Colombians vote Sunday in a presidential election held up as a test for peace talks between the government and Marxist guerrillas to end a half-century-old civil war.

President Juan Manuel Santos, who is seeking a second four-year term, has presented his re-election as a referendum on his negotiations to end the conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Colombian authorities have arrested the unlicensed driver who fled his overcrowded bus after it burst into flames, burning to death 33 young children, an official said on Monday.

An evangelical church leader who had chartered the bus was also arrested, prosecutor Luis Gonzalez told a press conference.

Colombia Monday mourned the tragic loss of 32 children burned to death in a fiery bus explosion as authorities arrested the driver who had fled the scene of the inferno.

The youngsters -- aged one to eight -- perished Sunday after the bus burst into flames as they returned home from church services in the north of the South American country.

The United States cheered a deal clinched by Colombia and leftist FARC rebels on ending the country's vast illicit drugs trade.

The issue was the third on a six-point agenda for peace talks, which began November 2012, aimed at putting a stop to the longest-running insurgency in Latin America.

Colombia and leftist FARC guerrillas concluded a key stage in talks on Friday aimed at ending five decades of war, as the rebels announced a truce for the upcoming presidential election.

The outcome of talks between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels and Bogota authorities is important for President Juan Manuel Santos's May 25 re-election bid.

Colombia's FARC rebel group said Friday it will observe a unilateral truce during the country's May 25 elections as a gesture of goodwill.

The FARC said the truce will run from May 20 through May 28, and will also include the forces of Colombia's second largest guerrilla group, the ELN.

Rescue workers recovered more bodies Saturday of people killed in a landslide at an illegal gold mine in western Colombia, raising the death toll to 10, with an additional six feared dead.

Miners had been laboring with hand tools to extract gold from the open pit mine when it was hit by an avalanche of mud, rock and earth on Wednesday.

A collapse at one of Colombia's many unlicensed mines has killed three people and left another 13 missing under tons of mud and rock, rescue officials said Thursday.

As anguished relatives looked on from behind a security perimeter 24 hours after the tragedy in western Colombia, six backhoes clawed at the earth to try to get to the missing.

Colombia will pay special tribute to its late native son, the Nobel-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with a solemn ceremony Tuesday.

The memorial, led by President Juan Manuel Santos, will be held in Bogota's Primada Cathedral, the country's culture ministry tweeted Saturday.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel-winning Colombian author who used magical realism to tell epic stories of love, family and dictatorship in Latin America, died Thursday at the age of 87.

Known affectionately as "Gabo," the author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera" became one of the most popular Latin American novelists in the world and the godfather of a literary movement that witnessed a continent in turmoil.