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The 'No' campaign in Colombia's 2016 peace agreement referendum

Summary

On 2 October 2016, Colombians rejected by a margin of 50.22% to 49.78% the final peace agreement signed four days earlier between President Juan Manuel Santos’ government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), with 6,438,552 votes against and 6,382,901 in favour out of 13,062,917 ballots cast. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016] The campaign that produced that result was led by former president Álvaro Uribe and his Democratic Center party, which argued that the deal would let FARC members escape prison, hand them automatic seats in Congress, and legalise narcotrafficking; the result was compared in contemporary coverage to the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s 2016 U.S. election win as a shock that polls had failed to predict. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]

Tactics used

  • cross-party coalition building around a single opponent figure (former president Uribe) that pulled together his own Democratic Center, the 2014 presidential ticket of Óscar Iván Zuluaga and Carlos Holmes Trujillo, then-senator Iván Duque Márquez, and crossover endorsements from former Conservative president Andrés Pastrana and former Inspector General Alejandro Ordóñez [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]
  • targeted media messaging, including the 27 August 2016 op-ed “La verdadera paz empieza con el No” published in El Tiempo and signed by Duque, Holmes Trujillo and Zuluaga, and continuous Twitter- and press-based criticism of Santos as having exceeded his constitutional authority [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]
  • public-figure mobilisation outside formal party structures, including novelist and filmmaker Fernando Vallejo’s 6 April 2016 speech at the World Summit of Art and Culture for Peace in Bogotá, footballer Daniel Alejandro Torres’ Instagram video accusing Santos of not placing Jesus at the heart of the negotiations, and a public endorsement by Jhon Jairo Velásquez (“Popeye”), the former hitman for Pablo Escobar and the Medellín drug cartel [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]
  • legal and constitutional framing of the agreement as overreach, drawing on Democratic Center’s argument that Santos had negotiated beyond the terms of the Colombian constitution [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]

Background

The peace negotiations had begun on 26 August 2012 in Havana and concluded on 25 August 2016 after four years of talks between the Colombian government and the FARC. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016] The final agreement was signed in Cartagena de Indias on 27 September 2016, and on 18 July 2016 the Colombian Constitutional Court had already approved the holding of a national plebiscite to validate it. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016] The referendum’s ballot question, “Do you support the final agreement to end the conflict and build a stable and lasting peace?”, required “Yes” votes to clear two thresholds at once: outnumber “No” votes and reach at least 13% of the electoral roll, or 4,396,626 votes out of 34,899,945 registered voters. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]

The conflict the agreement addressed had its roots in La Violencia following the 1948 assassination of liberal political leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, and in the anti-communist repression in rural Colombia during the 1960s from which Liberal and Communist militants reorganised into the FARC. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016] Álvaro Uribe, who built his political career, including two terms as president, on promises to defeat the guerrilla groups, had been an outspoken critic of Santos ever since Santos began negotiations with the FARC. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]

What happened

The Democratic Center presented four core arguments against the deal: that FARC combatants would not serve time in prison; that they would automatically be awarded ten seats in Congress; that the deal would legalise narcotrafficking; and that in pursuing the negotiations Santos had exceeded the terms of the Colombian constitution. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016] Alongside party leader Uribe, his Democratic Center supported the 2014 presidential candidate Óscar Iván Zuluaga, the 2014 vice-presidential candidate Carlos Holmes Trujillo, and then-senator Iván Duque Márquez, who would go on to win the 2018 presidential election. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]

Outside the Democratic Center, conservative former Inspector General Alejandro Ordóñez, who feared the agreement would legitimise violence in the country, and former president Andrés Pastrana — Uribe’s predecessor and himself a failed FARC negotiator between 1999 and 2002 — also campaigned for “No”, breaking with Pastrana’s own Conservative Party’s official position. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016] On 2 August 2016 the Democratic Center formally launched its “No” campaign; the public messaging peaked in August and September with op-eds, social media posts, and direct addresses from cultural figures. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]

On 27 August 2016, Duque, Holmes Trujillo and Zuluaga published their joint El Tiempo op-ed “La verdadera paz empieza con el No”, articulating the constitutional-overreach argument. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016] On 29 September 2016, El Tiempo reported Ordóñez stating that if “No” lost it would mean legitimising violence. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016] Outside formal politics, novelist and filmmaker Fernando Vallejo, who became a naturalised Mexican citizen in 2007, used a debate at the World Summit of Art and Culture for Peace in Bogotá on 6 April 2016 to call President Santos “shameless” and the FARC “thugs”. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016] Footballer Daniel Alejandro Torres, a regular starter in the Colombia national football team during 2016, used his Instagram account to accuse Santos of not placing Jesus at the heart of the negotiations, and Jhon Jairo Velásquez (“Popeye”), the former hitman for Pablo Escobar and the Medellín drug cartel, also publicly opposed the accord. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]

Opinion polling from the run-up to the vote shows how thin the lead for “Yes” had become by referendum day. A Datexco poll for W Radio and El Tiempo on 31 August–1 September 2016 put Yes at 59.5% and No at 33.2%; by 25–26 September 2016 a Cifras & Conceptos poll for Caracol Radio and Red + Noticias gave Yes 62% and No 38%. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016] Researchers Matanock and Garcia-Sanchez noted that attitudes among Colombians tracked support for either Santos or Uribe: those who supported Uribe’s party and his preferred candidates showed lower support for the peace process, while those who supported Santos did the opposite. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]

Outcome

Verdict: won.

The “No” vote carried the referendum on 2 October 2016 with 50.22% (6,438,552 votes) against 49.78% (6,382,901 votes) for “Yes”, out of 12,821,453 valid votes and 13,062,917 total ballots; turnout was 37.43% of the 34,899,945 registered voters, with 241,464 invalid or blank votes. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016] The result was a narrow upset — opinion polls had consistently given “Yes” a double-digit lead in the final three weeks, with the closing Cifras & Conceptos survey on 25–26 September 2016 still showing Yes 62% to No 38%. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]

The rejection did not, however, end the peace process. Then-FARC commander-in-chief Timoleón Jiménez (“Timochenko”) publicly reaffirmed that the FARC remained committed to peace, and on 5 October 2016 thousands of citizens took to the streets across 14 cities to protest against the referendum result. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016] A 2018 text-mining study by Correa, García-Chitiva and García-Vargas suggested that one driver of the “No” vote may have been the linguistic difficulty of the agreement itself. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016] Hurricane Matthew made landfall on referendum day along Colombia’s northern coast, a region that strongly backed “Yes”, and although it cut turnout by an estimated 11–13%, a 2026 study by Bernal, Lacouture, Perez-Cardona and Rettberg concluded it was unlikely to have changed the outcome. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]

Lessons

  • A referendum in which approval requires both a popular majority and a fixed share of the electoral roll can be defeated by a narrow “No” coalition even when “Yes” leads in polls, because the threshold structure rewards mobilisation of reluctant voters rather than persuasion of committed ones. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]
  • A campaign that frames a technocratic peace agreement around a single resonant moral argument (here, alleged impunity for guerrilla fighters) can succeed against a fragmented multi-party “Yes” coalition, even when the latter spans left, centre and right of the political spectrum. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]
  • The same pool of opinion polls that delivered a comfortable “Yes” lead throughout September 2016 missed a late, cross-partisan swing: by 2 October 2016, “No” won 50.22% to 49.78%, with turnout at only 37.43% of registered voters — a structural reminder that low-turnout referendums amplify motivated minorities. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]
  • Cultural figures operating outside formal party structures (a novelist, a footballer, a former cartel hitman) can move the perceived stakes of a referendum beyond policy detail into questions of national identity and morality, providing “No” campaigns with cheap reach into audiences that political ads alone cannot buy. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]
  • Even when a referendum rejects a peace agreement, the underlying process need not collapse: the FARC publicly reaffirmed its commitment to peace the day after the vote, and a renegotiated accord was signed in November 2016 without a second plebiscite, illustrating that a popular “No” can be absorbed politically rather than treated as final. [source: colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016]

Sources

Disclaimer: Included as a teaching example of campaign craft, not as endorsement.

Sources & verification

  • colombian-no-campaign-peace-agreement-referendum-2016 — grounding: primary — license: cc-attribution
  • Rewritten: 2026-07-15 via rw2-q12 batch.

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Last verified: 2026-07-15