General Freddy Padilla looked buoyant when he knocked at the front door of Sergio Jaramillo, Colombia’s defence minister, last month.

Dressed in perfectly pressed fatigues, the grey-haired military man could not suppress a grin and a symbolic gesture when asked to predict when the end of the Farc might come. Drawing a line across his throat, the general hinted that final victory over Latin America’s oldest guerrilla movement was in sight.