He won battles after he died, as was said about the Spanish Cid. Juan Manuel Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize five days after losing the plebiscite in which a majority of Colombians rejected the accords signed with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
What happened? Probably, the final decision was made several weeks ago by the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. That Santos would win the plebiscite by a wide margin was deemed a sure thing, and the prize would reinforce his moral authority.
On Monday, Oct. 3, when the word that Santos had failed reached Oslo, it was too late to revoke the selection. Everything was ready and rolling. After all, Alfred Nobel's last will and testament stated that the prize would go to whoever had fought for peace “more or better.” According to the Colombians' verdict, Santos had not done it so well, but he had spent several years in the effort.
Nevertheless, the awarding of the Nobel Prize comes at a strange moment. President Santos does not understand that the peace accords were annulled by the sovereign decision of the Colombian people. The plebiscite asked them if they approved or rejected the pacts reached in the 297-page document and, against every prediction, they rejected them. Those accords no longer exist, except as experience with which to begin a new negotiation from scratch.
Santos could have fragmented the pacts in diverse categories and established a referendum so the people could decide what they believed to be good or bad, but, as the bold poker player that he is, he decided to bet everything on the plebiscite, convinced that he couldn't lose.
Eager to win, he committed all the resources of the State, assigned large sums of money for propaganda, lined up supporters for his project such as Pope Francis, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and King Juan Carlos I of Spain, and he even organized an odd ceremony in Cartagena where everybody dressed in white, the color of peace, including “Timochenko,” FARC's supreme leader and the owner of a blood-curdling, violent biography.
In turn, the NO supporters had barely enough resources but moved feverishly through the social networks, convinced that if the accords signed in Cartagena and Havana were approved, the result would be not peace but a totalitarian grotesquerie like the ones in Venezuela and Cuba. They were betting on a model of State. The FARC were going to win by other means what they hadn't achieved by force of arms.
The peace accords suspended the separation of powers, voided the penal code, rejected the democratic principle that all citizens are equal before the law, and graciously granted the narcoguerrillas -- in addition to large subsidies -- several seats in Parliament. Meanwhile the atrocious crimes committed by FARC remained unpunished under the benevolent cloak of a transitory justice that had all the symptoms of becoming a permanent injustice.
In addition, the measures seemed suspiciously similar to those taken by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to disassemble the rule of law proper to liberal democracies. Santos would even be bestowed with a kind of “enabling law” that would help him guide Colombia down a similar road. Not by chance, the FARC advisers (who ended up being everybody's advisers) were the same Spanish communists who built the juridical cage in Venezuela.
Why did Santos fail with his plebiscite, if he had everything “nicely tied up?” For at least five reasons. Because his popularity is barely 21 percent, the lowest of all the democratic presidents; because the nation's economic situation is very bad, and the Colombians just handed him the bill; because the NO movement was led by Álvaro Uribe, the country's most valued politician, and by the respected former President Andrés Pastrana; because of the huge educational efforts of figures like Fernando Londoño, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, and Iván Duque; and because the accords were really very harmful to the nation.
Let's hope that Santos will realize that he cannot ignore the will of his compatriots as expressed by the balloting. He received the Nobel Peace Prize, not a permit to do whatever he feels like doing.
