COLOMBIA’S president dismissed concerns on Wednesday that peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) will miss their deadline later this month.

“I’m not going to sign a bad agreement to meet a date,” President Juan Manuel Santos said at a public event. It was his first public recognition that the two sides may miss the March 23 deadline.

Mr Santos insisted that if the two sides have not reached an acceptable agreement by then, they will simply set a new deadline.

Great progress has been made in the Cuban and Norwegian-mediated talks in Havana since 2012, despite attempts by hard-line warmongers, including former president Alvaro Uribe, to derail them.

United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki Moon acknowledged this fact on Wednesday when he appointed veteran French envoy Jean Arnault to head a monitoring mission for the expected ceasefire.

But a recent string of murders of left-wing campaigners has raised fears of a repeat of the 1984 truce with the Farc, which ended following the murders of more than 3,000 members of its Partriotic Union party by right-wing death squads.

The Guardian reported yesterday that Marcha Patriotica member William Castillo was shot dead on Monday in Antoquia state, a historic area of paramilitary activity.

The previous day, Communist Youth activist Klaus Zapata was gunned down after playing a football match in Bogota.

Farc commander Rodrigo Londono, known by the nom de guerre Timochenko, tweeted: “This is the wrong path if we want reconciliation with a view toward peace.”