translated from the original EL TIEMPO article.
It has been said that Juan Manuel Santos spent his whole life preparing to be president of the Republic, and also—based on the facts—for putting an end to more than five decades of war with the FARC.
Since he took office on August 7, 2010, he made it clear that peace was not beyond reach. He secretly arranged for rapprochements with the guerrillas in order to explore the possibilities for dialogue.
This Monday in Cartagena, with the international community’s eyes on Colombia, he closed this cycle by signing a historic agreement that leaves 52 years of conflict as just one more chapter in the country’s recent history.
Since his time as a journalist for this publishing company—where he became assistant director—Santos was always interested in peace issues. This interest led him to analyze various peace processes in other countries, particularly in South Africa and the role played by the emblematic figure of Nelson Mandela.
According to Santos, something that influenced his stance toward a negotiated solution was a summit in which Adam Kahane, an expert in conflict resolution who actively helped the peace process in South Africa, participated. This meeting was held in 1996 at the behest of Fundación Buen Gobierno.
A year later, another meeting took place in Antioquia for national leaders to think about the future of the country. From there, Destino Colombia, a document describing several scenarios for ending the conflict, was born. One of those scenarios referred to the strengthening of law enforcement in order to reduce the guerrillas’ power so they would be obliged to negotiate their disarmament.
That was precisely what Santos did, and this Monday, he saw the results. In 1998, during his first official campaign for the presidency as a member of the Partido Liberal, his political platform was to reach peace through dialogue.
As Santos himself acknowledges, the signing of the peace agreement also involved other major players. While he was unsuccessful in negotiating with the FARC in the demilitarized zone of El Caguán, then President Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) paved the way for a military build-up with the Plan Colombia, a cooperative initiative financed by the USA.
The results of this process became visible during the administration of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), for which Santos served as Minister of Defense. Uribe achieved a historic reduction of the FARC’s offensive and criminal capabilities.
Aware of this historic moment, which resulted from a governmental effort to restore institutions and appeared to be modeled on the exercise from which Destino Colombia was born, Santos opened the door to dialogue in order to end the internal conflict and to start acknowledging the victims of the conflict so as to really transform the country. As Santos emphasized, this Monday was the result.
Santos, 65 years old, achieved an objective that seemed charted since he entered public life, both as an official and a journalist. He was the country’s first Minister of Commerce and was also the Minister of Defense during the Uribe government, an appointment that enabled him to severely strike the FARC.
It is clear that certain political and military factors converged to bring the conflict with the FARC to an end. Still, it is undeniable that Santos’s work during all those years—and his efforts for consolidating the end of the conflict—was essential for putting together the jigsaw puzzle of peace at last.
Santos has commented that after moving out of the Casa de Nariño, he wants to dedicate himself to teaching and that—expressed with some irony—he does not want to bother his successor. Without doubt, academics will use this achievement as an example for which he will go down in history as the president who—after more than half a century—put an end to the FARC.
Last week in New York, the message to the UN General Assembly was direct: “The war in Colombia is over.”
translated from the original EL TIEMPO article.