BOGOTA, Colombia — Colombian voters have rejected a peace deal with FARC rebels, a surprise outcome that risks prolonging a 52-year-old armed conflict, and in doing so tossed the peace process into chaos.
By a razor margin of 50.25 to 49.75 percent, voters rejected the peace deal, a Brexit-style backlash that few were expecting.
After nearly six years of negotiations, many handshakes and ceremonial signatures, Colombia’s half-century war is not over. Not even close.
Surveys had predicted an easy win for the “yes” vote by a margin of 2 to 1. Instead the result delivers a crushing blow to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who since 2011 has pursued the peace deal with single-minded determination and to the steady detriment of his own popularity. He took an extraordinary risk by insisting that the accord — the product of tedious, grinding negotiations with the FARC– would only be valid if Colombian voters gave their blessing.
They didn’t, and that failure has left Santos politically crippled. The president’s supporters began insisting that FARC leaders and government negotiators re-open the accord, but Santos had repeatedly warned Colombians that no such thing would be possible.
Sunday’s vote was also an extraordinary rejection of the guerrilla commanders of the FARC, who in recent months have tried to engineer a makeover of the rebels’ public image in preparation for an eventual return to politics. The outcome reveals the depths of Colombian public animosity toward the rebels, accumulated by decades of kidnappings, bombing and land seizures in the name of Marxist-Leninist revolution.
Sunday’s vote, for many Colombians, was about far more than a cease-fire with FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Many saw the country’s political and judicial integrity at stake, and the peace accord as a dubious giveaway to the rebels.
“I want peace, but not if it means kneeling down to the guerrillas,” said Bogota resident Piedad Ramos, 60. “Santos has divided and deceived the country.”
Gina Narvaez, 34, voted no because she wants the two sides to “take another look at some of the points of the accord.”
Her brother and her uncle were kidnapped by the FARC in the Huila department in the 1990s. They were freed only after a costly ransom payment.
“They need to change to accord so that there’s some kind of punishment for those who committed these crimes,” she said.
Voter turnout was lower than 40 percent, and heavy rains along Colombia’s Caribbean coast, one of the strongholds of president Santos, may have sapped support for the accord.
No one knows what will happen now with the nearly 5,800 fighters FARC fighters who were preparing to move into U.N.-monitored camps to begin laying down their weapons and start a transition to civilian life. They will presumably remain in their jungle hideouts, and a bilateral cease-fire between the rebels and the government is also now potentially in doubt.
By insisting on a deal that would allow them to avoid prison time in exchange for providing full and honest testimony to their war crimes, FARC’s leaders gambled that such an arrangement would be acceptable to Colombian voters. They were wrong.
The accord is not a surrender for the FARC, and includes other concessions to the rebels, including the guarantee of at least 10 seats in Colombia’s congress through 2026.
Colombians on both sides of the debate saw the significance of their vote Sunday in terms much bigger than the armed conflict itself.
At a base level, it was a clash between the two most powerful figures in Colombian politics: Santos and his arch-nemesis, conservative former president and senator ?lvaro Uribe, who led the campaign against the peace deal.
The son of a wealthy Bogota publishing family, Santos is a figure from Colombia’s urban, globalized business elite, for whom the war with FARC has been a kind of anachronistic developmental constraint. They’re hoping the peace deal brings a new wave of foreign investment to Colombia, and increased trade.
Uribe, whose father, a cattle rancher, was killed by the guerrillas, represents the traditional Colombian landowners who bore the burnt of the FARC’s rural terror. They largely financed the paramilitary groups whose counter-insurgency campaign against the guerrillas and Colombian civilians produced the war’s worst violence. And their land disputes with rural farmers were at the origin of the conflict itself.
Now they will have to fight those battles with FARC– or whatever the name of its future political party may be– in the halls of Colombia’s congress.
Sunday’s outcome also amounts to a rare foreign policy win for the United States and the Obama administration, which has backed Santos and pledged to boost U.S. aid to Colombia by nearly 50 percent, to $450 million a year. Washington’s 16-year, $10 billion “Plan Colombia” security assistance package is widely credited with tipping the conflict in the Colombian government’s favor by weakening the FARC militarily and driving the rebels to seek a negotiated solution.
Voting got off to a slow start in the capital, but as the rain cleared voters began streaming into polling stations.
“I voted yes for the future of my children, so they won’t have to live in a country at war,” said Roc?o Cano, 41, a schoolteacher. “Fifty years of violence is enough.”
A few voters Sunday who had suffered personally from the war said they were not ready to forgive the FARC– or at least not through an accord like this one.
“We all want peace, and I respect those who vote yes, but I can’t support this agreement,” said Jakelin Rueda, 33. “There’s no real justice in it.”
Rueda said her father was killed by the FARC in 2002 in the small town of Caparrap? north of the capital where she grew up. He was a farmer and community leader who opposed the guerrillas.
A lot of Colombian city-dwellers voted ‘yes” for “idealistic reasons,” Rueda said. “But they have not been affected by the violence directly.”
While FARC leaders did not formally campaign, the rebels made a major last-minute public relations push ahead of the vote. For the first time, rebel commanders have met with the families of victims at the sites of notorious FARC massacres, seeking forgiveness. On Saturday, the guerrillas volunteered to get an early start on disarmament, detonating about 1,400 pounds of explosives and other military ordnance in the presence of observers from the United Nations.
Most important, FARC leaders announced Saturday that they would make a formal declaration of their financial assets to make reparations to victims. The assets will include cash and property in areas of Colombia that the FARC has controlled for decades.
Until now the rebels insisted that they did not have money to contribute to the implementation of the peace accord, despite the widespread view here that FARC has socked away millions from drug-trafficking profits and other illicit sources.
“I want our country to be free,” said Nelson Gonzalez, 42, explaining why he voted to support the accord. Growing up in the Caquet? department of southern Colombia that has been a FARC stronghold for decades, Gonzalez lived in constant fear of guerrilla roadblocks, where motorists faced shakedowns, and the risk of being carjacked or kidnapped. There were places on the map that were simply no-go zones.
“I’d like to be able to travel around my country, at any hour, and not have to be afraid,” he said. “I just want to live in peace.”
