Colombian leader Juan Manuel Santos has announced a bilateral truce between his nation and the Marxist rebel group FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia).

The BBC reports Santos would like the truce to start on Jan. 1, 2016.

Since 2012 both sides have been participating in peace talks, which have been hosted by the Cuban government in Havana. Until Santos made his recent announcement, Colombia had declined to declare a ceasefire. FARC, on the other hand, had placed themselves on a unilateral ceasefire for several years and had asked the government to do so as well.

Regarding his plans, Santos asked FARC and Colombian negotiators "to make the effort so between now and 31 December we can wrap up the fifth point [on the peace agenda], which is how to end the conflict, so that we can declare an internationally monitored bilateral ceasefire from 1 January."

Tensions between the leftist group and the conservative Latin American government have existed since FARC was founded in 1964. The decades of conflict between Colombia and FARC has resulted in the deaths of an estimated 220,000 people.

In September the two politically disparate sides came to agree upon certain key issues in order to build peaceful negotiations, with President Santos setting an initial deadline of six months for the signing of a final agreement.

Now that things seems to be going peacefully with FARC, Santos can start to focus on the second largest rebel group in the region: ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional).

On Monday, the ELN killed 12 security members in the remote indigenous reserve of Bachira.

In retaliation, Santos ordered the army to increase its offensive against the rebel group.

As the AFP reports, Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas called the ELN’s recent attack a war crime.

The ELN is a considerably smaller group than FARC, with 2,500 fighters and as opposed to FARC’s 7,000.