MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Santos unveils negotiating team for talks to end 50 year conflict

The Colombian president is hopeful it will not all end like a similar effort ten years ago

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos unveiled on Wednesday a six-man team to negotiate with FARC rebels in the hope of ending almost 50 years of internal war.

A decade after the last attempt to end Latin America's longest-running insurgency failed, the negotiators led by former Vice President Humberto de la Calle are to travel to Norway next month to meet the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The negotiations will then move to Cuba.

“It's a team with ample experience and each member wants things to move ahead in a serious, dignified, realistic and effective way,” Santos said at an address in the presidential palace, flanked by some of the negotiators.

Members of the negotiating team include a former police chief, an industrialist, a former military head, the president's chief security adviser and a former environment minister.

Half-way into his four-year term, Santos, a US-British-trained economist, is staking his reputation on the talks. He knows they will be thorny given past failures like the 1999-2002 process when the rebels stonewalled, threw up tough demands and used the time to regroup.

Santos is betting the FARC will avoid imposing tricky demands this time and bring an end to a war that has killed tens of thousands since starting in 1964.

“The difference with these peace talks and the last is that there seems to be real desire, willingness from both sides,” Ivan Cepeda, an opposition lawmaker whose father was killed by paramilitaries in 1994, told reporters. “That wasn't the case before.”

Back in El Caguan, as the 1999-2002 process became known, the seven-member FARC leadership was composed of ideological and military hardliners, who, critics say, had no intention of agreeing to peace. Four of them are now dead.

Still, this time there will be no ceasefire, which some analysts say could jeopardize the talks as combat rages.

The dangers were illustrated on Tuesday when FARC rebels blew up two trucks at a coal mine in the northern province of La Guajira, according to industry sources.

Though Colombia's economy has enjoyed a boom since the FARC were pushed back to remoter areas, its presence is still a hindrance to the fast-expanding mining and oil sectors.