The biggest losers in Colombia’s referendum: FARC rebels

(Photo: Ricardo Mazalan – AP)

The conventional wisdom is that Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos lost the most when voters rejected his agreement with the FARC guerrillas to end his country’s five-decade-old armed conflict, but the biggest losers may be the FARC itself, and its Cuban and Venezuelan allies.

Granted, Santos suffered an unexpected defeat. All major polls had predicted that his agreement with the FARC would be approved by a 2-to-1 margin. And the agreement’s signing ceremony in Cartagena — with several Latin American presidents in attendance along with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon — had given the peace deal a mantle of international support that seemed sure to help Santos win the referendum.

But the defeat of the 297-page peace accord has left the FARC commanders more isolated than ever, and facing an uncertain future.

Under the agreement, FARC leaders accused of war crimes would have received largely symbolic sentences — doing community work in restricted areas, rather than going to jail — and would have been automatically granted five seats in the Senate and five seats in the House for the next eight years.

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