Rome, September 7 - Pope Francis on Thursday urged Colombian civil and political authorities to "heal wounds" and "not indulge in any vendettas" following more than 50 years of conflict between the government and FARC rebels. The pontiff said it was time "to help each other" after hatred that had lasted "too long". "Bullets are becoming words" of peace and reconciliation, President Juan Manuel Sanchos told the pope in Bogotà. Pope Francis and President Santos on Thursday lit a torch of peace symbolising the South American country's desire to achieve peace after more than 50 years of conflict ended last year. "Thank you for accompanying us and stimulating us in our first step towards reconciliation," Santos told the pope three months after FARC rebels completed handing in their weapons. Upon his arrival in Colombia Wednesday, the pope met with victims of the 52-year conflict between the government and the FARC rebels. Among the youth he met was Emmanuel, son of Clara Rojas, an MP today who was taken hostage in 2002 and held by the FARC for years in the jungle, where the boy was born. Arriving in the nunciature, Francis met a group of young people in a programme of recovery from drugs and street life in the barrios. "Don't let them steal your happiness, and let no one deceive you or steal your hope," Francis said. The pope then turned his attention to Venezuela where, he said, "may dialogue happen and may the country rediscover a good stability with the dialogue of all". After meeting Colombian authorities and bishops, Francis will celebrate a Mass later today.</s>Pope Francis speaks during his welcoming ceremony at the Nunciature in Bogota. | AP

BOGOTA: Pope Francis landed in Colombia Wednesday to promote peace after decades of war.

Here are three highlights from day one of the Argentine pope's fifth papal visit to his native continent:

After stepping off his plane in Bogota, Francis was handed a sculpted peace dove by Emmanuel, a child who is seen as a symbol of the war.

Emmanuel was born in captivity in 2004 to Clara Rojas, a politician kidnapped by FARC rebels. His father was one of her captors.

"He is a child of war... He symbolizes what we are living through in Colombia: a child who was born in war but now has every chance of living in peace," said President Juan Manuel Santos.

Though his trip will focus on Colombia, Francis's first words were for its neighbor, Venezuela.

Francis called for "solidarity, justice and concord" and dialogue to settle Venezuela's deadly economic and political crisis.

Francine Howard, 32, a Venezuelan opposition leader in Colombia, called for Francis to intervene to provide humanitarian assistance to Venezuelans fleeing to Colombia.

Francis's 12-hour journey from Rome was the first time the pope's words have been reported direct from his plane.

Reporters were able to broadcast from the skies thanks to wireless internet on the Alitalia flight.

Excited Colombian reporters sent papal quotes and anecdotes about the trip. AFP filed several photographs of the pope greeting journalists.</s>BOGOTA, Colombia (CNS) — Pope Francis urged Colombians to put aside prejudice and pursue peace through social inclusion, fighting inequality and paying attention to the plight of the country’s most marginalized populations, such as campesinos, Afro-Colombians and indigenous peoples.

Speaking alongside President Juan Manuel Santos, the pope called on Colombians to recognize that “real wealth is diversity” and to pursue a “culture of encounter,” in which people are at the center of all political, social and economic activity. Promoting such a culture would “help us flee from the temptation of revenge and the satisfaction of short-term partisan interests.”

“I encourage you to look to all those who today are excluded and marginalized by society, those who have no value in the eyes of the majority, who are held back, cast aside. Everyone is needed in the work of creating and shaping society. This is not achieved simply with those of ‘pure blood,’ but by all,” the pope told Santos and government officials Sept. 7 outside the Casa de Narino, Colombia’s presidential palace.

“Please . . . listen to the poor, to those who suffer,” he added. “Look them in the eye and let yourselves be continually questioned by their faces racked with pain and by their pleading hands. From them we learn true lessons about life, humanity and dignity.”

The speech — invoking St. Peter Claver, a Jesuit who fought discrimination and the slave trade in Colombia — was Pope Francis’ first official event on his five-day visit to the South American country.

Pope Francis arrived in Colombia as the country pursues peace after five decades of armed conflict. That conflict has claimed 220,000 lives and left millions more victimized and displaced. Many of those victims came from the poorest strata of Colombian society.

“Our gaze fixes upon the weakest, the oppressed and maltreated, those who have no voice, either because it has been taken from them, or was never given to them, or because they are ignored,” the pope said, as children sat behind on a platform in front of the presidential palace columns.

The pope also emphasized the importance of family — “envisioned by God to be the fruit of spousal love” — as a source of social cohesion and “that place where we learn to live with others despite our difference and to belong to one another.”

Colombia’s government and a Marxist guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, reached a peace accord last year. The FARC is demobilizing and recently formed a political party. Another Marxist group, the National Liberation Army, is in talks with the government and agreed to a four-month cease-fire in the days before the pope’s arrival.

The peace accord with the FARC has proved polemic; some in Colombia disapprove of FARC leaders receiving reduced punishments for committing atrocities and fear the presence of former guerrillas in the country’s political process.

Pope Francis has not specifically endorsed the peace accord, but he saluted the process of bringing peace to Colombia.

“Over the past year, significant progress has been made. The steps taken give rise to hope, in the conviction that seeking peace is an open-ended endeavor, a task which does not relent, which demands the commitment of everyone,” Pope Francis said. “It is an endeavor challenging us not to weaken our efforts to build the unity of the nation.”

Santos, who has promoted the peace accord in the face of stiff opposition, called the pope’s visit a “push” to take the first steps toward peace and reconciliation.

“It’s no use silencing our weapons if we continue armed in our hearts,” the president said. “It’s no use ending a war if we still pursue each other as enemies. That’s why were need to reconcile.

“We trust your visit will open the hearts and minds of Colombians to the peace that comes from God and inhabits the souls of men. This is the peace we are constructing,” he told the pope.

Pope Francis ended by telling the country, “you have a great and noble mission, which is also a difficult task,” then quoting Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “In spite of this, before oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the unending wars down the centuries, have been able to subdue the tenacious advantage of life over death. An advantage which is both increasing and accelerating.”</s>Pope Francis urged Colombians to rally behind a peace process seeking an end to Latin America's longest-running conflict and to address the inequalities that fueled it during his first full day in the South American country Thursday.

"There has been too much hatred and violence," the pope told an adoring crowd at Bogota's presidential palace. "Let us not forget that inequality is the root of social ills.''

The 80-year-old Argentine pontiff spoke alongside Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos, addressing political elites bitterly divided by last year's peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which ended a more than 50-year-old war.

Santos won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to restore peace, but the agreement remains unpopular among Colombians.

Later Thursday, Pope Francis will lead an outdoor Mass in Simon Bolivar Park, attended by thousands of people tightly packed into the plaza. At least four people were taken away in stretchers after fainting in the crowds.

Crowd control has been a challenge and security tight during the first Latin American pontiff's trip to largely Catholic Colombia.

Nearly four out of 10 Catholics lived in Latin America and the Caribbean as of 2010, the Pew Research Center's latest data show. Colombia alone had the sixth-largest concentration of Catholics globally. Out of the country's almost 49 million people, nearly seven out of 10 identify as Catholic.</s>BOGOTA, Colombia (CNS) — Pope Francis arrived in Colombia Sept. 6 for a five-day visit to promote reconciliation in a deeply Catholic country scarred and reticent to offer forgiveness after decades of war.

The pope was greeted was welcomed by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and his wife, Maria Clemencia Rodriguez Munera. Children in traditional costumes presented him with flowers, and the pope greeted members of the Colombian military, including soldiers injured in the line of duty.

In a gesture to promote the themes of peace and reconciliation, he was given a dove by a boy named Emmanuel, who was born in a guerrilla camp to Colombian politician Clara Rojas, kidnapped in 2002 and released nearly six years later.

On the 12-hour flight from Rome, Pope Francis told reporters that the trip was “to help Colombia go forward in its journey of peace.”

Expectations for Pope Francis’ visit are running high among Colombian Catholics. It’s the first papal trip to Colombia since 1986, when St. John Paul II visited.

But he arrived after the signing of a peace accord promising to put Colombia on a path of ending more than 50 years of armed conflict. Just days before the visit, the National Liberation Army, a Marxist organization carrying out crimes like kidnap and bombings, and the government agreed to a four-month cease-fire.

Challenges remain, especially as many Colombians — including Catholics and those of conservative persuasions — object to the idea of demobilized Marxist guerrillas accused of atrocities receiving reduced punishments and even participating in politics. Those persecuted by paramilitaries voice similar misgivings.

“We are expecting that the pope brings a lot of hope,” said Msgr. Hector Fabio Henao, director of Caritas Colombia. “The pope arrives at a time when reconciliation is the greatest challenge. We hope that his message touches the hearts of those who have suffered due to this conflict.”

The papal trip carries the motto: “Let’s take the first step,” purposely chosen to convey a sense of collective involvement in the country’s peace process.

“The motto of the apostolic trip says exactly what we are expecting: Let’s take the first step,” said Auxiliary Bishop Juan Carlos Cardenas Toro of Cali. “This first step by the pope, stepping off the flight to come closer to this nation, which has suffered, is something for us that opens the door to hope.”

The Colombian government and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym as FARC, reached a peace accord in 2016, in which the FARC agreed to demobilize. The agreement has proved polemic, even though violence perpetrated by guerrilla groups, government soldiers and paramilitaries has left an estimated 220,000 dead and millions more displaced.

Catholics are divided on the peace accord, and Colombian bishops have stayed on the sidelines, while encouraging the laity to voice their opinions. Many conservative Catholics, along with evangelicals, argued the deal included provisions harmful to the traditional family — a charge denied by peace accord proponents; opponents turned out to defeat the deal in a plebiscite.

The accord later was reworked and approved in Congress. People say they want peace, but disagree — often strongly — on how to pursue it

“The church itself reflects the divisions in Colombian society,” said Jesuit Father Mauricio Garcia Duran. “The pope comes to Colombia in a context of polarization.”

The papal visit touches on themes important to the country and church. In the capital, Bogota, Sept. 7, the pope will celebrate a Mass focused on young people, expected to attract more than 1 million attendees.

He travels Sept. 8 to Villavicencio — gateway to the at-times neglected southern half of Colombia — where he will pray with 6,000 victims of violence and is expected to call for reconciliation. That call for reconciliation will include a call to reconcile with creation; included in the audience will be indigenous peoples from the Amazon and lands increasingly exploited by mining and natural resource extraction.

The following day, Pope Francis will address clergy and religious in the city of Medellin. He also will visit a Catholic orphanage.

Pope Francis ends his visit to Colombia on the Caribbean coast in the city of Cartagena. There he is expected to address the church’s controversial history of trafficking slaves to the New World.

He will also recite the Angelus at a shrine to St. Peter Claver, a Jesuit who worked to stop slavery.

Contributing to this story was Cindy Wooden in Bogota.

Copyright © 2017 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. www.catholicnews.com. All rights reserved. Republishing or redistributing of CNS content, including by framing or similar means without prior permission, is prohibited. You may link to stories on our public site. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To request permission for republishing or redistributing of CNS content, please contact permissions at cns@catholicnews.com.</s>BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Pope Francis opens the first full day in his Colombia visit on Thursday with messages to political leaders and citizens alike encouraging all to rally behind a peace process seeking an end for Latin America’s longest-running conflict and to address the inequalities that fueled it.

Francis will kick off the day with a meeting with President Juan Manuel Santos at the presidential palace, where he is likely to call for a building of bridges among elites bitterly divided by last year’s peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

It will be followed in the afternoon by an outdoor Mass in Simon Bolivar Park that is expected to be attended by hundreds of thousands of worshippers in one of Latin America’s most-fervently Roman Catholic nations.

In between, he is to meet with bishops from around the region, including his first encounter with clergy from neighboring Venezuela, who are looking for the pope to demand accountability from their country’s socialist government and deliver a message of hope to a nation torn by political and economic turmoil.

His 20th trip abroad as pope, Francis’ five-day visit to Colombia is a highly emotional one, fulfilling a promise he made to government and FARC negotiators when he visited Cuba in 2015 as negotiations between the two dragged on in Havana.

Back then, he appealed to both sides not to let the historic opportunity for peace slip by. But now that the deal is signed, the guns silenced and 7,000 rebels are transitioning back to civilian life, Colombians face the even more difficult challenge of coming together and eradicating the social disparities at the root of the half-century conflict.

Santos, the winner last year of the Nobel Peace Prize, offered thanks on Wednesday for Pope Francis pushing negotiators during difficult moments of the four-year talks. He expressed hope the pontiff’s visit will inspire Colombians to take the next step and definitively put behind them the long decades of political violence that left 220,000 dead and 7 million internally displaced.

“Peace needs a solid foundation, and reconciliation is one of those pillars that we hopefully we will not only plant but also strengthen,” Santos told reporters.

The theme of reconciliation wasn’t far from Francis’ mind from the moment he arrived in Bogota late Wednesday afternoon to great fanfare.

In a gesture likely to mark the deep symbolism of the trip, he was presented on the tarmac with a commemorative peace dove by a youth who was born in a jungle camp to a guerrilla father and a politician mother after she was taken captive by FARC rebels in 2002. Clara Rojas, now a congresswoman, did not see her son again until she was rescued in 2008 when he was 3.

Francis then made his way in the popemobile past thousands of people who had stood for hours waiting to catch a glimpse of the wildly popular pontiff along the 15-kilometer (9-mile) route from the airport to the Vatican’s embassy.

With no police line in sight, Francis was practically mobbed by well-wishers, though he seemed to revel in the outpouring of emotion from people showering him with flowers, red-yellow-and-blue Colombian flags and shouts of “Viva Francisco.” He even gave a few high-fives to some youths who got a little too close.

Once at the Nunciature in Bogota, where Francis will sleep every night, he delivered his first public remarks to a group of young people battling drug addiction, urging them not to ever lose “happiness and hope.”

It was a message that resonated with Angie Albanil, who spent part of her teenage years on the streets of Bogota but now is getting back on her feet as part of a church-backed group that performed rap and traditional cumbia music for the pontiff.

“The ills that have spread in society, we’re the ones who have to overcome them with respect for people who think differently,” she said in a prepared remarks read to the pope upon his arrival. “We’re the ones who have to build a society in which we all fit.”

Associated Press writers Cesar Garcia and Juan Zamorano contributed to this report.</s>BOGOTA — At the start of his first full day in Colombia, Pope Francis urged Colombians to persevere on the path to reconciliation and reject violence despite an unpopular peace deal that has left the country deeply divided.

“There has been too much hatred and vengeance,” Francis said in a speech at the country’s presidential palace, his first address of the day. “We do not want any type of violence whatsoever to restrict or destroy one more life.”

Colombia has recently emerged from a bloody civil war that lasted over 50 years, left 220,000 dead and displaced millions. But the country remains divided over a 2016 deal between the government and the FARC guerrilla group that brought an end to the violence. The deal gave amnesty to 7,000 former FARC guerillas, and some may win seats in Congress. Many Colombians think the deal is far too kind to the rebels.

Francis urged the crowd of 750 members of Colombia’s elite to remain committed to peace despite the unpopularity of the deal.

“The more demanding the path … the greater must be our efforts to acknowledge each other, to heal wounds, to build bridges, to strengthen relationships and support one another,” he said.

But Francis told the lawmakers that just laws are needed to resolve the “structural causes of poverty that lead to exclusion and violence.” He called inequality “the root of social ills,” and said Colombia needs the participation of all members of society — including the indigenous people and women — to thrive.

Later in the morning, he told 22,000 young people gathered in front of the Cardinal’s Palace that they must be agents of healing through forgiveness.

“Your youthfulness also makes you capable of something very difficult in life: forgiving,” he said. “It is remarkable to see how you do not get entangled in old stories, how you watch with surprise when we adults repeat events that divide us simply by being tied to resentments.”

Francis will spend the entire day in Bogota, visiting its cathedral and addressing the country’s bishops. Later in the afternoon, he will celebrate mass before an expected crowd of over 1 million people.

Large enthusiastic crowds have lined the streets of Bogota to catch a glimpse of the pope in his popemobile, chanting and running alongside it.

This is Francis’ 20th trip abroad, and the fifth to his native continent of South America.

In addition to Bogota, the Pope will also visit the city of Villavicencio – where he will lead a prayer for national reconciliation – as well as Medellin and Cartagena, before heading back to Rome on Sunday night.

Article originally appeared on Today Colombia and is republished here with permission.</s>(CNN) When Pope Francis arrives Wednesday in Colombia for a five-day visit, he'll be on difficult terrain, and not just because of the country's high altitude.

In early 2016, Francis promised he would visit the South American country once a peace agreement ending its civil war of more than 50 years had been reached. A few months later, the government and FARC rebels forged an agreement, but Colombian voters struck it down in a referendum.

A revised agreement was not put to a second referendum but passed in Colombia's Congress in November. President Juan Manuel Santos received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, but the deal is still unpopular.

Now the Pope must make good on his promise and help the peace agreed to on paper become a reality in the hearts of a divided Colombia.

"The Vatican has made it very clear that the Holy Father is not going to Colombia to bless the peace process or support either the government or the opposition," said Nestor Ponguta, a longtime Vatican correspondent for W Radio Colombia and the author of a book on Pope Francis.

"The great hope for his visit is that it helps us to heal the wounds, and that the message extends to other countries like Venezuela that are experiencing very difficult conflicts."

The Pope and Vatican diplomacy have been working for several years to help Colombia achieve peace.

In December, Francis personally brought together Santos and opposition leader, former President Alvaro Uribe, in an unprecedented three-way meeting at the Vatican.

The Pope publicly called on Colombia's leaders to push forward on the path to peace from Havana's Revolution Plaza during a visit to Cuba in 2015. "We do not have the right to allow ourselves yet another failure," he said.

The 52-year civil war in Colombia, the longest in Latin American history, has claimed 220,000 lives and displaced millions.

Former US Secretary of State John Kerry officially recognized Francis' role in helping to end the conflict.

"I also must express my deep appreciation to Pope Francis for his moral leadership and the Vatican's good offices in the quest for peace in Colombia," Kerry said in 2015

Though the focus is on peace, Vatican officials say the Pope's visit is about much more.

"This trip is daring and important," Guzman Carriquiry, vice president of the Vatican's Commission for Latin America, said at a Vatican briefing Friday. "It is wrong to only focus on peace; the Pope sees this trip as part of a long process in fighting violence."

Carriquiry pointed to some causes of the violence. "Over 50% of (the) Colombian population live in poverty; the drug trafficking culture poisons and creates corruption in the life of the country."

During his visit, Francis will stay at the papal ambassador's residence in Bogota and take day trips to Villavicencio, Medellin and Cartagena.

The Pope will participate in a prayer meeting for national reconciliation Friday in Villavicencio with some 6,000 victims of violence, former fighters and militia.

At Mass on Friday, Francis will beatify two Colombian priests who were killed in violence.

Bishop Jesus Emilio Jaramillo Monsalve of Arauca, was shot twice in the head by rebels in 1989 and the Rev. Pedro Ramirez Ramos, known as the "martyr of Armero," was killed in 1948.</s>BOGOTA, Colombia (CNS) — Pope Francis urged Colombians to put aside prejudice and pursue peace through social inclusion, fighting inequality and paying attention to the plight of the country’s most marginalized populations, such as campesinos, Afro-Colombians and indigenous peoples.

Speaking alongside President Juan Manuel Santos, the pope called on Colombians to recognize that “real wealth is diversity” and to pursue a “culture of encounter,” in which people are at the center of all political, social and economic activity. Promoting such a culture would “help us flee from the temptation of revenge and the satisfaction of short-term partisan interests.”

“I encourage you to look to all those who today are excluded and marginalized by society, those who have no value in the eyes of the majority, who are held back, cast aside. Everyone is needed in the work of creating and shaping society. This is not achieved simply with those of ‘pure blood,’ but by all,” the pope told Santos and government officials Sept. 7 outside the Casa de Narino, Colombia’s presidential palace.

“Please … listen to the poor, to those who suffer,” he added. “Look them in the eye and let yourselves be continually questioned by their faces racked with pain and by their pleading hands. From them we learn true lessons about life, humanity and dignity.”

The speech — invoking St. Peter Claver, a Jesuit who fought discrimination and the slave trade in Colombia — was Pope Francis’ first official event on his five-day visit to the South American country.

Pope Francis arrived in Colombia as the country pursues peace after five decades of armed conflict. That conflict has claimed 220,000 lives and left millions more victimized and displaced. Many of those victims came from the poorest strata of Colombian society.

“Our gaze fixes upon the weakest, the oppressed and maltreated, those who have no voice, either because it has been taken from them, or was never given to them, or because they are ignored,” the pope said, as children sat behind on a platform in front of the presidential palace columns.

The pope also emphasized the importance of family — “envisioned by God to be the fruit of spousal love” — as a source of social cohesion and “that place where we learn to live with others despite our difference and to belong to one another.”

Colombia’s government and a Marxist guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, reached a peace accord last year. The FARC is demobilizing and recently formed a political party. Another Marxist group, the National Liberation Army, is in talks with the government and agreed to a four-month cease-fire in the days before the pope’s arrival.

The peace accord with the FARC has proved polemic; some in Colombia disapprove of FARC leaders receiving reduced punishments for committing atrocities and fear the presence of former guerrillas in the country’s political process.

Pope Francis has not specifically endorsed the peace accord, but he saluted the process of bringing peace to Colombia.

“Over the past year, significant progress has been made. The steps taken give rise to hope, in the conviction that seeking peace is an open-ended endeavor, a task which does not relent, which demands the commitment of everyone,” Pope Francis said. “It is an endeavor challenging us not to weaken our efforts to build the unity of the nation.”

Santos, who has promoted the peace accord in the face of stiff opposition, called the pope’s visit a “push” to take the first steps toward peace and reconciliation.

“It’s no use silencing our weapons if we continue armed in our hearts,” the president said. “It’s no use ending a war if we still pursue each other as enemies. That’s why were need to reconcile.

“We trust your visit will open the hearts and minds of Colombians to the peace that comes from God and inhabits the souls of men. This is the peace we are constructing,” he told the pope.

Pope Francis ended by telling the country, “you have a great and noble mission, which is also a difficult task,” then quoting Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “In spite of this, before oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the unending wars down the centuries, have been able to subdue the tenacious advantage of life over death. An advantage which is both increasing and accelerating.”</s>Francis received a raucous welcome on his first full day in Colombia, with young choir members abandoning their positions in the palace courtyard and throwing their arms around him as he arrived for his first event of the day. History’s first Latin American pope took the protocol and security breaches in stride, relishing in the adoration of one of the continent’s most staunchly Roman Catholic countries.

“There has been too much hatred and violence,” Francis told a crowd at Bogota’s presidential palace that included soldiers with amputated limbs and disabled children.

BOGOTA—Pope Francis urged Colombians on Thursday to come together to heal the divisions spawned by five decades of armed conflict and address the entrenched inequality that sparked Latin America’s longest-running armed rebellion.

In his speech, Francis appealed to President Juan Manuel Santos and Colombia’s political, cultural and economic elite to avoid the temptation to seek vengeance as the country emerges from the conflict and works to rebuild. Instead, he urged them to commit themselves to “heal wounds, build bridges, strengthen relationships and support one another.”

One year after the government signed a peace accord with rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known by its Spanish acronym FARC, the guns have been silenced and 7,000 rebels are transitioning back to civilian life. But Colombians remain badly divided over the accord, with conservative opponents seeing it as too generous for the guerrillas who were behind scores of atrocities during the conflict.

Citing the most famous work of Colombia’s Nobel laureate, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Francis said he wanted to come to Colombia to encourage reconciliation.

“The solitude of always being at loggerheads has been familiar for decades, and its smell has lingered for a hundred years,” he said. “We do not want any type of violence whatsoever to restrict or destroy one more life.”

In addition, Francis insisted that Colombia now needed to enact “just laws” to resolve the structural causes of poverty and inequality to “overcome the conflicts that have torn apart this nation for decades.”

“Let us not forget that inequality is the root of social ills,” he warned.

The FARC formed as a Marxist army in the mid-1960s to overthrow Colombia’s economic and social system and open the way to redistributing land amid gross economic inequalities.

While the first year of the accord’s implementation has seen the FARC disarm, it has also been marked by the state’s failures to bring services to hard-to-reach communities where the government has historically had little presence and where rebels are beginning a new chapter as civilians. Former guerrillas arriving at many of the 26 demobilization zones found little more than fields of mud, and months later many remain living in tents rather than the buildings with running water and electricity that the government promised.

Santos, who won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the conflict, echoed the Pope’s words in his speech, urging Colombians to let go of lingering resentments.

“Silencing the guns is worthless if we remain armed in our hearts,” he told the crowd. “Ending the war is worthless if we still see each other as enemies.”

Francis had a packed day Thursday, meeting with bishops from around the region, including his first encounter with clergy from neighbouring Venezuela, who are looking for the Pope to demand accountability from their country’s socialist government and deliver a message of hope to that nation torn by political and economic turmoil.

He ended the day with an outdoor Mass in Simon Bolivar Park that is expected to be attended by hundreds of thousands of worshippers.

The theme of reconciliation wasn’t far from Francis’ mind from the moment he arrived in Bogota late Wednesday afternoon to great fanfare.

In a gesture likely to mark the deep symbolism of the trip, he was presented on the tarmac with a commemorative peace dove by a youth who was born in a jungle camp to a guerrilla father and a politician mother after she was taken captive by FARC rebels in 2002. Clara Rojas, now a congresswoman, did not see her son after his birth until she was freed in 2008 when he was 3.

Francis then made his way in the Popemobile past thousands of people who had stood for hours waiting to catch a glimpse of the wildly popular pontiff along the 15-kilometre route from the airport to the Vatican’s embassy.

With no police line in sight, Francis was practically mobbed by well-wishers, though he seemed to revel in the outpouring of emotion from people showering him with flowers, yellow-blue-and-red Colombian flags and shouts of “Viva Francisco.” He even gave a few high-fives to some youths who got a little too close.

Once at the Nunciature in Bogota, where Francis will sleep every night, he delivered his first public remarks to a group of young people battling drug addiction, urging them never to lose “happiness and hope.”

It was a message that resonated with Angie Albanil, who spent part of her teenage years on the streets of Bogota but now is getting back on her feet as part of a church-backed group that performed rap and traditional cumbia music for the pontiff.

“The ills that have spread in society, we’re the ones who have to overcome them with respect for people who think differently,” she said in a prepared remarks read to the pope upon his arrival. “We’re the ones who have to build a society in which we all fit.”
Pope Francis arrives in Colombia for a five-day visit. In early 2016, Francis promised he would visit the South American country once a civil war peace agreement was in place.