After the Colombian people rejected the agreement between the government and the guerrillas last October, the new peace treaty, revised and amended, is expected to be signed on Thursday.
On Thursday 24 November, the Colombian government and the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) will finally sign the new peace agreement. After more than fifty years of war, four years of negotiations and an agreement that appeared to have failed following last October's referendum, Colombia may at last achieve the long-sought peace.
The conflict between communist guerrillas and government forces, which began in 1964, has claimed more than 260,000 lives. The Farc were founded in the 1960s to protect farming communities from paramilitary groups and with the aim of overthrowing the Colombian state and establishing a Marxist government.
Last August in Havana, Cuba, peace agreement negotiations between the two parties took place. At the end of the meeting, delegates from the Colombian government and the Farc declared that they had reached a "comprehensive and definitive" agreement.
The agreement was then put to a national referendum, dubbed the plebiscito por la paz. Against expectations, the peace agreement was rejected by Colombian voters. Some 50.24 per cent of eligible voters opposed the agreement, which many considered too favourable towards Farc members.
Despite the referendum result, the two parties continued to work together; president Juan Manuel Santos (who in the meantime received the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize precisely for his determination to end the civil war) pressed on with negotiations with the Farc and a new peace agreement was drawn up. Following the rejection of the previous agreement, around sixty amendments were made to the treaty in order to make it more acceptable to more conservative Colombian voters.