Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos led Colombians in a massive march for peace on Tuesday, calling for an end to decades of armed conflict at a time when peace talks in Havana are under fire from his predecessor Alvaro Uribe.
Hundreds of soldiers joined Santos and his Cabinet ministers at the Plaza of the Fallen Heroes, one of seven starting points for the march by thousands of people, many of them in white T-shirts and carrying white flags.
“We have to end this nightmare of 65 years,” Santos said, referring to the 1948 assassination of liberal leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, which ignited a long period of political unrest known as “La Violencia.”
Photo: Reuters
“Peace is the victory of any soldier. Peace is the victory of any policeman. If we reconcile, we will have a better homeland,” he said.
Santos then set out on a march through Bogota, wearing a T-shirt with the message: “What matters is to believe. I believe in peace.”
An estimated 150,000 people took part, waving white banners and wearing T-shirts that read: “We are the generation of peace.”
Santos has opened peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a leftist guerrilla group founded in 1964 that grew out of the lawlessness and ideological divisions that also spawned right-wing paramilitary groups and drug trafficking organizations.
However, Santos’ peace overtures have encountered stiff resistance from Uribe, a conservative hardliner who sought to destroy the FARC militarily during his 2002 to 2010 presidency, in which Santos served as defense minister.
On Monday, Santos accused his former boss of trying to sabotage the peace talks by disclosing on his Twitter account precise locations where rebel leaders were to leave Colombia for Havana under a military safe conduct.
Most political parties and a variety of civic organizations support the peace march, but Uribe denounced it as “legitimizing the terrorism of the FARC.”
The leftist Democratic Pole also has refused to endorse the march, seeing it as a vehicle for Santos’ re-election bid next year.
However, some of its leaders were taking part, and the FARC sent a message on Monday that saluted “each and every person who has decided to march for peace in Colombia.”
Bells were rung in churches across the country at noon as marchers converged on Bogota’s central Plaza Bolivar. White banners and balloons draped from windows of downtown buildings.
Marches also were organized in other Colombian cities.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
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