a prosecutorial tribunal, such as that handling former Yugoslavia, or something in between.

“Farc has to understand that at the beginning of the 21st century, there is no such thing as blanket amnesty. It’s not an option,” says Jaramillo. However, he adds: “Farc is more radical in its public positions than it is in private. It has to develop its positions, and that is happening”.

Rodríguez says one option is that of “alternative sentences” other than jail for commanders and known perpetrators: community service, or teaching, in exchange for compliance with some kind of truth commission. “What most people want is just the truth: what? Who? Why?” he says. “For most, that is enough – along with some kind of reparations. That’s one lesson we’ve learned from Ireland – you cannot leave all that until later.”

It is hard to gauge the voice of the Farc. Reporters have penetrated the jungle to speak with militants who give insight into guerrilla life, but not leadership thinking. The New York Times spoke to negotiators in Havana, but with little information on the proceedings at stake. The Farc press office in Havana does put out regular press releases, through a website called resistencia-colombia, in Spanish and Italian.

“What does all this mean, Mr President?” challenges a recent press release, about bombing and ground attacks on the Farc by paramilitary formations, which are supposed to have disarmed, alongside “patrols of the national army”, it alleges. But the reporter who has followed the Farc most closely, María Jimena Duzán of the excellent Semana magazine, thinks that these communiques “are talking more to their own people, to act the tough guy they must appear to be, than for wider information”. Duzán was, however, the recipient of a letter from the Farc’s “Timochenko”, which was published by Semana.

It makes for interesting reading, not least for its insistence that “the upper classes have always conceived of peace as just a termination of the armed uprising with no important change to economic and social structures, or political regime. Colombia requires deep transformation of its rotten political institutions.”

According to Duzán, there is one man who, though not in the Farc, is close enough to know the organisation’s mind yet distant enough to speak it candidly. He is Carlos Lozano Guillén, editor of a newspaper called Voz (Voice). Its office hardly has a normal newspaper entrance: once through robust metal doors, one is greeted by staff warily watching the exterior on CCTV. Friendly, they boast that back in the 1950s, editions of the paper were smuggled around what is now Farc territory rolled up within husks of corn. Lozano is a veteran of the Colombian Communist party, now small – but a cog that moves bigger wheels, with ties to Havana.

Lozano has written a book called La Paz, si es Posible (Peace: Yes, It’s Possible), in which he rolls back six decades of thinking on the Marxist left in Colombia: “Nothing is won through the military road,” he writes. “Everyone is the loser, including the civilian population and its numerous victims.” He calls the Farc: “A protagonist on the frontline of history for more than half a century in this country, and a reality that no one can ignore.” In conversation, he is cordial and frank about the guerrilla leaders’ thinking.

He sees the Farc taking its place alongside the current left groups at election – the Progresistas who won Bogotá, and Clara López’s Polo – into what he plans to be a “broad front of socialist, indigenous and environmentalist organisations. And to build that broad front as an option for power”, as per the governments in neighbouring Ecuador and Bolivia.

The focus, he says, “should be the organisation of land reform, resistance to the presence of multinationals, defence of the environment and the opening of new democratic spaces in the cities. The government wants the terms to be agreed by summer. I cannot see anything before October, or even the end of the year, because there remain some difficult topics to resolve.”

Lozano is most intriguing on two things: the issue of justice, and what he sees as a potential impasse over economic policy and the role of multinational corporations, especially those wanting to extract Colombia’s significant riches in gold, emeralds, coal, hydrocarbons and minerals, or turn grassland into palm oil plantations.

Farc fighters performing military exercises. ‘Farc is more radical in its public positions than it is in private,’ says national security adviser Sergio Jaramillo. Photograph: Sipa Press/REX

On justice, he says: “The government has proposed a ‘transitional justice’ framework, but it is unilateral. It’s a rough copy of what Uribe did with the paramilitaries. Farc is committed to a justice procedure, but there is no way Farc will agree to a unilateral process of justice, which involves only the victims of Farc, and only punishes Farc, and the state doesn’t pay for anything although it is the main perpetrator of the war. The reality is that the worst massacres in Colombia have been those of the state armed forces with help from paramilitaries. Farc will only accept a multilateral judicial or reconciliation process, which takes into account crimes by the state and paramilitaries, and victims of their violence. The issue is under discussion now in Havana, and it will take a while.”

On ceasefire, Lozano says: “The government wants an easy peace that doesn’t cost them politically. They want a peace to appease the multinationals. But they’re wrong if they think Farc will be interested in the president’s easy peace if it opens up Colombia to exploitation by multinational companies who can then take our resources from areas in which they are found, free of the guerrilla presence. That is not going to happen. That is why the question of disarming the guerrilla forces is a political one: Farc took up arms for specific reasons that were political and social, and we preserve that right of rebellion.”

There is a twist here. There remains an obstacle: the National Liberation Army (ELN). The Farc, it turns out, is not the last guerrilla group. Mauricio Rodríguez has been tasked to open a channel to this much smaller, but highly cogent formation – “a fraction of Farc, without Farc’s large civilian base, but they matter”, says Rodriguez, “because they are more ideological and entirely economic in their actions. Their territory covers areas of mining and energy resources, blowing up pipelines, kidnapping and menacing foreign mining and energy people.

“ELN’s opening demands are different,” he says. “All to do with ownership of resources, and a blanket no to foreign extraction of minerals and energy. In reply to which I tell them that is not an option. That is not the economic model we are committed to. We won’t do anything that will not attract foreign investment – it’s a fact of life. I say to them: do you want to eradicate poverty? So do I. When I told them our plans for attacking poverty, they said I should be a guerrilla! I replied: don’t be crazy; be with us instead.”

Rodriguez also points to what he sees as a bigger problem: “The hard right, and the 40% who voted against Santos and peace; against Farc in congress, and against ‘alternative sentences’ – the Uribe people. Their problem is that Uribe’s political survival depends on Farc, quite apart from the fact that the war is big business for landowners and ex-paramilitaries. If you had a poll today, it’d be 60-40 for the peace, but that is not enough. If Farc comes into politics, the story of the left in Colombia changes and the Uribe people have lost their reason to exist – and that is a problem in a violent country. They are the people I fear, and this is why I would worry if there was not a settlement by the end of this year, so they can say, ‘You see? All for nothing.’ That is why we have to reach this agreement soon”.

Fernando García, once a commander in M-19, now works in the international department for mayor Petro’s administration in Bogotá. He remembers when M-19 “came in”. Its leader, Carlos Pizarro, was assassinated by paramilitaries in 1990 and replaced by Antonio Navarro, who became a co-president of the national constituent assembly. “I worry that if Farc came in now,” says Fernando, “some of the leadership would also be killed by the paramilitaries. And if one or two were killed, the others would disappear back into the jungle to fight. But when our leader Pizarro was killed, Navarro sat on a wall and faced the comrades who wanted to go back to fight. ‘What are you thinking?’ he said. ‘Stay strong, stay in the peace process’. Now, we must say to Farc: that was the most intelligent decision we ever made. “I think Farc understands Latin America, and has now realised,” says Fernando, “that it’s time to come over to this way of doing things.”

Back in Cuidad Bolívar, outside Jorge Garcia’s Youth in Peace class, a boy called Harold Olive talks about his life. “I live with the social cleansing, drug traffic, killing by the gangs, killing by the government. I’m from the lower barrios, the most dangerous, where the resistance is in hidden art – graffiti, sports, music. The project helps us, it shows us a way out and some love in a place where there is none. But while the government talks about a peace process in Havana, there’s war back here in the barrio.”



Jorge knows he’s right, but cannot let this lie. “We have to show the connections,” he says, staring Harold in the eye, “between our peace process, the Farc peace process, and all these smaller peace processes right here in the barrio, to break the cycles of violence endemic in Colombian society. We’ve experienced pain – we are the result of pain. But we’re taking responsibility now for what happens next.”

• This article was amended on 17 March 2015 to remove a paragraph placed in the wrong context, with misleading information about an interviewee.