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...member of the Notables and the former director of Medellín's peace-and-reconciliation program. Since Feb. 1, the first day of the truce, Gaviria says, murders have dropped significantly and conditions are ripe to negotiate a more permanent peace. But the green light the government in Bogotá had granted the Notables to hold talks wasn't renewed after Feb. 12, stoking fears that bullets will fly again. (From TIME's archive: See when Medellín was the world's most dangerous city...
They showed up at one of Bogotá's top theater academies and presented themselves as teachers who would be putting on a play at their high school. For $2,000, the instructor gave them a crash course in Method acting. The amateur players passed their first test. Though he wondered about his students' high-tech radios, the theater professor never caught on that he was teaching a pack of army agents. (See pictures of FARC in the jungle...
...always been the case on the other side. Since 2003, about 30,000 right-wing paramilitary fighters who battled the FARC have disarmed. But the bulk of the paramilitaries were ordered by their commanders to lay down their weapons en masse as part of a peace process with the Bogotá government. Some did so only grudgingly and have since formed new militias that are dedicated to drug-trafficking. "If they haven't changed or don't want to change, it's much easier for these fighters to fall back into their former lifestyle," says Mariana Díaz Kraus...
Like Visages, most FARC deserters are impoverished young men and women with long rap sheets and few marketable skills. Once transferred to Bogotá and other big cities, they temporarily settle in government-run halfway houses where they can earn high school degrees and take part in job-training programs. But given the FARC's nasty reputation for kidnapping and murder, few Colombians are willing to hire demobilized guerrillas. And there's always the danger that revenge-seeking rebels will track down the fugitives. But now that he has extracted himself from the war, Visages claims it's all good...
...victims often exchange one kind of hell for another. After escaping the violence, they usually end up in ugly, overcrowded city slums. At one of the cramped IDP shelters in Bogotá, run by the Catholic Church, about 30 former farmers were taking classes in breadmaking, a new skill that might come in handy in the capital. When asked about government claims that security has improved, many simply rolled their eyes. "The armed groups are still there," says one woman who abandoned her farm in southern Caqueta state. "They've just changed their names...