A standard-bearer for peace

Alina Dieste -

President Juan Manuel Santos will be the star of the moment when he picks up his Nobel Peace Prize on Saturday. But at home he is a curiously divisive figure. The Nobel committee is rewarding Santos, 65, for his work to end Colombia’s half-century civil war, through some sticky compromises.

For his admirers, he is the statesmen whose patience and discipline helped him succeed where others failed in striking a peace accord with Farc communist rebels. For his critics, he is at best uncharismatic and at worst a treacherous opportunist.

The road to peace in Colombia has been long — and there may still be bumps ahead. Santos is pushing his revised peace deal with Farc rebels through Congress after voters narrowly rejected an earlier version in a referendum on October 2.

“He has a reputation for being calculating, but he miscalculated,” said Maria Elvira Samper, a journalist who is Santos’s cousin. “He thought that Colombians were so fed up with war that he could overcome voters’ rejection of the Farc and his own low approval ratings.”

A poll by Gallup published in September indicated two thirds of Colombians disapproved of Santos. Coupled with that was his perceived lack of charisma. “He does not show his emotions, but that does not mean he does not feel them,” Samper said. But his “highly rational” approach “does not connect with a passionate country like Colombia.”

His supporters say that what Santos lacks in spark, he makes up for in quiet determination. As defence minister under the hawkish conservative ex-president Alvaro Uribe, Santos led a fierce offensive to crush the Farc.

But after becoming president himself in 2010, he changed tack and negotiated for a settlement with the guerrillas. “He made war as a means to achieve peace,” Santos’s brother-in-law and adviser, Mauricio Rodriguez, said. “He weakened the Farc to make them sit at the negotiating table.”

The peace drive “required courage, audacity, perseverance and a lot of strategy — those are Santos’s strengths.” Santos has described himself as politically in the “extreme centre.” “I was never a hawk or a dove. I’ve always been a standard-bearer for peace,” he said before the peace deal was announced.

As he signed the first version of the deal in September with his erstwhile mortal enemy, the Farc guerrilla leader Timoleon “Timochenko” Jimenez, Santos said: “I prefer an imperfect accord that saves lives to a perfect

war.” — AFP