Santos, Juan Manuel (1951-…), served as president of Colombia from 2010 to 2018. As president, he gained recognition for his efforts to end a decades-long civil war between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The FARC formed in the mid-1960’s as a guerrilla group with Communist ideals. Santos was awarded the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize .
Juan Manuel Santos Calderón was born on Aug. 10, 1951, in Bogotá, Colombia, into an influential family. Santos’s great-uncle Eduardo Santos was president of Colombia from 1938 to 1942, and his cousin Francisco Santos was vice president from 2002 to 2010. Members of Santos’s family also owned and edited the leading Colombian newspaper El Tiempo for many years.
Santos graduated from the Admiral Padilla Naval Academy in Cartagena, Colombia, in 1969. He then studied economics and business at the University of Kansas in the United States, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1973. From the early 1970’s to 1981, Santos represented the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation, an organization promoting the growers’ interests, in London, England. He also pursued graduate studies at the London School of Economics and at Harvard University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, both in Massachusetts in the United States. From 1981 to 1992, Santos worked as a columnist and deputy director at El Tiempo.
Santos began his political career as a member of the moderate Colombian Liberal Party. He served as Colombia’s minister of foreign trade from 1991 to 1994. In 1993 and 1994, he was also the “designated official to the presidency,” a position that later became the vice presidency. Santos was involved in unsuccessful peace negotiations between the government and the FARC in the 1990’s. From 2000 to 2002, he served as minister of finance.
Santos broke with the Liberal Party and in 2005 founded the centrist Social Party of National Unity (Party of the U). The new party united politicians who supported President Álvaro Uribe, elected in 2002 and again in 2006. From 2006 to 2009, Santos served as defense minister in Uribe’s government. In that post, he oversaw a sometimes controversial military offensive against the FARC. Uribe’s administration opposed negotiations with the FARC.
Term limits prevented Uribe from running for a third term. Santos was elected president in 2010, on a platform of continuing Uribe’s policies. He was reelected in 2014. After becoming president, however, Santos abandoned Uribe’s intolerance of the FARC and began pursuing new peace talks with the group. Formal negotiations began in Cuba in 2012 and yielded a historic peace agreement in 2016. However, Colombians narrowly rejected the agreement in a referendum (direct public vote) in October 2016. Several days after the referendum, Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the civil war. In November, Santos’s government and the FARC reached a revised peace deal, which Colombia’s Congress ratified that same month.
Santos has written several books. They include The Third Way (1999; co-written with British Prime Minister Tony Blair ) and Check on Terror (2009).
