The guerrillas put down their weapons

The government and FARC end a half century of conflict in a country blighted by anti-personnel mines, which will take seventy years to clear.

María Eligia Zuluaga Gómez’s son was 12 when he stepped on an anti-personnel mine. It was a holiday and the schools were closed. He was taking food to his father, who worked in a factory. “I live down there, but the explosion was so strong I heard it,” remembers Zuluaga Gómez. “Thank God he wasn’t hurt”.

The year was 2003 and times were hard in Carmen de Viboral, a municipality of Antioquia, the department in Colombia with the highest number of landmines. Marxist guerrillas, namely the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), had been present in the region for years. The group emerged in the 1960s to protect peasants from violent landowners but was later accused of human rights violations and ties with the drug trade.

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