Colombian Voters Reject Peace Deal with Rebels
I can&#x27;t say these are good news, but as someone who voted &quot;No&quot; I am glad about the result. There are a couple of things that I didn&#x27;t like about all this <i>&quot;Peace Agreement&quot;</i>, the fact that the majority of poor &#x2F; non-educated people couldn&#x27;t understand +300 pages of the document was one of the main reasons for me to take a decision. Many mothers lost their children on this war either by direct contact or via narcotraffic. I know two women who lost their husband and son respectively when they were killed by FARC when they were passing by a small town in Casanare, and one family who lost their two male teenagers after FARC kidnapped them to force them to fight for them.<p>There is more people in Colombia with tragic stories than people without, many of them decided to vote &quot;No&quot;, not because they don&#x27;t want peace but because the agreement between the government and FARC had more benefits for them than for the affected people. The head of FARC were going to get +2 years salary with bonuses without working. I am not going to pay my taxes knowing that part of it is going to become the wine served to these bastards. I am pretty sure they are going to keep their <i>&quot;clean&quot;</i> money in their international bank accounts without problems. Who is going to clean minefields? Who is going to repair children who lost their legs, arms, vision? What about people who were raped? What about all the terrorism?<p>I and my family were very upset during the celebration days ago of the signature of the peace agreement between the government and FARC because they were assuming people were going to vote &quot;Yes&quot; just because of the word &quot;peace&quot;. This is another one of the reasons of why I am glad the &quot;No&quot; won, because they shouldn&#x27;t have celebrated before the results of the plebiscite, they were like telling people via a televised event <i>&quot;We don&#x27;t care what your opinion is, we are going to have peace no matter the cost&quot;</i>.<p>NO!!! I and many other Colombians don&#x27;t want &quot;peace&quot; knowing that these terrorists are not going to be punished for all the things they did. Knowing that the congress will have more criminals than there already is. I don&#x27;t want to tell my children that we have congressmen who committed many of the worse war crimes.<p>Do you know how many young geniuses have left the country because of this war? <i>&quot;Fuga de cerebros&quot;</i> was a term coined here to refer to the migration of smart people to other countries mostly because of the decay of the local job market for professionals, but war was and still is the main factor for that migration. Who wants to have a family and raise children in a country where the president and many powerful people non-affected by war decide to give privileges to the criminals instead of the victims?<p>I am not even surprised by the number of votes for the &quot;Yes&quot; coming from Colombians living abroad, many of them have been living abroad too many years to understand what is the current situation. If you are one of them, how dare you? It is easy to tease the lion when it is behind bars. It is easy to think that &quot;peace&quot; is what Colombians want when you are living the good life in a 1st-world country.<p>It is uncertain what is going to happen now, but I can tell you something, if the government doesn&#x27;t removes those benefits directed to the head of FARC and their guerrilla I, my family, and many of my friends will vote &quot;No&quot; again.