An Indian woman carries her daughter during a peace march in Bogota, Colombia, Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2016. AP Photo/Fernando Vergara. All rights reserved.
By October 5, it was a truth publicly acknowledged that Colombia’s opposition had purposely distorted reality to sink the referendum on the peace treaty President Juan Manuel Santos had reached the leftist FARC guerrilla. Speaking to newspaper La Republica, former senator Juan Carlos Vélez admitted that the NO campaign he had managed deliberately avoided discussing the contents of the peace treaty, and forged a panoply of scaremongering narratives specifically tailored to foment indignation among distinct sectors of the electorate.
The strategy crafted a poisonous discourse which posited the implementation of the peace deal as a threat to the integrity of Colombia’s society. A crucial element of the propaganda was the myth that the peace deal would have implied the imposition of a “gender ideology” that could have shattered the traditional heterosexual family unit.
