Colombia Elections: Presidential vote poses test for FARC peace deal

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Europe

01:41

This presidential election is Colombia's first in half a century to be free of the threat of the FARC, an achievement celebrated by outgoing President Juan Manuel Santos. However the vote also poses a test for the 2016 FARC peace deal. Natasha Hussain has more details.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, was created in 1964. Its activities escalated over the years, matched by the push back from the Colombian government.

With a call to arms, the group declared its intentions to overthrow the government.

But it took more than just intentions for the group to grow from a few thousand rebels to a persistent force -- estimated at 20-thousand fighters at its peak in 2002. By the end of 2002, four years of peace talks with the Colombian government ended in failure.

Negotiations finally bore fruit in 2016, when an agreement led to FARC's disarmament and conversion into a political party. President Juan Manuel Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the deal with the rebel group.

Yet the FARC's new party did not win much support in the March legislative elections this year. It failed to add to the 10 parliamentary seats it was awarded in the peace deal.

Colombia is still struggling to emerge from the longest armed conflict in the Latin Americas. The fighting left more than 260-thousand people dead, nearly 83-thousand missing and some 7-point-4 million others forced from their homes.