Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos declared the country's 50-year conflict with FARC guerrillas "truly over" on Tuesday, as the last truckloads of decommissioned weapons rolled away to be melted down.
Santos himself shut a padlock on the last lot of decommissioned rifles before it was taken out of a remote demobilization camp to formally seal the UN-supervised disarmament by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
"With the laying down of arms...the conflict is truly over and a new phase begins in the life of our nation," Santos said at a ceremony in Pondores, a remote area in the northern Guajira department.
He also said:
“This is truly a historic moment for the country...We have been a republic for 198 years. Never did we have such a long conflict and today is indeed the last breath of that conflict”
The leftist rebel force has said it will officially transform into a political party on 1 September, a major step in reintegrating into civilian life as part of a historic peace deal signed last year.
"Soon we will be holding a founding congress for the new political party that will be called the Alternative Revolutionary Force of Colombia," said one of the FARC's senior leaders, Ivan Marquez, at the ceremony.
The FARC was born in May 1964 from a peasants’ revolt, and its ranks were mostly made up of country-dwellers who rallied behind the group’s Marxist-Leninist ideology, with land reform as its key demand.
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