by Ben Purper
It was a strange development in an already strange year for democracy; just like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, in 2016 Colombian voters made a decision that seemed to make little sense to the rest of the world. On October 3, voters rejected a peace deal between Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known by its Spanish acronym, FARC), a Marxist revolutionary group founded in the 1960s as an armed offshoot of the Colombian Communist Party. The deal, negotiated for four years in Havana, Cuba, would have ended 52 years of guerrilla warfare, kidnappings, and assassinations, as well as dealt a significant blow to the Western Hemisphere’s drug trade by ending FARC’s use of narcotics cartels as a fundraising tactic. Then, Colombian voters shocked the world by narrowly rejecting the deal. “[B]y a margin of less than 1 percentage point,” NPR reported, “Colombians voted to remain at war.”
However, with the benefit of some hindsight, it is clear that the vote was not as simple as that. The “no” vote demonstrated that many Colombians felt that the peace deal, which offered partial amnesty and political recognition for former FARC rebels, was too lenient. Adapting the model of other Latin American revolutionary groups who trade arms for the democratic process (former President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, is one such example), the agreement would have permitted FARC’s gradual transformation into a political party. Supposedly lenient terms, coupled with the fact that many Colombians simply do not trust FARC to keep their word, allowed former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe to lead the “no” vote to victory. Rather than voting to stay at war, voters were rejecting an agreement that “secured peace at the expense of justice.”
However, the peace deal was not yet over, as President Santos – emboldened by receiving the Nobel Peace Prize just days after the referendum – re-entered into negotiations with the FARC. This time Congress, rather than a national referendum, passed the revised peace plan. This amended November 24 deal forced FARC rebels to bear more accountability for any crimes they committed. In some way, this is a success for both Santos and the “no” movement, yet opposition remains strong. Looking forward, the Colombian government will face a situation familiar to the United States and European Union: a deep political divide between cosmopolitan city-dwellers and rural conservatives, intensified by the outcome of a major democratic decision.
A successful peace deal will have larger implications for the region and for the hemisphere as a whole. For some observers, such as Colombian politician and human rights activist Ingrid Betancourt, the referendum’s outcome was “another sign of the shift to the right in Latin America,” echoing election results in Argentina and Brazil. It also occurs at the same time Cuba is normalizing relations with the U.S., which seems to signal that the last vestiges of Latin American communist movements are dissipating. The dismantling of FARC’s drug trade will also deal a blow to drug cartels on their way through Central America, and may relieve cartel-related violence in the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador) and Mexico.
All of this, however, depends on the deal’s success, and especially on President Santos’ ability to ensure its survival before leaving office. Though the international community has reason to be cautiously optimistic about Colombia’s future, there is still much uncertainty. Just like with Brexit, or Syria, or a Trump presidency, the world will have to wait and see what 2017 holds.
Benjamin Purper is a senior at the University of Redlands, where he studies International Relations and Instrumental Performance.
