There are signs that South America’s oldest and mightiest guerrilla army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or FARC), is undertaking a tactical pivot toward ending more than half a century of armed struggle, raising hopes for a lasting cease-fire, eventually a full demobilization and possibly peace.

Colombia’s Battered Rebels Seek Peace | Consortiumnews – 1/7/2014.

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My correspondent in South America notes, “Colombia have oil, gas and mineral field in the jungle that remain under the control of the FARC Army, this is like a defeat of Colombia, but this is like a defeat of the FARC Army also… like a death point to both sides…”

Indeed, long-running guerrilla conflicts consume the living whose lives have been attached to “the struggle” or its suppression.

Continuous and largely unresolvable issues, more defined by dreaming than by plain dealing but often also provoked by the abuse of the powerful, remain so toward the end, as puzzling to the best of minds and souls as they were when first “discovered” or “encountered” or developed in some narcissistic outrage inflamed by a messianic will.

Evolution in ethics and law in the greater world — and there is always a greater world surrounding comparatively specific ones — then bear down on the policies and practices of place and may do so with a self-concept altering vengeance.

While the idealism informing a youthful revolutionary fervor may sink with age into corrupt arrangements and crime, the powerful too may have the muck to scrape from their boots.  The once young and strident nationalist may look in the mirror and find himself surprised with the fat pig looking back at him: good soul that he may have once been, or egotistical and heroic peacock with clean hands and a clean uniform, may have in memory the haunt of an angry hardness and force that wasn’t necessary and that cannot be easily repaired.

I make up characters — here, caricatures — in a short package.

I point to no one with them.

Nonetheless, with a little bit of truth in the fiction that might be made real, one hopes for peace toward the end of a grim trail in dark space.

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