ROME -- The Roman Catholic Community of Sant’Egidio expresses much joy and great satisfaction after the announcement of a successful peace agreement in Colombia, Friday evening.

 The announcement of this concluding agreement between the Colombian government and the leftist FARC guerrilla rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, marks the end of what has come to be known as the world’s longest civil war. For the Catholic lay association, “This is a great piece of news that gives hope in a time that is so difficult for the world.”

 The South-American country has known over 50 years of violent and complex armed struggle, with its beginnings in the 1960s with uprisings that displayed frustration over the deep socio-economic inequality that had become manifest in Colombian society. Though these rifts had existed since the country’s independence from Spain in 1891.

 The FARC insurgency has its roots in Marxist ideology and peasant revolt, beginning as a fight for social justice and equality within a highly unequal society. Yet the guerrilla group then began to adopt terrorist tactics and became involved with the cocaine trade to finance its radical activities.

 Colombia’s period of intense violence over the last five decades was subsequently a product of the multiple-sided fight between the FARC, other similar rebel groups, the government and corrupt paramilitaries, leaving over 200,000 dead and about 5,000,000 internally displaced.

 The quest for peace has therefore been a long and infinitely complex one, that has come about through various different phases, leading up to proper initial dialogues between the FARC and the government in Havana in 2012. Since then, further peace talks have finally reached this fruitful conclusion, and the Sant’Egidio Community are proud to have followed this closely and to have been involved in important moments of the process.

 Now begins the difficult implementation of the deal’s terms, which the Sant’Egidio community intends to fully support, and calls out for the rest of the world to do so too. They have announced that “The peace agreement in Colombia acts as a message for us all: even in those places where the reasons for conflict seem to have been lost in history and the distance between the conflicting sides seems unbridgeable, it is always possible to reach a reasonable compromise. Peace is always possible.”

 nkd