Q&A with Professor Miguel La Serna about the FARC-Colombia peace deal rejection

Colombian voters rejected a peace deal between President Juan Manuel Santos and the Colombian rebel group FARC on Oct. 2. FARC and the Colombian government engaged in four years of negotiations to achieve a peace agreement after a decades long war between the two parties. 

Miguel La Serna is an associate professor in the UNC Department of History who is interested in political unrest in Latin America. Staff writer Rebecca Ayers spoke with La Serna about the peace referendum and its rejection. 

The Daily Tar Heel: Who are the FARC and what are their origins?

Miguel La Serna: The FARC came out of the period which was known as La Violencia, which is a period during the 1940s onto the mid-20th century where there was a lot of fighting between liberals and conservatives... It was born out of that in the mid-1960s, and the FARC formed as this sort of military wing of the Communist Party. Eventually it grew in size and scope and scale and eventually started to separate from the Communist Party itself so instead of being the militarized wing of the Communist Party it started to be its own autonomous group, and that’s how it’s been operating ever since.

DTH: What are the Colombians' general opinion of the FARC?

MLS: It depends on where in the country you are. There’s a generational divide also and it really depends on who you’re talking to. But if you look in the cities in places like Bogotá, the FARC is still widely unpopular. One of the reasons why this peace accord was rejected narrowly by the populace is because people thought it was being too lenient on the FARC... And people call them terrorists — they’re criminals, they’re drug traffickers. So there was a lot of resentment for the things that the FARC has done over the years, and this is half a century in the making.

DTH: Why did the FARC decide to negotiate a peace deal with President Santos?

MLS: The Colombian government in the early 2000s did a major push to really try to take the fight to the FARC and really go into some of the areas they controlled and crush them. And actually the Minister of Defense at the time was Santos, so he was the one that really oversaw this whole thing. He was the one that really led this effort to weaken the FARC and he was really successful in many ways.

DTH: In your personal opinion do you think it’s justified that Colombians want the peace deal to be more strict for the FARC or do you think it would have been better for the peace deal to have gone through?

MLS: Far be it from me to tell Colombians how to vote, but I think that they will see this and history will see this as a lost opportunity and that the impulse to vote against this and to demand more stricter sanctions is a very understandable one. It’s an emotional response to a 52-year war that has affected virtually every corner of Colombian society... I hope they find a way around it soon because this country has never been this close to peace.

DTH: When do you think this peace deal will be revised?

MLS: Nobody knows, and that’s one of the real travesties is that this could be over and done with now. There’s so much uncertainty about what happens next because Santos didn’t have a plan B. He put all of his eggs in one basket and was really banking on this to be approved and every indication was that it would be approved. 

DTH: What is the relationship like between Colombia and FARC now? Are they in a ceasefire?

MLS: That’s one of the problems. Part of the negotiations was that they had a ceasefire. Now, the ceasefire is still going on but it’s set to expire soon and once it expires, now there is nothing binding about the agreement to keep it going on.

DTH: When does the ceasefire end?

MLS: It’s set to expire within a month, so, soon.

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