•  As Colombia’s Congress Ratifies Peace Deal With FARC Rebels

Brazil has declared three days of mourning after a plane carrying the Chapecoense football team crashed in Colombia in the early hours of Tuesday, killing 71 players, journalists and crew members.

Six of the 77 people on the plane – three footballers, two crew and a journalist – survived the disaster. One footballer who was pulled alive from the plane’s wreckage died later in hospital.

A Reuters photographer at the scene said dozens of bodies were laid out and covered with sheets around the wreckage, as about 30 rescuers, police and military personnel searched the crash site. He said the plane had been split in two with only the nose and wings recognisable, and the tail end completely destroyed.

Colombian officials said the charter flight started its journey in São Paulo, Brazil, on Monday afternoon and stopped over in Bolivia before heading for the Colombian city of Medellín, where the team had been due to play in the final of the Copa Sudamericana.

The plane, a British Aerospace 146 short-haul aircraft, was carrying footballers, club staff and journalists to the match against Atlético Nacional in Colombia’s second-largest city.

A statement from José María Córdova airport in Medellín said the plane had declared an emergency at 10pm local time on Monday because of electrical failures. Around 15 minutes later, it crashed in a wooded, mountainous area outside Medellín, where heavy rain, fog and darkness hampered rescue efforts.

“At the moment we know that the disaster happened in Cerro Gordo in the municipality of La Unión and that there were 72 passengers and nine crew on board, including the football team Chapecoense Real. There are reported to be six survivors,” the statement read. Officials originally believed there were 81 people on the plane, but the toll was lowered after it was confirmed that four people on the passenger list had failed to board the plane in Bolivia.

Later on Monday, Colombia’s civil aeronautics agency announced that it had found the plane’s two flight recorders “in perfect condition.”

Colombia’s civil aviation authority named the six survivors in a statement posted on Facebook on Tuesday. It said two crew members – Ximena Suárez, a flight attendant, and Erwin Tumiri, a flight technician – had been taken to the Clínica Somer hospital in Rionegro.

In the meantime, Colombia’s Congress approved a new peace deal with FARC rebels late on Wednesday, despite objections from former President and now Senator Alvaro Uribe, who said it was still too lenient on the insurgents who have battled the government for 52 years.

The agreement was approved in the lower house by 130-0, a day after the Senate ratified it 75-0. Lawmakers from Uribe’s Democratic Center party left the floors of both houses in protest just before voting began.

The ratification — and signing last week — begins a six-month countdown for the 7,000-strong FARC, which started as a rebellion fighting rural poverty, to abandon weapons and form a political party.

President Juan Manuel Santos and rebel leader Rodrigo Londono signed the revised accord last week in a sober ceremony after the first deal was rejected in a national plebiscite.

Santos, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in October for his peace efforts, wants to get the deal implemented as quickly as possible to maintain a fragile ceasefire.

Uribe’s supporters argued the deal offered too many concessions to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and did not serve as a deterrent for other groups involved in crime.

“Let’s not forget what we are doing today, we’re trying to end more than 50 years of war,” government negotiator Sergio Jaramillo said.

The new agreement to end Latin America’s longest insurgency was put together in just over a month after the original pact — which allowed the rebels to hold public office and skip jail — was narrowly and unexpectedly defeated in an Oct. 2 referendum.

While the government says the accord includes most of the proposals put forward by those who rejected it, the new document did not alter those two key provisions. That angered many among Colombia’s largely conservative population, who are also furious that Santos decided to ratify the deal in Congress instead of holding another plebiscite.

The government and FARC worked together in Cuba for four years to negotiate an end to the region’s longest-running conflict that has killed more than 220,000 and displaced millions in the Andean nation.

An end to the war with FARC is unlikely to end violence in Colombia as the lucrative cocaine business has given rise to criminal gangs and traffickers.

Guardian with additional report from Reuters