After a lifetime of warfare, ‘Peace is about to break out in Colombia’ according the government negotiator who helped strike a key agreement with Farc rebels

Few times in his 75 years has Alonso González dared to believe that peace in his war-ravaged Colombia was possible.

When he was just eight years old, a bitter partisan war erupted throughout the nation, driving him and his family from his home and forcing him to witness his first of several massacres.

Shortly after that decade-long spate of violence ended, a new war began in 1964, when leftwing rebels calling themselves the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia took up arms against the government.



Colombia: is the end in sight to the world’s longest war? Read more

Those same rebels grew to be the most powerful leftist insurgency in Latin America with as many as 18,000 fighters by the late 1990s and units across the country. When they began peace negotiations with the Colombian government in 1999, González had no illusions that the war would end.



“I have seen them do so many bad things, I didn’t believe they were really willing to lay down their arms,” he says. He had every reason to doubt. It was during those abortive talks that the Farc forced González at gunpoint to sell his cattle ranch for refusing to plant coca, the raw material used in making cocaine.



“I have suffered the war and violence in this country, first-hand, all my life,” he said. “It seemed like it would be like that forever.”



But on Wednesday, President Juan Manuel Santos and the Farc leader, Rodrigo “Timochenko” Londoño, announced a major breakthrough in the current peace talks, saying that they had agreed to finalise a deal by March 2016 – and that the Farc would lay down their arms two months later.

And as González watched the president and the guerrilla chief shake hands on the deal, he finally allowed himself to hope things could change – and that just maybe Colombia’s five-decade civil war will soon come to an end.

“I think that this time it’s real,” he said. “I am hopeful.”



The Colombian government’s top negotiator gave González more reason to believe. “Peace is about to break out in Colombia,” declared Humberto de la Calle on Thursday at a press conference in Havana, where negotiations have been held for nearly three years.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest President, Juan Manuel Santos, left, and the head of the Farc, Rodrigo Londoño, shake hands as Cuba’s President Raúl Castro seals the deal. Photograph: Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty Images

Under the new agreement, guerrillas and Colombian military commanders accused of rights abuses can confess their crimes at special tribunals in exchange for reduced sentences that can be served through community service and confinement in specially designated areas, though not prison. Those who do not confess face up to 20 years behind bars.

But while the path has been cleared for a final peace deal with the Farc, much still has to be hammered out by the March deadline.



Still on the negotiating agenda are the issues of demobilisation and decommissioning of weapons. The Farc have said they are willing to put down their arms but not hand them over to the state.



There is also the question of how the agreements reached in Havana will be implemented.

Then parliament has to make the laws to set the deal in motion. The president has asked Congress to grant him special decree powers and to approve a fast-track legislative process to make the laws necessary to apply the peace deal once it is signed.

None of the pending issues, however, hold the same complexity as the agreement on justice. “Everything else is just carpentry work,” wrote Rodrigo Pardo, editor of the influential Semana magazine.



Carpentry and a lot of public relations.



James Lockhart-Smith, an analyst at Verisk Maplecroft, a risk consultancy, says both the government and the Farc will have to convince Colombian society to accept the deal. Santos has vowed to allow Colombians to vote for or against the pact once it has been finalised.



“The focus of risk has now shifted from whether or not the Farc will fully commit to laying down their arms, to whether the Colombian populace and courts system will accept the peace deal as politically and legally valid,” he said.



Polls have repeatedly shown that although most Colombians want to see a peace deal signed, 90% want to see Farc commanders behind bars.



González was one of them. “After all the atrocities they committed jail seems like the minimum they should get,” he says. “But I guess, who’s going to lay down their guns just to sit in jail for I don’t know how many years.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Colombians in Bogotá watch a telecast of the peace talks in Cuba on Wednesday. Photograph: Diana Sanchez/AFP/Getty Images

The rightwing opposition, led by former president and now senator Álvaro Uribe, has decried the deal on justice as a pact for impunity. “This is a bad example for society that will generate more violence,” he said.



And peace with the Farc will hardly mean an end to violence in Colombia. Colombia’s second-largest guerrilla group, the ELN, has flirted with beginning its own negotiations with the government but despite a year of preliminary talks, no formal peace process has begun.



And many members of former rightwing paramilitary groups formed by drug traffickers and cattle ranchers to fight the Farc, and which demobilised between 2003 and 2006, have regrouped as powerful criminal gangs that control drug trafficking and illegal mining in much of the country.



Still, González says that once the government and Farc sign a peace deal, it will change everything he has ever known. “It will change the course of history,” he says. “I may finally see peace.”