50-year Colombia violence ends in promising peace agreement

Nearly six million people are currently displaced while another 250 million have died in Colombia -  a country at the northern tip of South America - over the last 50 years.

The country's  military, left-wing guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitaries had been fighting so much and this left the country on the brink of becoming a failed state.


The government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known by its Spanish acronym, FARC), the country's largest insurgent group, announced in August 2016 they had reached a peace agreement after four years of negotiations.

The FARC and ELN were founded in the 1960s on the heels of 10 years of national political violence in Colombia known as la Violencia (1948–58). Having been excluded from a power-sharing agreement that resulted in fighting, communist guerrillas took up arms against the government of the day.

The FARC was composed of militant communists and farmhand self-defense groups, while the ELN’s ranks were occupied by mostly students, Catholic radicals, and left-wing intellectuals who hoped to replicate Fidel Castro’s communist revolution in Cuba. The U.S. State Department had designated both groups as foreign terrorist organizations.

Sources: CFR
Image Voice Of America Jewish News