FARC rebels look to New Year to consolidate peace

VEGAEZ: Like many Colombians, Johana Martinez and Fabio Grinon are hoping peace will finally take hold in 2017. But for the couple — both FARC rebels — it will mean an unfamiliar civilian life with their son.

“We are so happy to have him here with us. And that he can feel he still has parents, and that we can share with him,” Fabio said as the boy about 12 paid a visit to the FARC 34th Front camp in the jungles of Uraba, Antioquia.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is now starting to implement its peace deal with President Juan Manuel Santos’s government.

For the boy, smiling between his parents, the family time was anything but easy: his grandfather brought him from Medellin, where he lives to the middle of a jungle camp of 130 guerrilla troops.

The location is so remote that just the last part of the journey was a fourhour trip by speedboat.

“We all want peace. Nobody wants war,” Johana said, stressing that she and her husband want “brothers to stop killing brothers” as they did for more than five decades.

After the peace deal was signed in November, the FARC agreed to disarm. Over the next six months, they will be gathering in demobilisation zones to hand in their weapons with UN supervision.

The five-decade conflict has killed more than 260,000 people, left 45,000 missing and forced nearly seven million to flee their homes. — AFP