Juan Manuel Santos

Juan Manuel Santos: The Warrior Who Made Peace

Six days after Colombians narrowly voted down his peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas, the Nobel committee in Oslo awarded Juan Manuel Santos its Peace Prize anyway — not for a finished deal, but for having tried at all, and for pressing forward to sign a revised one weeks later. It was a strange vindication for a man who had spent years running the very war machine he then dismantled.

A Newspaper Dynasty's Reluctant Journalist

Santos was born into one of Colombia's most consequential families. His ancestors fought in the wars of independence, his great-uncle Eduardo Santos served as president of Colombia in the late 1930s, and his family owned El Tiempo, the country's leading newspaper, where his grandfather, father, and uncle all worked as journalists before him. Rather than follow that path directly, Santos trained as an economist, studying at the University of Kansas, the London School of Economics, and Harvard University, where he later held a Nieman Fellowship. He also served as a cadet in Colombia's Naval Academy and spent a decade in London representing Colombia at the International Coffee Organisation. He eventually did return to the family business, working as a columnist and deputy publisher at El Tiempo and winning the King of Spain Award for journalism, before entering politics at forty.

Building a Career Inside the War

Santos's path through government ran directly through the machinery of Colombia's internal conflict. He served as the country's first trade minister in the early 1990s, opening the economy and negotiating regional trade agreements, then as finance minister in the early 2000s during an economic crisis. His most consequential pre-presidential post was as defense minister from 2006 to 2009, a period in which he oversaw a sustained military campaign that significantly weakened the FARC's fighting capacity, including strikes that killed senior guerrilla commanders, while insisting the campaign operate within the bounds of humanitarian law. That record as a hardliner against the FARC is precisely what made his later pivot toward negotiating with them so unexpected.

The Pivot to Peace

Elected president in 2010 and reelected in 2014, Santos surprised both allies and critics by prioritizing a negotiated end to a conflict that had run for more than fifty years and killed hundreds of thousands of Colombians. He opened secret exploratory talks with the FARC that became formal negotiations in Havana, Cuba, a process that stretched across roughly six years and covered land reform, political participation for demobilized fighters, drug trafficking, and mechanisms for truth and reparations for victims. Santos later described the difficulty of the effort in a line that became emblematic of his presidency: "It is far more difficult to make peace than it is to wage war."

A Referendum Defeat and a Second Try

The negotiators produced a final agreement, but when Santos put it to a national plebiscite in October 2016, Colombian voters rejected it by a razor-thin margin, a result that stunned international observers who had expected easy ratification. Rather than abandon the process, Santos's government returned to the negotiating table, incorporated concessions demanded by opponents of the original deal, and pushed a revised agreement through Colombia's Congress instead of a second popular vote. The FARC formally relinquished its weapons in a UN-supervised process, completing disarmament by August 2017 and ending, on paper, Latin America's longest-running guerrilla insurgency.

The Nobel Committee's Verdict

Announced just days after the plebiscite defeat, the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize went to Santos alone, an unusual choice given that the FARC's own leadership had co-negotiated the deal. The Nobel committee's decision to honor an unfinished, publicly rejected process rather than wait for full implementation was itself read as a deliberate act of encouragement, intended to help sustain a peace effort that still faced fierce domestic opposition, including from his own predecessor and former patron, Álvaro Uribe, who had turned into his most vocal critic over the terms offered to former combatants.

Life After the Presidency

Santos left office in 2018 with the peace accord signed but its implementation contested and incomplete — questions that persist over the reincorporation of former fighters, continued violence from dissident factions and other armed groups, and the safety of social leaders in former conflict zones. Since leaving power he has remained active in international diplomacy and conflict-resolution circles, including work with The Elders, the group of former statesmen founded by Nelson Mandela, and in advocacy connected to Oxford's Department of International Development.

Why Juan Manuel Is Called a Genius

The label fits Santos awkwardly, and it should. His achievement was not a discovery or an invention but a feat of sustained political and diplomatic management: holding together a fragile, deeply unpopular negotiation for six years, absorbing a stinging referendum defeat without letting the process collapse, and finding a legislative path to ratification when the popular one failed. That required a specific kind of intelligence — patience, secrecy, the willingness to negotiate with an organization he had spent years fighting militarily, and the tactical flexibility to revise a deal rather than treat its rejection as final. The Nobel committee effectively endorsed this reading, prizing perseverance over a clean outcome. The honest counter-case is substantial: the peace he brokered remains only partly realized, violence has continued in many of the regions the accord was meant to pacify, and critics both at home and abroad argue the deal's amnesty provisions for FARC commanders were a moral compromise rather than a triumph of statecraft. Whether that makes Santos a genius of diplomacy or simply a determined and lucky negotiator is a matter on which Colombians themselves remain sharply divided.

Legacy

Whatever the accord's flaws, Santos ended the active phase of Latin America's longest civil conflict and is remembered internationally as the president who chose, at real political cost, to negotiate an end to a war his own career had helped prosecute. His trajectory — from defense minister waging war against an insurgency to the head of state who dismantled it at the negotiating table — remains one of the more unusual reversals in modern Latin American politics, and it continues to shape how his successors and neighboring governments approach negotiated settlements with armed groups across the region.

Achievements

• Nobel Peace Prize — 2016
• Kew International Medal — 2017
• Educated at University of Kansas, London School of Economics and Political Science and John F. Kennedy School of Government
• Worked as politician, journalist and economist