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:

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.

The leader of the efforts for the “no” vote has been Álvaro Uribe, a former president and current senator whose father was killed by FARC. Much of his argument is emotional; if the referendum went through, FARC guerrillas would not be fully punished for all of their crimes, which Uribe refers to as amnesty. FARC would also become a political group.

What is not reported as much is that the FARC peace process is mirrored on one that Uribe pioneered, when he convinced Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), a violent right-wing paramilitary organization dwarfed by FARC, to disarm. Perhaps the difference is personal. For years, Uribe has been hounded by allegations that he is intimately connected with AUC. Reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Pablo Escobar’s widow have all put him near or at the top of AUC’s command structure, and his ties to the organization were investigated by Colombian authorities as recently as 2013.

Uribe was also behind a hugely controversial extradition deal in which paramilitary leaders, including some with AUC, were put to trial in the U.S. and received relatively lenient sentences.