Hours before a crucial deadline, rebel and government negotiators last night agreed on a timetable for ceasefire talks, a significant accomplishment in Colombia's rancorous peace process.
The agreement calls for the immediate opening of ceasefire talks, with the goal of setting ceasefire terms by April 7, and the participation of an international verification commission. Negotiations will also attempt to end violence by a brutal rightwing paramilitary group and stop kidnappings by the rebels.
The rebels and the government's chief negotiator signed the accord three hours and 40 minutes before the president, Andres Pastrana, was to decide whether to cancel a vast safe haven he ceded to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) three years ago.
Mr Pastrana, in a nationwide television address, called the accord "an important step" and said he was prolonging the safe haven until April 10. Cancellation of the zone would almost certainly have resulted in the escalation of the bloody civil war which has seen thousands killed since the 1960s.
"The whole world will be a witness as to whether the Farc and the government are keeping their word," Mr Pastrana said.
Foreign diplomats helped to facilitate talks, held under an open-air thatched-roof hut deep in their sanctuary in southern Colombia. After the agreement was reached, the chief government negotiator, Camilo Gomez, and the envoys toasted the accord with rum. The Cuban ambassador, Luis Hernandez Ojeda, handed out cigars to government officials, gun-toting rebels and diplomats.
"This is good news for Colombia," declared the UN special envoy, James LeMoyne.
Although the accord called for more talk and not an actual ceasefire, it raised hopes for Colombia's peace process, which began three years ago but has produced few results.
However, there have been disappointments before. A 1984 ceasefire agreement between the Farc and the administration of the then-president, Belisario Betancur, broke down three years later when the rebels ambushed an army patrol. The government then suspended peace talks.
Mr Pastrana revived the peace process after taking office in 1998, taking the unheralded step of giving a government enemy a huge safe haven, as a site and incentive for talks.
However, Mr Pastrana, now in his last year of office, has become impatient with the lack of results. Last week, he sent troops to the borders of the rebel safe zone, which is the size of Switzerland, and threatened to retake it unless the rebels returned to the negotiating table, which they abandoned in October.
He said that if negotiators failed to agree by midnight yesterday (0500 GMT today) on a timeline for ceasefire talks, he would revoke the guerrilla safe haven.
If the safe haven had been cancelled, the rebels would then have had 48 hours to evacuate the five main towns in the zone in the jungles and pasturelands of southern Colombia.
While talking peace, the Farc has waged an offensive during the past few days, killing 12 government soldiers on Saturday. The president of Congress, Carlos Garcia, said on Saturday night that the rebel attacks appeared to be aimed at pressuring the government and weakening its negotiating position.
Critics of the peace process say the rebels are participating only to buy time and strengthen their forces, currently estimated at 16,000 combatants. But if the peace process fails, many Colombians fear the country will explode in all-out war.
Colombia's civil war kills roughly 3,500 people every year, pitting US-backed government forces and an outlawed rightwing paramilitary group against the Farc and a smaller rebel army.
