...Last Monday, September 26th, in an elaborately staged treaty-signing ceremony in Cartagena de Indias, a colonial-era Caribbean city, President Juan Manuel Santos and Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri, alias Timochenko, the leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or farc, declared that the country’s fifty-two-year civil war was over. Dozens of V.I.P. guests, including John Kerry, King Juan Carlos of Spain (the former monarch, who abdicated in favor of his son), the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cuba’s Raúl Castro, and other heads of state, were in attendance. Then, in a plebiscite held on Sunday in Colombia, a majority of voters rejected the peace deal, by a margin of sixty-three thousand ballots out of thirteen million cast. The victory of the 'No' side has triggered a political crisis of unforeseeable proportions in Colombia. Nobody knows what will happen next.
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That plebiscite was the vote held Sunday, after which everything that was celebrated in Cartagena was thrown into an anxious limbo, including the major question of whether the current ceasefire, which has been in place since late July, will hold, or if the war will resume. During the talks, both sides had sought to reduce the fighting, and the death toll had fallen to its lowest level by far in years. In a country where seven million people have been displaced and at least a quarter of a million killed, possibly many more, this had been the main reward of the peace talks thus far. The plan had been for thousands of farc guerrillas, who remain armed, to gather in twenty mustering points and demobilize in the coming months under the auspices of U.N. peacekeepers; thanks to the No vote, there is now no legal authority for that to happen.
