The Nobel Creates Another Twist in Colombian Peace Talks

In the hours after last Sunday’s plebiscite called by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos to ratify the peace deal he had struck with his country’s FARC guerrillas—which was rejected by a margin of sixty-three thousand ballots, out of thirteen million cast—memes appeared showing a cartoonish Santos lying prone on the ground, apparently kicked to death by Álvaro Uribe, his arch-adversary and right-wing predecessor. Uribe had launched and led the successful “No” campaign against Santos’s peace deal, opposing it on the grounds that it was too lenient to the FARC, and also exposed government soldiers to possible war-crimes prosecution. In the cartoon, Uribe was depicted as being forcibly led away from the scene by several supporters, with a caption reading, “Enough, leave him, he’s dead.” Another meme riffed on the expectation that Santos’s chances of winning a Nobel Peace Prize—a possibility that had been floating in the atmosphere in recent months—were now doomed.

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At Last, a Peace Deal in Colombia
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