Make a Desert, Call It Peace
The failure of Colombia's peace deal will only benefit the forces of violent right-wing repression.
The unexpected defeat of the referendum on the Colombian peace agreement, by a wafer-thin majority of sixty thousand votes, is a disaster for the people of Colombia; how great a disaster will only become clear over the weeks and months to come. There will no doubt be many articles written analyzing the result and its implications in detail; the points below are an immediate reaction to the vote that will be rapidly superseded by such analysis.
1. “No” won by slim margins.
Opinion polls had shown a clear lead for the “Yes” camp in the weeks leading up to the vote, with support for the agreement ranging between 54 and 72 percent. How did the “No” side win? Their greatest friend was abstention, which reached 63 percent — a remarkably high figure, even in a country where turnout at elections is usually below 50 percent. It cannot be emphasized enough that “Colombians” have not rejected the peace deal: less than one-fifth of the electorate has voted against it.
The 2014 presidential election, which was a de facto referendum on the peace process between the Santos government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, is a useful benchmark for comparison. Then, turnout was 48 percent, and the incumbent Juan Manuel Santos defeated his far-right challenger Óscar Iván Zuluaga by a comfortable majority in the second round. Santos won 7.8 million votes in 2014, while Zuluaga received 6.9 million.
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