In divided Colombia, President Santos’s Nobel Peace Prize provokes mixed reactions
Opposition to the deal has been led by former president Alvaro Uribe, Santos’s predecessor and one-time boss
“Santos doesn’t deserve it,” said Rodolfo Oviedo, one of the opponents of a peace deal that aimed to end half a century of conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Oviedo, a 40-year-old farmworker, was forced from his land by the FARC in 2004, in the central department of Tolima, a rebel stronghold.
He went about this all wrong. He started by making peace from the top down
Like many critics of the peace deal signed on September 26 and narrowly voted down in a referendum on Sunday, he accuses Santos of being too soft on the Marxist guerrillas. Instead of holding high-level talks with rebel leaders in faraway Cuba, the president should have listened to the rebels’ victims on the ground, he said.
“He went about this all wrong. He started by making peace from the top down. He didn’t start from the ground up. Peace has to be made from the countryside, with the displaced,” he said.
Oviedo was speaking on Bolivar Square in central Bogota, where he has been camped outside the presidential palace for more than a month. It is his way of protesting what he says is the government’s neglect of the nearly seven million people forced to flee their homes by the conflict, which has also killed more than 260,000 people and left 45,000 missing.
Jose Alberto Soriano, an 18-year-old whose grandfather was killed by the FARC in 1991 for refusing to leave his land in the central department of Meta, said he too disagreed with the Nobel committee’s decision.
