Newspapers headlines read in Spanish; "Colombia said No", in Bogota, Colombia, Monday, Oct. 3, 2016. AP Photo/Fernando Vergara. All rights reserved.
On 2nd October 2016, Colombians were invited to the ballot to vote on whether to accept the terms of a peace deal between the government and FARC rebels, which had been several years in the making. Voters rejected the landmark deal, with a slim majority of 50.2% voting against it. Whilst the referendum’s failure to deliver public endorsement for the deal came as a surprise to many international observers, at a national level there have been signals of public discontent and fatigue with the peace process for some time. We found evidence of this in our study which centred on portrayals of the peace process through political cartoons featured in Colombia’s mainstream newspapers. Not only did this study tell us something about circulating opinions of the peace deal and its proponents within Colombian society, it also highlighted a divergence between the international and domestic framing of the peace process.
The Colombian government and the country's largest left-wing rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), have recently taken steps to put an end to more than five decades of violent armed conflict known as ‘La Violencia’. During this conflict more than 220,000 people have been killed, and up to 80% of these have been civilians.
