Columbians vote no to peace

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  • October 9, 2016 at 9:05 am #54840
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    I dont follow Columbian politix so I dunno what is going on in Columbia.

    I googled a bit today to try to understand why they voted no to the “peace” deal.
    Couldnt find much analysis that made sense.

    Anybody know why they voted it down?

    I’m reading this New Yorker article at the moment, fwiw:

    http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-colombias-voters-rejected-peace

    “…..Uribe skipped the ceremony. Instead, he’d spent part of the day at a rally across town for the No campaign, which he had launched some months ago. Its slogan was “We want peace, but not this peace.” Uribe, who governed Colombia from 2002 to 2010, is a very different man from Santos. Santos is the worldly scion of a patrician family from Bogotá, while Uribe is a right-wing Catholic from a provincial cattle-ranching family. The two were once close allies: Santos founded Uribe’s party and served as his defense minister, heading a U.S.-assisted military campaign that, in the late two-thousands, seriously weakened the FARC on the battlefield. Their falling-out came after Uribe was thwarted in his bid to change Colombia’s constitution and obtain a third term in office, whereupon Santos succeeded him. When Santos revealed that he had begun peace discussions with the FARC, Uribe accused him of betrayal, and launched a sustained campaign of opposition, rallying supporters across the country and online. Indeed, Uribe may be the first former head of state to have taken up Twitter to undermine a fellow head of state. Uribe uses Twitter like a general uses artillery, often many times a day, in order to react to news, quarrel with other politicians and with journalists, and generally make his presence felt. Most of all, he uses it to attack Santos and the FARC, often lumping them together, and to warn about the dangers of the peace deal. He argued that its terms amounted to a surrender to the FARC and would enable the leftist political phenomenon he calls “Castrochavismo” to take over Colombia. In Uribe’s deployment of social media, in his reactionary populism, and in the angry slogans and feelings on display at his noisy rallies, there are uncanny parallels to Donald Trump—and, for that matter, to the anti-E.U., anti-immigrant demonstrations that were held across United Kingdom in the lead-up to the Brexit vote, last June. And, as with Brexit, the No campaign had no realistic alternative at the ready—no better peace deal…..

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    October 9, 2016 at 9:14 am #54843
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    excerpt:

    “….We don’t want them to go back to the bush.” But a couple of days ago, in Uribe’s stronghold city of Medellín, a local man told me that he planned to vote No because that was precisely where he wanted the guerrillas to remain: “We don’t want them in the city. Let them stay in the bush.” Another Colombian man e-mailed an appeal for me to understand why he had voted No: “It’s hard to forgive.”

    Shortly after the vote count came in, a young Colombian woman, crushed to tears by the No win, told me, “Uribe is like Colombia’s Voldemort.” She and some of her friends were also dismayed by the low voter turnout, of around thirty-seven per cent, and talked about leaving the country. “First Brexit, now this,” she said. “This means Trump is going to win in the United States. What will you do?”.
    —————–

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