Abstract:
Established in 1964 as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army is Colombia's oldest, largest, most capable, best-equipped and financed Marxist - Leninist revolutionary guerrilla organization. In the present day this guerrilla organization fights to establish "social justice" in the country, to extirpate rural poverty from Colombia and give access to the agrarian class to political institutions from which they remain marginalized. After fifty-years of internal armed conflict, in August 2012, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced that exploratory peace talks with senior representatives of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia had started in Oslo to find a negotiated solution to the almost half a century war that has taken place in the rural areas of Colombia. Originating in Oslo, the peace talks later moved to Havana-Cuba, where negotiations are still ongoing. The Colombian government and the leftist insurgent group are seeking common ground on a five-point agenda: rural development and land reform, politic participation, illegal drug trade, compensation for the victims, end of the conflict. Until now the first three points of the agenda have already been agreed upon making day by day much more possible the idea of a negotiated solution of the conflict. The achievement of the Havana peace talks suggest in fact that despite serious challenges, the present attempts to bring to an end the armed conflict between the parties is likely to succeed. The aim of this thesis is (having previously explored in detail in chapters one and two the history the Colombian armed conflict) to analyze the five points of the agenda signed by Colombian government and FARC-EP and to give, thanks to the interviews made during these months, an account of which is the perception of the Colombian fragmented society with regards to the underway peace process and their hopes for the future.
