Workers set up chairs and hang banners on walls at a venue in northern Colombia, near the Venezuelan border, where peace talks between the Colombian government and a dissident faction of the FARC guerrilla group that disarmed in 2017 are set to begin. At the initiative of Colombia's first-ever leftist president, Gustavo Petro, the government wants to give the dissidents a second chance to lay down arms after rejecting a 2016 peace agreement with the FARC, of which they were then a part. Petro took office last year with a vow to bring "total peace" to a country battered by decades of civil conflict between the state and various left-wing guerrilla groups, right-wing paramilitaries and drug traffickers. IMAGES