Conservatives, against the peace deal with FARC, used President Juan Manuel Santos's social liberalism against him, imploring voters who disagreed with his open policies on LGBTQ people to vote against the deal.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for trying to end the country's 52-year war with FARC—a peace plan that his citizens ultimately rejected. From the committee's statement:

The civil war in Colombia is one of the longest civil wars in modern times and the sole remaining armed conflict in the Americas. It is the Norwegian Nobel Committee's firm belief that President Santos, despite the 'No' majority vote in the referendum, has brought the bloody conflict significantly closer to a peaceful solution, and that much of the groundwork has been laid for both the verifiable disarmament of the FARC guerrillas and a historic process of national fraternity and reconciliation. His endeavors to promote peace thus fulfil the criteria and spirit of Alfred Nobel's will.

FARC leader Timoleón Jiménez also offered his congratulations:

Colombian voters declined to approve a referendum that would have ratified the government's peace agreement with the country's oldest and largest armed militia, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, by a margin of less than one percentage point. The turnout for the referendum was extremely low, under 40 percent, and an analysis of the geographic distribution of the vote showed that Colombians who deal directly with FARC—poorer, rural descendants of slaves brought from Africa, who live in the outskirts of the country—voted for the deal, while the better-off central urban parts of the country voted against it.

Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos had been negotiating with FARC since 2012, and successfully convinced the jungle-based armed militia to disarm earlier this year—if the referendum had passed.

Both the Colombian government and FARC have reaffirmed their commitment to not take up arms against each other again even with the referendum results.

Colombia's armed conflicts with various militias began with La Violencia, a 1950s civil war between armed conservative and liberal peasant groups that claimed 300,000 lives. After the government attacked a small village—that had declared itself independent from the country in 1964—the US got involved. Kennedy ordered US troops to train the Colombian military to invade the largest armed peasant enclaves. An Army official later wrote that, "In order to shield the interests of both Colombian and US authorities against 'interventionist' charges any special aid given for internal security was to be sterile and covert in nature."

As FARC and other rebel groups began taxing the drug trade in the 1980s and '90s, US involvement got even more pronounced. Money began funneling from various government agencies to the Colombian government to stop drug trafficking. Multiple reports will also point out that the Colombian military was just as involved in the drug trade as rebel groups. Eventually, after years of kidnappings for ransom and extortion, FARC was designated as a terrorist group by the US, leading even more money to be spent fighting it, often by covert means.