8 ms·

Colombia’s Milestone in World Peace

108 points by JBReefer 10y ago

oblio 10y ago
The Cold War is the gift that keeps on giving. Many of our current worries (ISIS, for example) are things frozen in time by the appropriately called Cold War. Maybe some day within my lifetime North Korea will stop being a dictatorship..
- euroclydon 10y ago
  I wonder what exactly you mean... Borders used to change all the time, until we 1) got a little turned off by industrialized bloodshed, and 2) went nuclear. Now there's a lot of pressure on national borders as some states have become weak, and other stronger, but global politeness is preventing much of a shift in the lines.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Many of our current worries (ISIS, for example) are things frozen in time by the appropriately called Cold War. The entity calling itself "The Islamic State" -- ISIS is an acronym for one English translation of its previous name for itself -- isn't "frozen in time" by the Cold War (you can certainly argue that a number of aspects of the Cold War formed important historical bases for its development, but the proximate trigger for it developing from al-Qaeda in Iraq into the Islamic State in Iraq (and then Iraq and the Levant -- or "Iraq and Syria" to much of the US news media, etc.) comes from the US invasion of occupation of Iraq, which was sort of the culmination of more than a decade of post-Cold War US-Iraq conflict and confrontation.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > The entity calling itself "The Islamic State" -- ISIS is an acronym for one English translation of its previous name for itself I don't really see a big difference between "the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham" and "the Islamic State". They dropped the geographical indicator from their name. They're still there; the name without the geographical indicator is pretty transparently derived from the earlier one. There's nothing about "ISIS" that opposes or conflicts with the "new" name, nor is it even necessary for us to change our name for something according to the whims of someone else.
  - int_19h 10y ago
    And yet it is indirectly tied - it was CIA support for the more radicalized mujaheddin factions in Afghanistan (which in turn was caused by listening to and trusting Pakistani ISI advice too much) that produced Taliban later, and indirectly accelerated the creation of al-Qaeda. Remember this? https://imgur.com/CRaBPOx https://imgur.com/CRaBPOx
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      And that very much was a part of the 'cold war' in that it caused the former Soviet Union to expend huge resources in Afghanistan. So the ISIS cold-war link is quite clear.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      That's a really indirect tie, because the group that became al-Qaeda in Iraq (and later the Islamic State in Iraq, etc.) was an unrelated homegrown Iraqi Islamist group that only adopted the al-Qaeda brand temporarily after al-Qaeda became the dominant public face of anti-American Islamic extremism in the wake of 9/11, dumping that branding as soon as they had their own local success and didn't need the al-Qaeda brand for increased visibility.
      - int_19h 10y ago
        Not the same people, obviously. The tie here is the continuation of the same ideology. And while the ideology predates Cold War (Wahhabi, Deobandi, and even Qutb, from whom most of modern extreme Salafi directly derive), its quick proliferation is largely due to outside assistance in proxy wars.
    - gaius 10y ago
      The situation in Syria can accurately be described as a proxy war between the CIA and the Pentagon.
- angersock 10y ago
  At least in the case of North Korea, I very much fear that in a decade or two the place will go dark and the rest of of the world (ourselves included) will find a mausoleum of a country. We'll all kinda go, "Well, we couldn't just invade them, could we?", and just silently acknowledge that everyone in the world sat there while millions of people were starved, butchered, or tortured. And then we'll probably have a fight over what's left.
jedmeyers 10y ago
Yeah, last "war" ended since no one declare wars anymore. Just look at Russian annexation of Crimea with the armed forces of "noname" country.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  FYI, Crimea's not in the western hemisphere.
  - daveslash 10y ago
    I think jedmeyers' point was that it's possible to have conflicts without it officially being designated a war - and he/she was holding Crimea as an example of such. There's still rebel paramilitaries in Southern Mexico who have declared war against the state (e.g. Zapatista Army of National Liberation) - but it's not "officially" a war (whatever that means) [edit] gender pronoun
    - joyinsky 10y ago
      No. The EZLN (Zapatista Army) surrendered in 1994 and in 1996 there was signed a Peace Accord with them. The conflict in Colombia isn't ended yet though, the ELN hasn't signed the cease-fire.
- santiagogo 10y ago
  The funny thing is that until the peace process began nobody had ever called it a war in Colombia. It was just referred to as an internal conflict or a violence or guerilla problem. I guess the first part of solving it was recognizing that it was actually an internal war.
afarrell 10y ago
Isn't El Salvador in the middle of a war?
- lazyant 10y ago
  No
- theklub 10y ago
  I think Venezuela would be the next closest.
- zhemao 10y ago
  No their civil war ended long ago. But they do still have a lot of violence caused by gangs like Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) and the armed vigilante groups that hunt them.
  - afarrell 10y ago
    Right, isn't that gang violence enough of a war that the US is getting refugees?
    - zhemao 10y ago
      MS13 was started by Salvadoran prisoners deported from the US, so I guess the whole thing is coming full circle. I suppose it depends on what where you draw the line between violent crime and civil war. Usually when we think of war, we think of the combatants having clear political goals. As in they are trying to take or hold onto territory or political power. I'm not sure MS13 has any such goals. I could see how the level of violence would be about the same as that of a war, but for various reasons we don't call it such.
zpallin 10y ago
War on drugs hasn't ended.
joyinsky 10y ago
The conflict in Colombia isn't ended yet, the ELN hasn't signed the cease-fire.
- baristaGeek 10y ago
  Yup. But FARC is 30,000 people and ELN is 1,500. This agreement will probably serve as a framework to negotiate with this smaller group.
S_Daedalus 10y ago
Thank goodness, now it's just a bunch of "local conflicts" and "police actions". But no "war". Safe! /s
cgriswald 10y ago
Official war is over, but there are still all kinds of violence; and where there is not violence there is the subjugation by threat of violence. Much of this has to do with US policy w.r.t. the Americas for the last ~200 years and more recently the War on Drugs. Defining "peace" as a lack of official war is utter nonsense. We only have to look south across a single border to see a country very much at war.
Ericson2314 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere better stick to "the Americas"
- seliopou 10y ago
  A good old friend of mine just linked me directly to this comment, and with good reason. Somewhere around the years 2005-7 I was involved in a light edit war with a Dutch gentleman that rewrote this page to wipe away all reference to the Western Hemisphere as a geopolitical term. Rather than taking into account its historical usage, and _current_ usage in various fields, he instead approached the term on purely etymological, and consequently mathematical, basis. Western? Surely the part to the left. Hemisphere? That can only mean exactly half. I spent a good amount of time in the library researching this. Old books with old maps from rare collections, simple google searches, and more casual physical references. None really really backed up the etymological definition. I made a few attempts to edit, but eventually gave up. Mostly, because it seemed so pointless. The information out there (as opposed to online) was so apparently and plentiful, it felt like I was to argue that the sky is blue. So I let it be. A decade later, and the results still stand. A bland, technical page with with a tabulation of the countries Within, Without and Somewhere In Between the two Sets dominating the page.
  - nol13 10y ago
    Well he is technically correct, the best kind of correct!
    - Nimitz14 10y ago
      TIL Germany is not part of the Western Hemisphere.
  - Ericson2314 10y ago
    That's a great story! I'd be curious what the page looked like before. I actually really look at the tables, but saw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere#/media/File:Western_Hemisphere_LamAz.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere#/media/File... and then came to comment here. To the best of my knowledge I had never thought of this before, but it occurred to me while I was reading the opinion piece.
simonmd 10y ago
Read the final agreement (if you dare and don't vomit easily): - Those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity will NOT go to jail, in a blatant violation of the Rome statute. - Despite earning BILLIONS from drug trafficking, they will not issue any reparations to the victims, instead, ordinary colombians will be taxed for that purpose. - They will be GIVEN between 10-30% of control of the senate. No election necessary. - They will be GIVEN 26 regions where there will be no state presence. Coincidentally in every strategic drug corridor. - They will not return the recruited minors. - They will participate in the creation of a "super-tribunal" with absolute legal powers, even over cases that have been sentenced and closed. This is not an agreement, it is the surrender of a state and should be an international disgrace. In a real country this would constitute high treason. https://www.mesadeconversaciones.com.co/sites/default/files/24_08_2016acuerdofinalfinalfinal-1472094587.pdf https://www.mesadeconversaciones.com.co/sites/default/files/...
- hannibalhorn 10y ago
  Did you read it? I see that they're guaranteed 5 (out of 100) senate seats, which by my math is definitely not 10-30%. I doubt most normal folks will vote for them, especially in the countryside where people have been the most affected by the conflict. Yes, those responsible for war crimes - on all sides - (police, soliders, paramilitary, as well as the rebels) have the opportunity to confess before a tribunal and avoid jail time. It will be up to judges, but they will receive up to 8 years of restricted movement and community service (whatever that may be.) This is definitely the most controversial part of the agreement, as 95% of the country feels these folks are crooks and should be punished. I could go on - I'm an American and have lived in Colombia for about 6 years now, and see an entire country that has been held back due to this stupid war - the agreement isn't perfect, but this needs to be put to bed, so the country can move forward. After having just seen the whole "brexit" fiasco, I'm a little worried about how this is being put to a referendum and seeing so much disinformation being spread. Even on an English speaking tech news site.
  - simonmd 10y ago
    Yes I read it. Word by word. I am born and raised colombian, and for over 40 years have seen the result of sacrificing justice for short term gains or individual vanity. It's not 5 seats. It's 5 in the senate, 5 in congress, and 16 in special circumscription where only FARC friendly candidates can participate. They have massive amounts of money stashed for the upcoming campaigns, and by now you should be aware that money buys regional candidates in Colombia. Add to that fear of FARC retaliation in areas where the government now will have NO presence during elections or afterwards. (they have strategically left Frente Primero out of the accord, to handle the residual drug operation and armed coercion). "Confessing" to war crimes and crimes against humanity does not constitute appropriate punishment under any international standard. The International Criminal Court and Human Rights Watch have both been quite clear that no jail time would be unacceptable. You have lived here barely enough to have only seen Santos as president, who has done absolutely NOTHING except push his narcissistic agenda forward, at the expense of justice, economy and the independence of the branches of power. I am old enough to know colombia's problem is not 17,000 asshole terrorists in the jungle, it is LACK OF JUSTICE at every level, with politicians, guerrillas, paramilitaries etc. Sacrificing justice to appease one criminal entity is exactly why my country cannot 'move forward'.
doozy 10y ago
I'm living in Colombia, and my perception is most people want the agreement rejected and the President impeached. There's going to be a referendum on the agreement, and in spite of the government being heavily campaigning for it, odds are voters will side against it. If they don't I'm out of here. This will become Venezuela 2.0.
- afy 10y ago
  If you look at the byline, it is very interesting that this was co-written by Juan Manuel Santos (for other readers: the current president of Colombia).
- pastProlog 10y ago
  Doozy admits the truth you won't see in the US corporate media. The Colombian bourgeoisie does not want peace. It's why they murdered Gaitán. It's why when the left unilaterally put down the gun in the mid 1980s and ran for office, they had right wing death squads, the AUC etc. kill off the candidates, campaign workers etc. They want to run things with the army, with the US army and billions coming in from Plan Colombia etc. They don't want to let people vote or campaign, they'd prefer the FARC control a few departments in the south and they rule by force in the rest of the country. Thanks for making things clear. You don't see this kind of clarity in the US, where liberals say FARC wants violence and other nonsense.
  - doozy 10y ago
    Actually the peace process of the M19/UP of the 1980s is a chilling precedent of what will happen in Colombia if this agreement goes on: The government may grant immunity to the FARC, but their victims will not forget nor forgive. Peace with impunity will mean more war, as the victims of the kidnapping, racketeering and murdering (or their surviving relatives) will want their revenge, just as they did after the government forgave M19's crimes. In the (unlikely) case this agreement is approved, it wouldn't surprise me if it leads to a coup. And that's a rare thing in Colombia, one of the oldest democracies in the world and a country where the last coup attempt took place in the 19th century.
skylan_q 10y ago
Official wars between geographic factions and nations coming to an end in the west. Fourth generation warfare only starting.
desiderantes 10y ago
I'm really saddened to see such uninformed comments here, regarding Colombia's situation. I am victim of FARC's wrongdoing, i've lost family members, peace and a place to live to them. I've also suffered similar damages from paramilitar actors here in the Caribbean coast. A peace agreement kills FARC legitimacy and their international position. If they «agree» to stop their actions, you'll see a bunch of former supporters (like those insane danish supporters) moving to the mainstream left of this country, Polo Democrático, who've failed to distance themselves from Venezuela, and indirectly, from FARC (just like the right wing, which is deeply entangled with paramilitarism). People who live away from the war zones are most ikely to support the NO, after all, it's not their kids, brothers and fathers whose lives are being sacrficed. People living in war zones just want it to stop. Seriously. Uribe moved the conflict to rural and underdeveloped areas of this country, so peope living on the big cities (Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, etc.) do not see the big influence of FARC's actions, they live instead under the horror of ex-paramilitar criminal bands, same who signed a peace agreement with Uribe. So it comes to me as a surprise how the least affected by the war, and the ones getting a huge slice of the paramilitar violence, are the ones voting for NO (Antioquia is understandable, Uribe is like a god there). I support the peace agreement, but i see concerning flaws in its current form. I am, however, no FARC apologist, and honestly a part of me would like to personally kill some of them, but we need to move forward, end this part of the conflict, and when we move the criminals away from a ideological umbrella, we can see and stop them as they are, criminals who do not give a FUCK about left or right, and i'm damn sure we'll see a chunk of guerilleros forming armed bands, so it's far from over. But this is the first step, and it needs to be done.
- santiagogo 10y ago
  I agree, as a Colombian I think the most important part about the peace agreement is that it will delegitimize the position for using weapons in politics, which has become a long tradition in our country. It is also a huge step for a country that has solved it's political differences historically by killing the other party, that we have now had the capability of negotiating for 5 years under a truce, and that the right wing government is willing to accept political participation from the guerilla, and to entertain ultra leftist policies under a new bipartisan congress, and that it is recognizing that there is a huge social gap and inequality which led to the formation of the guerrilla in the first place, which should be fixed. Unfortunately violence probably will not end instantly, since the drug trade will continue to be a big business, and that a part of the trained militias will not be able to readjust to normal civilian life once the peace is signed. But at least criminals and narcos will not be shielded under a political left wing speech and be united under a flag, which will eventually lead to violence ending. I am completely confident that the Colombians will vote Yes for the peace process, and that the implementation will be successful. Some very big war criminals will probably walk away scot-free, but the huge overall benefit for the entire country will far outweigh the short term injustice. Expect a lot of big startups coming out of Colombia and some very interesting investment possibilities, since the peace agrement shows confidence in the Colombian institutions and constitution, which will lead to a booming middle class in a 50 million person country which has a lot of space to grow in since it has been historically been overlooked because of the security issues.
owly 10y ago
Dear my dead friends in Sarajevo, Europe has enjoyed 7 decades of peace. NYT told me, so it must be true. Kiza and Lana, you must've faked your deaths along with many of your friends based on the brilliant minds at the NYT. Please come home. Love always...
- phreeza 10y ago
  Do you count the states of former yugoslavia as western europe? I would suspect that the author just doesn't, and thats why they wrote what they did.

108 points by JBReefer 10y ago

oblio 10y ago

The Cold War is the gift that keeps on giving. Many of our current worries (ISIS, for example) are things frozen in time by the appropriately called Cold War. Maybe some day within my lifetime North Korea will stop being a dictatorship..

euroclydon 10y ago
I wonder what exactly you mean... Borders used to change all the time, until we 1) got a little turned off by industrialized bloodshed, and 2) went nuclear. Now there's a lot of pressure on national borders as some states have become weak, and other stronger, but global politeness is preventing much of a shift in the lines.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Many of our current worries (ISIS, for example) are things frozen in time by the appropriately called Cold War. The entity calling itself "The Islamic State" -- ISIS is an acronym for one English translation of its previous name for itself -- isn't "frozen in time" by the Cold War (you can certainly argue that a number of aspects of the Cold War formed important historical bases for its development, but the proximate trigger for it developing from al-Qaeda in Iraq into the Islamic State in Iraq (and then Iraq and the Levant -- or "Iraq and Syria" to much of the US news media, etc.) comes from the US invasion of occupation of Iraq, which was sort of the culmination of more than a decade of post-Cold War US-Iraq conflict and confrontation.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > The entity calling itself "The Islamic State" -- ISIS is an acronym for one English translation of its previous name for itself I don't really see a big difference between "the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham" and "the Islamic State". They dropped the geographical indicator from their name. They're still there; the name without the geographical indicator is pretty transparently derived from the earlier one. There's nothing about "ISIS" that opposes or conflicts with the "new" name, nor is it even necessary for us to change our name for something according to the whims of someone else.
- int_19h 10y ago
  And yet it is indirectly tied - it was CIA support for the more radicalized mujaheddin factions in Afghanistan (which in turn was caused by listening to and trusting Pakistani ISI advice too much) that produced Taliban later, and indirectly accelerated the creation of al-Qaeda. Remember this? https://imgur.com/CRaBPOx https://imgur.com/CRaBPOx
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    And that very much was a part of the 'cold war' in that it caused the former Soviet Union to expend huge resources in Afghanistan. So the ISIS cold-war link is quite clear.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    That's a really indirect tie, because the group that became al-Qaeda in Iraq (and later the Islamic State in Iraq, etc.) was an unrelated homegrown Iraqi Islamist group that only adopted the al-Qaeda brand temporarily after al-Qaeda became the dominant public face of anti-American Islamic extremism in the wake of 9/11, dumping that branding as soon as they had their own local success and didn't need the al-Qaeda brand for increased visibility.
    - int_19h 10y ago
      Not the same people, obviously. The tie here is the continuation of the same ideology. And while the ideology predates Cold War (Wahhabi, Deobandi, and even Qutb, from whom most of modern extreme Salafi directly derive), its quick proliferation is largely due to outside assistance in proxy wars.
  - gaius 10y ago
    The situation in Syria can accurately be described as a proxy war between the CIA and the Pentagon.
angersock 10y ago
At least in the case of North Korea, I very much fear that in a decade or two the place will go dark and the rest of of the world (ourselves included) will find a mausoleum of a country. We'll all kinda go, "Well, we couldn't just invade them, could we?", and just silently acknowledge that everyone in the world sat there while millions of people were starved, butchered, or tortured. And then we'll probably have a fight over what's left.

jedmeyers 10y ago

Yeah, last "war" ended since no one declare wars anymore. Just look at Russian annexation of Crimea with the armed forces of "noname" country.

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
FYI, Crimea's not in the western hemisphere.
- daveslash 10y ago
  I think jedmeyers' point was that it's possible to have conflicts without it officially being designated a war - and he/she was holding Crimea as an example of such. There's still rebel paramilitaries in Southern Mexico who have declared war against the state (e.g. Zapatista Army of National Liberation) - but it's not "officially" a war (whatever that means) [edit] gender pronoun
  - joyinsky 10y ago
    No. The EZLN (Zapatista Army) surrendered in 1994 and in 1996 there was signed a Peace Accord with them. The conflict in Colombia isn't ended yet though, the ELN hasn't signed the cease-fire.
santiagogo 10y ago
The funny thing is that until the peace process began nobody had ever called it a war in Colombia. It was just referred to as an internal conflict or a violence or guerilla problem. I guess the first part of solving it was recognizing that it was actually an internal war.

afarrell 10y ago

Isn't El Salvador in the middle of a war?

lazyant 10y ago
No
theklub 10y ago
I think Venezuela would be the next closest.
zhemao 10y ago
No their civil war ended long ago. But they do still have a lot of violence caused by gangs like Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) and the armed vigilante groups that hunt them.
- afarrell 10y ago
  Right, isn't that gang violence enough of a war that the US is getting refugees?
  - zhemao 10y ago
    MS13 was started by Salvadoran prisoners deported from the US, so I guess the whole thing is coming full circle. I suppose it depends on what where you draw the line between violent crime and civil war. Usually when we think of war, we think of the combatants having clear political goals. As in they are trying to take or hold onto territory or political power. I'm not sure MS13 has any such goals. I could see how the level of violence would be about the same as that of a war, but for various reasons we don't call it such.

zpallin 10y ago

War on drugs hasn't ended.

joyinsky 10y ago

The conflict in Colombia isn't ended yet, the ELN hasn't signed the cease-fire.

baristaGeek 10y ago
Yup. But FARC is 30,000 people and ELN is 1,500. This agreement will probably serve as a framework to negotiate with this smaller group.

S_Daedalus 10y ago

Thank goodness, now it's just a bunch of "local conflicts" and "police actions". But no "war". Safe! /s

cgriswald 10y ago

Official war is over, but there are still all kinds of violence; and where there is not violence there is the subjugation by threat of violence. Much of this has to do with US policy w.r.t. the Americas for the last ~200 years and more recently the War on Drugs. Defining "peace" as a lack of official war is utter nonsense. We only have to look south across a single border to see a country very much at war.

Ericson2314 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere better stick to "the Americas"

seliopou 10y ago
A good old friend of mine just linked me directly to this comment, and with good reason. Somewhere around the years 2005-7 I was involved in a light edit war with a Dutch gentleman that rewrote this page to wipe away all reference to the Western Hemisphere as a geopolitical term. Rather than taking into account its historical usage, and _current_ usage in various fields, he instead approached the term on purely etymological, and consequently mathematical, basis. Western? Surely the part to the left. Hemisphere? That can only mean exactly half. I spent a good amount of time in the library researching this. Old books with old maps from rare collections, simple google searches, and more casual physical references. None really really backed up the etymological definition. I made a few attempts to edit, but eventually gave up. Mostly, because it seemed so pointless. The information out there (as opposed to online) was so apparently and plentiful, it felt like I was to argue that the sky is blue. So I let it be. A decade later, and the results still stand. A bland, technical page with with a tabulation of the countries Within, Without and Somewhere In Between the two Sets dominating the page.
- nol13 10y ago
  Well he is technically correct, the best kind of correct!
  - Nimitz14 10y ago
    TIL Germany is not part of the Western Hemisphere.
- Ericson2314 10y ago
  That's a great story! I'd be curious what the page looked like before. I actually really look at the tables, but saw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere#/media/File:Western_Hemisphere_LamAz.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere#/media/File... and then came to comment here. To the best of my knowledge I had never thought of this before, but it occurred to me while I was reading the opinion piece.

simonmd 10y ago

Read the final agreement (if you dare and don't vomit easily): - Those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity will NOT go to jail, in a blatant violation of the Rome statute. - Despite earning BILLIONS from drug trafficking, they will not issue any reparations to the victims, instead, ordinary colombians will be taxed for that purpose. - They will be GIVEN between 10-30% of control of the senate. No election necessary. - They will be GIVEN 26 regions where there will be no state presence. Coincidentally in every strategic drug corridor. - They will not return the recruited minors. - They will participate in the creation of a "super-tribunal" with absolute legal powers, even over cases that have been sentenced and closed. This is not an agreement, it is the surrender of a state and should be an international disgrace. In a real country this would constitute high treason. https://www.mesadeconversaciones.com.co/sites/default/files/24_08_2016acuerdofinalfinalfinal-1472094587.pdf https://www.mesadeconversaciones.com.co/sites/default/files/...

hannibalhorn 10y ago
Did you read it? I see that they're guaranteed 5 (out of 100) senate seats, which by my math is definitely not 10-30%. I doubt most normal folks will vote for them, especially in the countryside where people have been the most affected by the conflict. Yes, those responsible for war crimes - on all sides - (police, soliders, paramilitary, as well as the rebels) have the opportunity to confess before a tribunal and avoid jail time. It will be up to judges, but they will receive up to 8 years of restricted movement and community service (whatever that may be.) This is definitely the most controversial part of the agreement, as 95% of the country feels these folks are crooks and should be punished. I could go on - I'm an American and have lived in Colombia for about 6 years now, and see an entire country that has been held back due to this stupid war - the agreement isn't perfect, but this needs to be put to bed, so the country can move forward. After having just seen the whole "brexit" fiasco, I'm a little worried about how this is being put to a referendum and seeing so much disinformation being spread. Even on an English speaking tech news site.
- simonmd 10y ago
  Yes I read it. Word by word. I am born and raised colombian, and for over 40 years have seen the result of sacrificing justice for short term gains or individual vanity. It's not 5 seats. It's 5 in the senate, 5 in congress, and 16 in special circumscription where only FARC friendly candidates can participate. They have massive amounts of money stashed for the upcoming campaigns, and by now you should be aware that money buys regional candidates in Colombia. Add to that fear of FARC retaliation in areas where the government now will have NO presence during elections or afterwards. (they have strategically left Frente Primero out of the accord, to handle the residual drug operation and armed coercion). "Confessing" to war crimes and crimes against humanity does not constitute appropriate punishment under any international standard. The International Criminal Court and Human Rights Watch have both been quite clear that no jail time would be unacceptable. You have lived here barely enough to have only seen Santos as president, who has done absolutely NOTHING except push his narcissistic agenda forward, at the expense of justice, economy and the independence of the branches of power. I am old enough to know colombia's problem is not 17,000 asshole terrorists in the jungle, it is LACK OF JUSTICE at every level, with politicians, guerrillas, paramilitaries etc. Sacrificing justice to appease one criminal entity is exactly why my country cannot 'move forward'.

doozy 10y ago

I'm living in Colombia, and my perception is most people want the agreement rejected and the President impeached. There's going to be a referendum on the agreement, and in spite of the government being heavily campaigning for it, odds are voters will side against it. If they don't I'm out of here. This will become Venezuela 2.0.

afy 10y ago
If you look at the byline, it is very interesting that this was co-written by Juan Manuel Santos (for other readers: the current president of Colombia).
pastProlog 10y ago
Doozy admits the truth you won't see in the US corporate media. The Colombian bourgeoisie does not want peace. It's why they murdered Gaitán. It's why when the left unilaterally put down the gun in the mid 1980s and ran for office, they had right wing death squads, the AUC etc. kill off the candidates, campaign workers etc. They want to run things with the army, with the US army and billions coming in from Plan Colombia etc. They don't want to let people vote or campaign, they'd prefer the FARC control a few departments in the south and they rule by force in the rest of the country. Thanks for making things clear. You don't see this kind of clarity in the US, where liberals say FARC wants violence and other nonsense.
- doozy 10y ago
  Actually the peace process of the M19/UP of the 1980s is a chilling precedent of what will happen in Colombia if this agreement goes on: The government may grant immunity to the FARC, but their victims will not forget nor forgive. Peace with impunity will mean more war, as the victims of the kidnapping, racketeering and murdering (or their surviving relatives) will want their revenge, just as they did after the government forgave M19's crimes. In the (unlikely) case this agreement is approved, it wouldn't surprise me if it leads to a coup. And that's a rare thing in Colombia, one of the oldest democracies in the world and a country where the last coup attempt took place in the 19th century.

skylan_q 10y ago

Official wars between geographic factions and nations coming to an end in the west. Fourth generation warfare only starting.

desiderantes 10y ago

I'm really saddened to see such uninformed comments here, regarding Colombia's situation. I am victim of FARC's wrongdoing, i've lost family members, peace and a place to live to them. I've also suffered similar damages from paramilitar actors here in the Caribbean coast. A peace agreement kills FARC legitimacy and their international position. If they «agree» to stop their actions, you'll see a bunch of former supporters (like those insane danish supporters) moving to the mainstream left of this country, Polo Democrático, who've failed to distance themselves from Venezuela, and indirectly, from FARC (just like the right wing, which is deeply entangled with paramilitarism). People who live away from the war zones are most ikely to support the NO, after all, it's not their kids, brothers and fathers whose lives are being sacrficed. People living in war zones just want it to stop. Seriously. Uribe moved the conflict to rural and underdeveloped areas of this country, so peope living on the big cities (Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, etc.) do not see the big influence of FARC's actions, they live instead under the horror of ex-paramilitar criminal bands, same who signed a peace agreement with Uribe. So it comes to me as a surprise how the least affected by the war, and the ones getting a huge slice of the paramilitar violence, are the ones voting for NO (Antioquia is understandable, Uribe is like a god there). I support the peace agreement, but i see concerning flaws in its current form. I am, however, no FARC apologist, and honestly a part of me would like to personally kill some of them, but we need to move forward, end this part of the conflict, and when we move the criminals away from a ideological umbrella, we can see and stop them as they are, criminals who do not give a FUCK about left or right, and i'm damn sure we'll see a chunk of guerilleros forming armed bands, so it's far from over. But this is the first step, and it needs to be done.

santiagogo 10y ago
I agree, as a Colombian I think the most important part about the peace agreement is that it will delegitimize the position for using weapons in politics, which has become a long tradition in our country. It is also a huge step for a country that has solved it's political differences historically by killing the other party, that we have now had the capability of negotiating for 5 years under a truce, and that the right wing government is willing to accept political participation from the guerilla, and to entertain ultra leftist policies under a new bipartisan congress, and that it is recognizing that there is a huge social gap and inequality which led to the formation of the guerrilla in the first place, which should be fixed. Unfortunately violence probably will not end instantly, since the drug trade will continue to be a big business, and that a part of the trained militias will not be able to readjust to normal civilian life once the peace is signed. But at least criminals and narcos will not be shielded under a political left wing speech and be united under a flag, which will eventually lead to violence ending. I am completely confident that the Colombians will vote Yes for the peace process, and that the implementation will be successful. Some very big war criminals will probably walk away scot-free, but the huge overall benefit for the entire country will far outweigh the short term injustice. Expect a lot of big startups coming out of Colombia and some very interesting investment possibilities, since the peace agrement shows confidence in the Colombian institutions and constitution, which will lead to a booming middle class in a 50 million person country which has a lot of space to grow in since it has been historically been overlooked because of the security issues.

owly 10y ago

Dear my dead friends in Sarajevo, Europe has enjoyed 7 decades of peace. NYT told me, so it must be true. Kiza and Lana, you must've faked your deaths along with many of your friends based on the brilliant minds at the NYT. Please come home. Love always...

phreeza 10y ago
Do you count the states of former yugoslavia as western europe? I would suspect that the author just doesn't, and thats why they wrote what they did.