Juan Manuel Santos: Reconciliation, empathy key to peace-building
Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia gave the annual Eugene McCarthy lecture at St. John's University and said it's important to pursue peace, fight inequality, and protect the environment.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016 “for his resolute efforts to bring the country’s more than 50-year-long civil war to an end.”
He shared peacemaking lessons he learned from Abraham Lincoln and Yitzhak Rabin and said communication is key. Santos said he tried to learn from Abraham Lincoln’s “team of rivals” approach and found success in building alliances in Congress.
The former president of Colombia said making peace is much more difficult than making war, and reconciliation and forgiveness are essential. And you must do what is right, even if it's unpopular. The most important virtue for any leader, he said, is empathy.
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It’s important to “communicate with your enemies,” he said, because “they have rights too. … Talk to the victims, and they will energize you.”
Parallel to the peace process, Santos said, was his fight against poverty and inequality. It was “important to focus the social investments where the impact on poverty was going to be the greatest.”
Santos stressed the importance of studying — and learning from — history. There are lessons to be learned about the necessary conditions for peace, he said.
He said he learned in the Navy you “must know where you want to go.” And he emphasized that a leader must “do what is right, even if it’s unpopular.”
He concluded by urging his audience to “be bold, be ambitious. It’s always better to feel sorry for what you did. Don’t get to the end of your life feeling sorry for what you could have done, and didn’t.”
2016 Nobel Peace Prize winner Juan Manuel Santos, the former president of Colombia, gave the 2020 Eugene McCarthy Lecture on Feb. 4 at St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict. The lecture series is hosted by the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy and Civic Engagement.
After his speech he answered audience questions moderated by native Colombian Valentin Sierra, St. John’s University class of 2010. You can hear that discussion here. It starts with a question about climate change and the environment.