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Juan Manuel Santos

BOGOTA. — Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and the leader of the FARC rebels, Timoleon “Timochenko” Jimenez, were due to sign a historic peace deal yesterday to end a five-decade war.

The former enemies were to sign the accord at a ceremony in the colourful colonial city of Cartagena on the Caribbean coast, the government said.

Santos was to open the day’s events with a tribute to the Colombian military and police, followed by a prayer for peace and reconciliation at an 18th-century Catholic church in Cartagena’s old town.

The guests would include UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, US Secretary of State John Kerry and an array of Latin American leaders — notably Cuban President Raul Castro, whose country hosted the nearly four-year-long peace talks that produced a final deal on August 24.

The 2 500 expected attendees had been invited to wear white.

Once the peace agreement is signed between the rebels and the government, the European Union would temporarily suspend the FARC from its list of terrorist organisations, the bloc’s ambassador in Bogota, Ana Paula Zacarias, told RCN television.

The group could be definitively removed from the blacklist after a six-month review process.

Colombia’s second-largest rebel force, the leftist National Liberation Army (ELN), agreed to hold fire ahead of the referendum.

The FARC, a Marxist guerrilla group, launched its war on the Colombian government in 1964, in the aftermath of a peasant uprising that was brutally put down by the army.

Over the decades, the conflict has drawn in several leftist rebel groups, right-wing paramilitaries and drug gangs, killing 260 000 people, leaving 45 000 missing and uprooting 6.9 million.

Such guerrilla armies were common across Latin America in the latter half of the 20th century. But now, 25 years after the Cold War, Colombia’s is the last major armed conflict in the Americas. — AFP.