The Signature Needs Keepers

In Uribe, Colombia, that distinction has a particular weight. Reporting for the Guardian on September 26, Sibylla Brodzinsky describes shopkeeper Noel Segura, who had fled his home three times: once because of the military, once because of rightwing paramilitary groups and once under threat from the FARC. As residents watched the peace signing in Cartagena, his willingness to try peace was not an exercise in forgetting. It was a judgment made with unusually good evidence about the alternative.

President Juan Manuel Santos and FARC leader Rodrigo Londoño, known as Timochenko, signed the accord on September 26. The signature is a genuine threshold after decades of conflict. The question is what carries people across it.

Different Jobs, Different Keepers

The agreement offers a transition from an armed organisation to a political party. Contemporary reporting describes a UN mission receiving the FARC’s weapons, a special tribunal addressing war-related crimes, and commitments to rural development, victims’ reparations and wider political participation.

Those are not interchangeable functions. Receiving weapons can make disarmament observable. It cannot, on its own, establish whether a victim receives redress or a new political participant can operate without intimidation. A tribunal can examine responsibility; it cannot substitute for investment in a neglected rural community.

The distinction matters because a peace process can accumulate evidence of one kind of progress while leaving another promise unfulfilled. A verified weapons handover would be an achievement, not a receipt for the entire settlement. Bureaucracy enjoys a completed form. A community requires something more habitable.

The immediate democratic decision also remains separate. Colombians are due to vote on October 2 on whether to approve the deal. Neither the signing ceremony nor international support supplies that answer.

Protection Is Part of Participation

Reuters’ September 26 report identifies the possibility that criminal gangs could fill spaces left by the guerrillas. Brodzinsky’s August reporting also identifies armed groups outside the settlement as potential obstacles. An agreement between two parties does not automatically bind everyone capable of threatening a household.

That makes protection a practical test of political opening, not an optional benefit to be considered after disarmament. If the cost of speaking remains a credible threat, the ballot offers a formal choice with an unofficial penalty attached.

The reporting does not establish that the promised transition has already made people safe. Nor should it. On the day of the signing, that is an obligation to be tested, not an outcome available for announcement.

Accountability is contested too. Brodzinsky reports that the provision for alternative, non-prison sentences for those who confess to crimes against humanity is difficult for many Colombians to accept. That objection cannot simply be filed under resistance to peace. Whether a settlement offers adequate justice is a substantive question, especially for those asked to live beside people responsible for grave harm.

The coherenceist test is therefore not whether the agreement produces a tidier national story. It is whether the people carrying its risks can influence implementation and challenge failures without being silenced. Segura’s history makes the point precisely: security cannot mean merely replacing the identity of whoever can force someone to leave.

The ceremony makes a commitment visible. The next measure is whether institutions can make that commitment usable: weapons surrendered, responsibilities examined, participation protected and rural promises translated into services. If those tasks diverge, the proper response is not to declare the whole undertaking either redeemed or fraudulent. It is to name the failing function and the authority responsible.

A signature needs witnesses for an evening. Peace needs keepers after the audience leaves.