COLOMBIA’S communist rebels will sign an amended peace deal today opposed by red-handed former president Alvaro Uribe.

The final draft of the revised accord was agreed between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) and President Juan Manuel Santos’s government on Tuesday.

The signing ceremony will be held at Bogota’s Colon Theatre.

Crucially, the new version of the peace deal will be put to Colombia’s congress for approval. The first accord was narrowly rejected in a referendum on October 2.

“We have the unique opportunity to close this painful chapter in our history that has bereaved and afflicted millions of Colombians for half a century,” Mr Santos said in a televised address following Tuesday’s meeting.

“This new accord possibly won’t satisfy everybody, but that’s what happens in peace accords. There are always critical voices, it is understandable and respectable.”

Government negotiators tried to win round Mr Uribe, who led the anti-peace campaign, and his supporters in a marathon seven-hour meeting on Monday night.

But the former president, who granted impunity to far-right paramilitary death squads, claimed the more than 50 changes to the accord were merely cosmetic and demanded another plebiscite.

“Uribe governed badly, corrupted and bled Colombia during eight years and never wanted peace,” Farc commander Pablo Catatumbo tweeted from Bogota. “He wanted to defeat the Farc but he couldn’t.”

The Farc has made several key concessions to win a second chance at peace.

They include increasing the potential scope of “war crimes” prosecutions against guerillas — while the troops and paramilitaries responsible for three-quarters of the 220,000 conflict deaths run free.

And the property claims of big landowners will be guaranteed against redistribution in favour of the Farc’s peasant support base.

Last week two Farc guerillas were killed in what one witness called an ambush while making their way to a demobilisation area under the terms of the August ceasefire.

Mr Santos met the UN human rights envoy and other officials on Tuesday to discuss a recent upsurge in killing of peasant land-reform campaigners.

The recent murders “are palpable, dramatic evidence of the risks and uncertainty that exists around the implementation of the peace accord,” he said after the meeting.