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Comment by doozy | Hacker News Reader

As I'm living in Colombia, I'm glad to see this disastrous agreement was rejected by the majority of voters. It was a lot closer than I thought, and while the government, almost every political party and the media were all pushing as hard as they could for a yes vote, the people was not so easily bamboozled.

It's uncertain what will happen. The government was very proud of saying there was no plan B, but the people gave the establishment the finger leaving the government in a precarious position.

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I'm curious. You state that you are glad that it failed, but you don't know what happens next. What if there really is no plan B? If war resumes, is that a better result or is the assumption that that there really is a plan B? (I'm not arguing one way or another, just trying to better understand the issue.)

In Colombia there really is no war. Farc and friends are armed groups fuelled by the drug trafficking business and population oppression, lurking in the most remote parts of Colombia where there is no presence of the state. So basically they are just thugs, but very well organised. If they really were an insurgency, had some kind of political agenda and vouched for some part of the population, then we could talk about a war, against a party with some legitimacy. Not the case here. There is no case of negotiating against a group that has nothing to bring to the table, and on the contrary it creates a very bad precedent. Were the plebiscite had succeeded today, the other armed group here, ELN, would have no incentive to stop its current mischievings knowing it also had a guaranteed agreement in the future with full pardon for them.

The most likely scenario is the government will spend fighting for its own survival until the next elections take place.

War was not going to stop regardless of the outcome. Hell, FARC attacked a polling station just today.

If the reports are correct, it is a dissident group that had been previously dismissed by the FARC because they refused the peace. And nobody was hurt.

stupid people in colombia voted like in Brexit driven by fear, lies and hate. Conservative ones are the only colombians that feel glad to be the biggest morons on earth.

Is the expectation there that open hostilities will resume, or that another round of negotiations will follow?

No one knows, things will probably stall until the end of this administration.

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