The Colombian guerrillas who won’t give up their guns

JUAN MANUEL SANTOS chose his words carefully after signing a peace deal with Colombia’s FARC guerrillas in 2016, officially ending a 50-year-long conflict. “Today marks the beginning of the end of the suffering, the pain and the tragedy of the war,” the president said, well aware that reintegrating the FARC into society would bring its own travails. Overall, the peace process has succeeded; the Colombian countryside is safer than it has been in generations. But a few holdouts still trouble Mr Santos, whose presidency ends on August 7th, and will test his successor as well.

On April 13th Lenín Moreno, the president of Ecuador, announced that two of his country’s journalists and a driver had been killed near the Colombian border. They had been kidnapped on March 26th by the Oliver Sinisterra Front, a gang of 70-80 former FARC guerrillas who refused to demobilise and broke off from the organisation. Led by an Ecuadorean named Walter “Guacho” Artízala, the splinter group has sought to retain a piece of the lucrative trade making cocaine in southern Colombia and northern Ecuador and shipping it via the Pacific Ocean. Its fighters often attack Ecuadorean security forces.