How Peace-Finally-Came to Reign Throughout the Western Hemisphere

Church bells rang in the small towns of Colombia at 12:01 a.m. on Aug. 29. The tolling marked the official start of a cease-fire that was years in the making and the end of a war that had dragged on for decades. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–a Marxist guerrilla group known as FARC–and the Colombian government had agreed to stop fighting, the first step toward the disarmament of thousands of FARC troops and the end of the longest-running war in the Americas. Since it began in 1964, the war had killed roughly 220,000 people. “Never again will parents be burying their sons and daughters killed in the war,” said Rodrigo Londoño, FARC’s leader, known in Colombia by his nom de guerre Timochenko.

But those bells weren’t ringing just for Colombia. The formal end of the conflict marks the effective end of war in the western hemisphere, home to more than a billion people. There is still plenty of violence to be found in the Americas–especially drug-related gang violence in countries like Mexico and Honduras. But traditional armed conflict–involving armies from two or more states, or between a government and an organized rebel group–has ended on one-half of the planet. At a moment when much of the world feels out of control, that’s worth celebrating.

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