Juan Manuel Santos
Juan Manuel Santos was President of Colombia from 2010 to 2018 and won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the longest insurgency in the Americas. Born in Bogotá in 1951 into a family that owned El Tiempo, the country's leading newspaper, he trained as a naval cadet, studied economics at Kansas and at the London School of Economics and Harvard, and worked at the International Coffee Organization. He was minister of foreign trade, then finance, and from 2006 defence minister under Álvaro Uribe, whose policy of military confrontation with the FARC he executed. Under him the armed forces killed several senior guerrilla commanders and, in Operation Jaque in 2008, rescued Ingrid Betancourt and fourteen other hostages without a shot. He also raided a FARC camp inside Ecuador, causing a diplomatic crisis. The false positives scandal — in which soldiers murdered civilians and presented them as guerrillas killed in action to inflate body counts — occurred largely on his watch, and he dismissed a number of generals over it. He won the presidency in 2010 as Uribe's chosen successor and then reversed course, opening secret talks with the FARC in 2011 and formal negotiations in Havana from 2012. Uribe became his bitterest opponent. The agreement covered land reform, political participation, drugs, victims and disarmament, with a transitional justice system offering reduced sentences for confession. Voters rejected it in a referendum in October 2016 by a very narrow margin; a revised text was passed through congress. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016. Some 13,000 fighters demobilised, and implementation has been slow and disputed since.
- Lived: 1951 CE – ?
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: head_of_state
