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Comment by ceronman | Hacker News Reader

You are not well informed. In Colombia the majority of the victims of the conflict support the peace process. You can easily see it in the map of how the people voted and you’ll notice that those territories where the war was actually fought got the big majority of the votes supporting the peace treaty.

The process didn't legalize the crimes nor allow the guerrilla to keep their drug dealing money. That's just FUD. The kind of FUD that made uninformed people vote no.

Uribe fought the guerrilla fiercely, but he did it by getting alliances with paramilitary groups that were even worse than the guerrilla.

The peace treaty is not perfect, and yes, there were some concessions made to the guerrilla. Like the possibility to have 10 out of 270 positions in the congress even if they didn’t get the votes, but only for two periods. It’s not easy to negotiate after 50 years of crude war, but all the lives saved with it are completely worth it.

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What about the monthly alimony every FARC combatant was to receive?

I would probably still have voted 'yes' but I have a hard time to denunciate people for thinking otherwise: that paying someone to not terrorize you anymore amounts to "extortion money".

For how long would they receive the money?

Economically it makes sense. You will have thousands of people which only work skill is to combat. With the end of the guerrilla, they won't immediately find jobs. If they don't have money, they will become thugs.

2 years. It's cheaper to do that than to continue the war.

This is darn cheap. I can't understand how someone in her senses can be against it.

Well if that's true I give up. It's indeed a cheap price. Instead of alimony the term "grant" or "transition backing" would be the better fitting word.

Still. Morality is often on bad terms with money. If you want to talk with people about principles they often become fundamental money-wise.

The process forgave atrocities and put some of the offenders into government jobs. I haven't seen a site that says otherwise. Sure their crimes aren't legalized but forgiveness isn't the same thing, it just acknowledges the crimes were crimes and won't be prosecuted.

Negotiating with terrorists where they get off the hook and even allowed to be part of government is not truly a good idea. Most likely the current regime went this way because of the incredible foreign aid they are betting on once a peace process is hammered out, I doubt they truly care that six million or so displaced people want to come back and there is no guarantee with a peace deal they actually will be able to do so.

It worked really well with the M-19. This is the movement that took over the Justice Palace once. And now they are part of the democracy, being a strong and necessary opposition party to current and past governments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_of_April_Movement#Demobil...

Is it possible the map looks like that is because a lot of the people affected by the attacks left the afflicted areas, and the voters that remain are ones benefiting from the guerrillas?

You don't benefit from mines, hard work conditions, no access to anything and the risk of getting bombed by planes or being in cross fire. I understand the logic for your question but once you check the facts of those parts of the country it's obvious that only the guerillas and huge land owners could be benefiting and they don't had enough control in this situation to affect the result of the vote.

>You can easily see it in the map of how the people voted and you’ll notice that those territories where the war was actually fought got the big majority of the votes supporting the peace treaty.

Or maybe because people in those territories support the guerrillas?

No, I'm taking about territories that were attacked by the guerrilla. Like Toribio Cauca, that got more than 600 guerrilla attacks since the 80s. 81% of them voted yes to peace treaty.

I'm uninformed, but is it possible the vote was basically a choice between "war" and "not war"? Maybe people voted for anything but more of the same?

The people who vote against claim they are not in favor of the war but in favor of another agreement. There's very few people in everyday life that want "the same". However, through many lies popular believe is that we can close the conflict making things even, like there's a better amazing deal we are missing altogether and need to stop and rethink it all. There's no full justice we can achieve as a country as there will never be anyone who can repair all the WWII deaths, destruction and suffering. That didn't mean that Europe couldn't recover and that Jews, as the most clearly affected group by size, where not able to cope and forgive in many cases. That's the point that voter against don't see and think they can easily get through another agreement.

I'm Colombian and this is not about peace or war, many victims lost family members and they don't know where they are, this treaty wanted to compensate those victims by having the guerrillas give total information about crimes to those victims. the only way to get amnesty was by giving 100% of that information to the victims.

The treaty was voted down because some political movements lied to the people in the cities (not the victims), telling them that Colombia would become Venezuela, that their income will suffer by new taxes, and that the treaty had Gender equality points (which is true).

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