One hundred years of tranquillity for Latin America?

Santiago

GABRIEL García Márquez's great novel One Hundred Years of Solitude starts with a colonel who "started 32 civil wars and lost them all" facing the firing squad. The site of the event is the fictional town of Macondo, but few readers are fooled: The novel is about García Márquez's native Colombia.

Last week, Colombia's civil war - the sole remaining armed conflict in Latin America - formally came to an end. It lasted more than 50 years, cost a quarter-million lives and displaced six million people. It seems hard to believe, but peace is finally here.