There is a growing sensation in Colombia that the peace talks with the FARC guerrillas are “about to come to an end” – in success or failure, according to the government’s chief negotiator, Humberto de la Calle.
Three major advances were made over the last week in the peace talks that have been moving forward in Cuba for nearly two years between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas, while the decades-old civil war rages on.
The first time I read Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) was when I was proofreading the galleys of “The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor”, which the Editorial Sudamericana was getting ready to reprint in Argentina.
The rural community of Las Pavas in northern Colombia received this year’s National Peace Prize Wednesday in recognition of its peaceful struggle for land that is claimed by an oil palm company, in a case that became an international symbol of the conflict over land in this country.
Colombia’s FARC guerrillas announced Friday a “pause” in the peace talks in Havana, which formally opened a year ago. But analysts say it is only a temporary glitch.
Almost a quarter of a million Colombians have been killed in the country's internal conflict since 1958, most of them civilians, a government-funded report has said.
Drugs and arms traffickers are muscling in on Colombia's Pacific coastal region, forcibly displacing local people, according to a new report by the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES).
"I was displaced here by mining a month ago. Illegal miners forced me out of my municipality. No, don't write down where I'm from, let alone my name," said a 40-year-old black man frightened for his safety. IPS agreed to say only that he is from Colombia’s southern Pacific coast region.
The crisis in Venezuela caused by the violent opposition of followers of Henrique Capriles, who is accusing President Nicolás Maduro of election fraud, and peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas in Havana, are occupying the attention of national and foreign media.
International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) initiatives working to overcome poverty and improve food security in the Colombian countryside can make a positive contribution to government efforts to tackle some of the most neglected problems facing this South American country.
Wearing a dusty hat and a smile that lights up his face, the septuagenarian José Alicapa does not shrink from the overwhelming bustle of the Colombian capital, which he reached after a 13-hour bus drive from the western province in Caldas.
Late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez played a key role in the current attempt to negotiate peace in Colombia. Along with Cuban President Raúl Castro, he confidentially urged the FARC guerrillas to agree to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’s secret proposal for peace talks.
Victims of crimes of the state want their recommendations to be taken into consideration by the peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas that are seeking to end half a century of armed conflict.
Colombia's large-scale agricultural producers and peasant farmers managed to listen to each other for the first time about the core cause of the decades-long armed conflict: the concentration of rural land ownership and the social and economic development of the countryside.
Colombia will be removed from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights “blacklist” next year. In exchange, the government of Juan Manuel Santos facilitated a visit to the country by a delegation from the Commission.
The Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas will resume the peace talks in the Cuban capital on Dec. 5, in a climate of moderate optimism surrounding a process in which citizen participation could play a key role.
Scepticism, fear of expressing an opinion and a dash of hope make up the cocktail of responses from Colombians asked about the possibility of the decades-old civil war finally coming to an end as a result of the peace talks between the government and the FARC guerrillas, which began Monday in Havana.
Closed-door talks between members of the FARC guerrillas and the Colombian government began in Oslo Wednesday, after the delegates were taken from the airport to an undisclosed location.
As peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas are about to start in Oslo, the possible participation of rebel leader Simón Trinidad, in prison in the United States, has not yet been decided.
It's hard to imagine her in guerrilla fatigues, carrying a 25-kg backpack and firing shots to repel an enemy attack, or diving for cover from aerial bombardment. She is known as Sandra Ramírez, and she has left the field of battle in Colombia to come to the Cuban capital to talk peace.
What are the obstacles to peace in war-torn Colombia? When government and rebel negotiators asked themselves this question, they concluded that one problem was that the media in this country had turned “peace” itself into a dirty word.