The Peace That Paused

For Nohora Tovar, the distinction was personal as well as political. A senator with Álvaro Uribe’s Centro Democrático who had been kidnapped by Farc in 2000, she told the Guardian that she would offer forgiveness when the guerrillas were behind bars. Her account cannot stand for every victim. It does make one thing difficult to hide: a signature between armed adversaries does not confer ownership of another person’s forgiveness.

Nor does that objection settle what terms could actually persuade an armed organization to disarm. That is the institutional problem beneath the campaign argument. A settlement must make stopping possible without treating the people harmed as the price of admission.

The Ceremony and the Consent

Sibylla Brodzinsky’s Guardian report, first published on referendum night and updated the following day, describes four years of negotiations before the agreement. President Juan Manuel Santos and Farc leader Rodrigo Londoño signed it on September 26, with international dignitaries witnessing the ceremony.

The choreography was complete. The consent was not.

The referendum result broke the apparent continuity between negotiating, signing and implementing. These were not three administrative stages of the same authorization. They involved different judgments: what the adversaries would accept, what their leaders would endorse, and what voters would permit.

Uribe presented rejection as a demand for a better agreement rather than continued war. Santos had campaigned without a plan B, warning of a return to war if No won. Those were competing political claims, not an exhaustive description of the choices available after the count.

The immediate responses mattered. According to the Guardian, Santos said the bilateral ceasefire would continue and that he would consult political parties. Londoño reiterated Farc’s commitment to peace. Rejection had not, by itself, ordered the shooting to resume. Neither statement guaranteed that the negotiating space would survive.

Forgiveness Is Not a Transferable Asset

A coherenceist reading must resist two shortcuts. One turns dissenters into obstacles to peace because they refuse the available bargain. The other turns rejection into proof that a more just, workable bargain is already waiting.

Neither has earned that conclusion.

The relevant test is whether the people affected can influence the terms without being required to disappear inside somebody else’s definition of success. Tovar’s demand deserves to be heard as a concrete objection. It does not authorize her party—or this article—to speak for all victims. Likewise, support for an agreement need not mean indifference to the crimes it seeks to move beyond.

For the next round of politics, the useful questions are narrower than “Who wants peace?” Which provisions do opponents want changed? What consequences would those changes have for disarmament? How would victims with conflicting views participate in judging the trade-offs? What protects people while leaders argue?

Those questions convert a winning campaign into a burden of explanation. They also require the government to do more than repeat that its negotiated compromise was the best available.

The referendum supplied a refusal, not a replacement settlement. The danger was that whichever leader spoke most confidently afterward would claim to possess both. Consent cannot be presumed before a vote, and its meaning cannot be privately appropriated afterward.