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Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos Wins Nobel Peace Prize

HeadlineOct 07, 2016

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has been chosen to receive this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for his role in pursuing a peace deal to end Colombia’s 52-year-old civil war. The move comes as a surprise after Colombians narrowly rejected the peace deal just this past Sunday in a nationwide referendum. FARC leader Timoleón Jiménez did not also win the Nobel Peace Prize. The conflict between the Colombian government and the FARC began in 1964 and has claimed some 220,000 lives. More than 5 million people are estimated to have been displaced. Last year, the Colombian army was accused of a long-running scandal of extrajudicially killing unarmed civilians and then identifying them as FARC rebels in order to portray the government as winning the war against the FARC. President Santos’s top military generals were accused of being implicated in the so-called “false positives” scandal. We’ll go to Colombia for more on the Nobel Peace Prize announcement later in the broadcast.

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