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rug

(82,333 posts) Wed Sep 28, 2016, 07:30 PM Sep 2016

Guess What? As Of Today, The Western Hemisphere Has No Wars

Colombians in the capital, Bogota, hold up the letters for "peace" in Spanish on Monday. The Colombian government and FARC rebels signed a peace agreement, marking an end to the last war in the Western Hemisphere. Colombia's civil war lasted more than 50 years and Latin America has had civil wars for the past six decades. Jennifer Alarcon/AP

September 27, 2016
10:34 AM ET
GREG MYRE

Fidel Castro and his rag-tag band of fighters assembled on the shores of Mexico, stealthily navigated their overcrowded boat to southeastern Cuba, and unleashed a 1956 insurgency that rocked all of Latin America. That temblor lasted 60 years and ended, more or less, on Monday.

Castro seized power in 1959, and his brother Raul still rules Cuba today. The revolution washed over the entire region, inspiring leftist insurgencies throughout Latin America for decades until the final one effectively came to a close as the Colombian government and the FARC rebels signed a peace deal in the Colombian coastal city of Cartagena.

"Long live Colombia, long live peace," the crowd chanted as Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and rebel leader Rodrigo Londono, both dressed in all white, shook hands on Monday evening.

The deal brings peace to a country that has endured more than a half-century of civil war. Yet widely overlooked is the far more sweeping notion that it brings down the curtain on six decades of nonstop conflicts in Latin America.

http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/27/495522306/guess-what-as-of-today-the-western-hemisphere-has-no-wars