The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded recently to Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia. He deserves congratulations for his efforts. Yet the Colombian population, in a referendum five days before the award was made, voted by a narrow margin to reject the agreement Santos had negotiated with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia to end the country's 52-year-old civil war, financed on the FARC side in no small part by drug dealing.
It has to be assumed that the Nobel committee gave the prize to Santos to encourage him to stay the course in pursuing an agreement. There is every reason to hope that he will do so.
The comparison of Santos having been awarded the prize and new U.S. President Barack Obama's having received it in 2009, based on expectations of what he might do in office, is impossible to avoid. In the case of Obama, it didn't work. At the end of nearly eight years in office, the United States is bogged down up to its axles with troops in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
That doesn't mean that the Nobel Peace Prize shouldn't be used to encourage peace-making. Let's hope it will work better with Santos than it did with Obama.
Editorial on 10/17/2016