Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos claimed Friday that in the almost 50 years of his country’s conflict nobody has hit guerrilla group FARC as hard as he has.
Santos made the statement in an interview on CNN explaining how he had gone from trying to defeat the FARC militarily when leading the Defense Ministry under former President Alvaro Uribe to becoming an advocate for a ngotiated end to the conflict.
“I wanted to kill them because I wanted peace. I knew that if you don’t strike them hard you’d never take them to a negotiating table,” Santos said, adding that “modesty apart, in 50 years, nobody has hit them as hard as I have.”
However, “making war is easier than making peace,” the president added.