AFP/Havana

Colombia’s Farc guerrillas yesterday praised President Juan Manuel Santos’ decision to suspend air strikes against rebel forces, but urged further steps to de-escalate the half-century-old conflict.
Santos ordered the stand-down on Saturday, five days after the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc by its Spanish acronym, resumed a unilateral ceasefire.
“The Farc regards as positive the presidential decision to suspend bombings of our camps,” said rebel negotiator Carlos Antonio Lozada, reading a statement to reporters here.
The Farc and the Santos government have been in peace negotiations in Havana since 2012 but the process was badly jolted earlier this year by a flare-up in fighting.
“Without doubt, the president’s decision is a measure which helps generate a climate of confidence propitious for advancing the discussion of pending issues,” Lozada said.
But he stressed that additional measures were needed to ratchet down the conflict, Latin America’s oldest guerrilla war.
“It’s necessary to agree on new measures that deepen and consolidate this process of de-escalation, so that the possibility of wasting this effort becomes more and more remote,” he said. Santos had previously ordered a bombing pause on March 10 but resumed air strikes in mid-April after 11 soldiers were killed in a rebel ambush.
The Farc argued that the ambush was a defensive action against a military patrol that had been harassing a guerrilla unit.
The wave of air strikes that followed cost the Farc the lives of about 30 rebels, prompting it to suspend a unilateral ceasefire it had been observing since December.
International sponsors of the peace talks - Norway, Cuba, Chile and Venezuela - worked to get the sides to back off, and on July 12 they agreed to a series of measures aimed at tamping down the conflict and reviving the peace talks.