Can Colombia’s centre hold?
To make peace stick, the government needs to do better
ON MAY 3rd a delegation from the United Nations Security Council arrived in Colombia for a two-day inspection of the implementation of last year’s peace agreement between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC guerrillas. “They are coming because it is the only success story that the UN has in the whole world at the moment,” crowed Mr Santos. That is not how many Colombians see it. A long-standing gap between the upbeat view of outsiders, symbolised in the award of the Nobel peace prize to Mr Santos, and disgruntlement at home has widened to a chasm. With a presidential election scheduled for May 2018, that is worrying.
The discontent starts with the peace agreement itself, which punishes FARC leaders who confess to terrorist crimes with “restrictions on liberty” (but not jail) and grants their new political party ten seats in congress. The accord was narrowly rejected in a plebiscite in October. After some hasty tweaking, the undeterred Mr Santos secured its approval in congress.
This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "Can the centre hold?"
From the May 6th 2017 edition
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