But today, the FARC’s commanders and old guard say they are ready to begin official peace talks with Colombia’s government, the fourth time since the 1980s that the two sides will negotiate.

That has given the people of this region, who have lived since 1964 in the midst of one of the world’s oldest conflicts, a faint hope that the violence they have known all their lives could at last come to an end.

It is a glimmer that is felt particularly, if ever so cautiously, by those whose families have spilled blood, such as Noemi Caicedo’s. Just this past January, her 18-year-old son, Jhoan Lenin, a FARC fighter who she said had been forcefully recruited, was killed in a firefight with the army.

“I think it’s time for things to calm down,” said Caicedo, 36, who lives here on the razor’s edge of a mountain where local lore holds that a determined band of farmers first formed the FARC, or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. “There’s been so much violence, so much blood spilled. It’s time.”

As President Juan Manuel Santos’s government prepares for negotiations to begin next month, polls show most people in this country of nearly 47 million have embraced the possibility that talks could finally lead the FARC to lay down its weapons. But it is not in the big, modern cities of Colombia where a brutal conflict still burns slowly these days.

It is in places such as Marquetalia, where counterinsurgency troops chase guerrillas and where people feel forced to choose sides: selling beans and chickens to the rebels and being branded as support staff to the guerrillas, or siding with the state and winding up as targets of rebel assassins.

“You have to stay put — don’t go with one side or the other,” explained Carlos Julio Mendez, 33, who is raising four daughters with his wife and worries about their safety. “That’s our life. You have to take care of yourself, your life and what you have.”

In interviews across these steep mountains, and in the hamlets where guerrillas and soldiers have long battled, people said they want peace. But they also said they support it wearily and are suspicious of both sides and their promises.

Many spoke in hushed tones about past army abuses, such as the killings of peasants by rogue military units.

Others bitterly recalled the negotiations between the state and the FARC that broke down in the past, the latest in 2002: Then-President Andres Pastrana accused the FARC of using a Switzerland-size safe haven ceded to them for negotiations to stockpile weapons and orchestrate military strikes.

“Could this be the same as before?” asked Carlos Andres Cardenas, 28, a town official in the nearby county seat, Planadas. “We’re afraid. We’re afraid that this will be like it was before. We want them to do this peace process right and that they don’t forget about the people.”

In the 1950s in these mountains of southern Tolima state, communist guerrillas and their allies, so-called self-defense groups from the Liberal Party, began forming to fight against the army and hired pistoleros from the Conservative Party. That sectarian violence, known as “La Violencia,” a national blood-letting that killed an estimated 200,000 people, spawned rebel organizations that expanded their fight for land into a revolutionary war to take power.

The terrain here, where coffee farms on rolling hills rise into peaks topping 16,000 feet, proved perfect for guerrillas: easy to defend, with trails that offered a clear escape to lowland jungles to the south.

A momentum shift

When the army deployed 1,500 soldiers on May 27, 1964, to corral a few dozen fighters led by Pedro Antonio Marin, the battered band escaped and the FARC was born. Marin, who took the nom de guerre Manuel Marulanda and led the FARC until his death in 2008, once described the guerrilla’s emergence as coming about “spontaneously, nebulously, as the peasants became protagonists of their own history.”

By the late 1990s, the FARC was more an army, with an estimated 18,000 fighters and thousands more civilian supporters, or militiamen. Funding its operations from the cocaine trade that thrives in regions where it holds influence, the FARC spread nationwide and had the capacity of overrunning army bases and whole towns.

The momentum has shifted over the past 12 years, as nearly $9 billion in U.S. aid — 70 percent of it geared toward the military — began to flow in. That helped Colombia improve its insurgency efforts, from intelligence gathering to providing transport helicopters and better training, giving the advantage back to the state. Seasoned commanders have been killed or captured, and the group’s influence is now confined to remote rural regions.

Some of the government’s success is apparent even here.

“We have security. It’s not perfect — this is Planadas, after all,” said the local army commander, Col. Jairo Leguizamon, who is 42 and has been in the service since he was 15. “But people can do their work, get their products to market.”

Guerrillas once patrolled the streets of Planadas, the only state presence being a small police outpost that was constantly under attack. Today, the military is here, roads are being built by army engineers, the prosecutor’s office is active and social programs are being introduced.

The government says that new reality is found across the country and is prompting a new generation of FARC commanders — the youngest of whom are in their late 50s — to engage Santos.

Even the FARC’s supreme leader, Rodrigo Londono, who is better known as Timochenko, acknowledged in a video shown in Cuba last week that the rebels “arrive at this new attempt at reconciliation besieged.” That is expected to continue during talks, as Santos told reporters last week that there will be no cease-fire.

Still, the FARC is far from gone, and the low-intensity violence in this region underscores the challenges facing a state that, until recently, never held much authority here.

‘We’re forgotten’

The rebels have been an especially stubborn presence along the wall-like mountains that rise from rapids in and around Marquetalia. Here, life has always been hard. Farmers grow beans and raise cattle along what appear to be impossibly steep hillsides where one false step can mean a 1,000-foot plunge.

It is a region begging for the state’s attention, locals say. Mario Medina, 50, who raises dairy cows, noted that state has been pledging roads and other services for years.

“Development would be good, and we’d also like peace,” he said. “In this place, we’re forgotten. In these corners, very forgotten, as you can see.”

Among the most forgotten is Marquetalia.

Nohemi Caicedo’s rambling wooden house is on an abandoned army base. Old trenches, some several feet deep, are a stones throw from her porch, overlooking a valley where the guerrillas made their escape from army troops 48 years ago.

It was here, too, where Marulanda — dreaming of revolution with his compatriots — plotted his next move.

Now, Caicedo said, she hopes that the negotiations lead to peace and that the two sides make the symbolic decision to sign an armistice here.

“I hope it happens, because there’s been so much war,” she said. “It would be so nice if it would happen here.”