Colombia's peace deal with the FARC

After four years of talks in Havana, the Colombian government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC rebels signed a peace accord in September 2016. In a plebiscite on October 2, voters rejected it by a narrow margin of about 50.2 percent to 49.8 percent, with low turnout of around 37 percent. Negotiators revised the text, and on November 24 a new agreement was signed in Bogota's Colon Theatre and approved by Congress. Santos received the Nobel Peace Prize in October.²³

The FARC began in 1964, rooted in peasant self-defense groups after La Violencia. For decades it fought the state, taxed the drug trade, kidnapped and recruited. Paramilitary groups and the army also committed abuses. A national historical memory center estimated about 220,000 deaths from 1958 to 2012, about 81 percent of them civilians, and 4.7 million people officially registered as displaced. Roughly 7,000 FARC fighters, and thousands more militia members, demobilized and a UN mission verified handing over of weapons. The accord included land reform, a transitional justice system, and guaranteed seats in Congress for the new FARC party. Implementation has been uneven: hundreds of former combatants and many social leaders have been killed, and dissident groups and the ELN continued fighting. Under President Gustavo Petro, elected in 2022, the government pursued talks with other armed groups under a policy called total peace.¹²