Colombia declares FARC war over as last guns roll away

President Juan Manuel Santos declared Colombia's 50-year conflict with FARC guerrillas finally over on Aug. 15, 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.

"This is truly a historic moment for the country," he said.

"We have been a republic for 198 years. Never had we had 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 Sept. 1, 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 a ceremony on Aug. 15. 

"We do not want to break with our past. We were and will continue to be a revolutionary force," said Marquez.

The FARC arose in May 1964 from a peasants' revolt, and its ranks were made up mostly of country-dwellers who rallied behind the group's Marxist-Leninist ideology, with land reform its key demand.

As well as a quarter of a million dead, about 60,000 Colombians remain unaccounted for and seven million have been displaced in the conflict.

A small rebel group...