President Juan Manuel Santos and Farc leader Timoleon Jiminez signed the deal last week after four years of negotiations. Yet this needed to be authorized by Columbians before it come into force.
President Santos addressed to the nation that he accepted the result but he would continue working on it to attain peace. The president was backed up with the "YES' campaign and a vast of politicians coming from Colombia and abroad, which include General Ban KI-moon, the UN Secretary General.
Yet, a "NO" campaign body was so vocal to opposed it, led by Alvaro Uribe, the former Colombian president. There were pools conducted prior to Sunday's vote which indicated a comfortable win for the "yes" campaign. In a surprise result, 50.2 % of voters rejected the agreement compared with the 49.8% who voted for it, the result was surprising for it contradicts to the result of the polls. The difference with (*.* % of the votes counted was less than 54,000 votes which is out of almost 13 million ballots.
The turnout was low which is fewer than 38% voters who casted their votes. The country was divided regionally. Those nearer the capital and inland are against the agreement. While those are in the outlying provinces are in favor of it.
In one of the provinces, Choco's hardest hit by conflict, 80$ of voters vacked the deal. On the other hand, in the town of Bojaya, there were at 119 people who were killed when a church was hit by Farc mortar bombs. There were 96% who voted yes. Whereas in Bogota, Colombia's capital there were people who also voted yes which consists the 56%. The Vaupes, a province marked a strong support with the deal with 78%. In the eastern province of Casanare on the other hand, 71.1 % voted against the deal.
This is an area where farmers and landowners have for years been extorted by the Farc and other illegal groups.Meanwhile in Antioquia, it has a 62% votes which rejected the deal, to note this is the home town of the ex-president Uribe.
Under the agreement, special courts would have been created to try crimes committed during the conflict.Those who confessed to their crimes would have been given more lenient sentences and would have avoided serving any time in conventional prisons.Most of those who voted "no" said they thought the peace agreement was letting the rebels "get away with murder".
According to them they simply did not trust the rebels to keep their promise to lay down arms for good.They pointed out the previous deal failed peace negotiations because the rebels took advantage of a lull in fighting to regroup and rearm as evidence that the Farc had broken their word before.
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