Santos is confident to sign peace treaty with the FARC

Juan Manuel Santos

The president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, hopes to sign a peace agreement with the FARC guerrilla group before the end of his administration, in August 2014, but this should accelerate the process of dialogue, he revealed in an interview published Sunday by the daily El Tiempo.

The president said that next Wednesday will be three years of his government, adding that one of its main goals before the end of his presidential term is to “finish the negotiations in La Habana, to end the armed conflict,” which has lasted nearly 50 years in Colombia.

In October 2012, the FARC began in Oslo the peace talks with the government of Santos to find a peaceful solution to the armed conflict, and in November the talks moved to Cuba.

Santos told the newspaper El Tiempo that if they achieved peace with the FARC, its members will be “integrated into society” after undergoing transitional justice, which includes delivery of arms, confess their crimes and the victim compensation. In this sense, Santos, warned that in such process there’d be “no impunity and no clean slate. Nor total amnesty. Neither a full pardon.“