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

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

Since 1948, a four-sided civil war has raged in Colombia, bringing misery and displacement to millions. Now, with talks under way involving leftwing group Farc, there’s the best chance of peace in decades

Ed Vulliamy
Sunday 15 March 2015 05.30 EDT


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‘La violencia’ begins: a burned-out hotel in central Bogotá, April 1948, following the assassination of the populist leader
Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Photograph: William J Smith/AP
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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.

More:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/15/colombia-end-in-sight-longest-running-conflict