Do we like them?

Do we like Juan Manuel Santos?

Our score: 6 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up in what I could read, and there's a real peace legacy, but there's an unresolved shadow over his time as defence minister and the record I could open is thin.

Santos is a former president of Colombia, and his time in office was never short of stoushes. As early as April 2011, judicial proceedings began over his changes to the shortlist for prosecutor general. A judge told Congress's Accusations Commission he had no right to submit a new shortlist. The article doesn't report a final ruling, and the Supreme Court did go on to elect Viviane Morales from his list.

The heavy chapter is the army killings known as 'false positives', where civilians were killed and passed off as combatants. In June 2021 Santos told Colombia's Truth Commission that most of them happened while he was defence minister under Álvaro Uribe, and that he initially ignored the practice. He spoke of “remorse and deep regret” and asked the mothers and families for forgiveness. An apology doesn't wipe the slate, and the page I read doesn't show how much he knew or when, so that one stays on the ledger.

On the harm test, the record I could open is short but clean. In a 2014 online chat during his re-election campaign, he said “Marriage between homosexuals seems to me perfectly acceptable”. He added that whether the union is called marriage was secondary to the rights. Activists called the statement ambiguous, and both of his opponents had also endorsed marriage equality. I found nothing harmful about trans people, women, migrants or the planet in his own words, but I couldn't read enough to say his record on those is all good either.

The latest news is calm for him. In June 2026, as the runoff result came in, he posted congratulations to De la Espriella and said it was time to unite the country. Two days earlier he had said “No apoyo ninguna candidatura”, so he stayed out of the contest itself, which is a call you can read as statesmanlike or as sitting on the fence.

The good stuff is big. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping end Colombia's long internal war, and he apologised on the record to families of the false-positives victims. That's a real achievement and a real act of accountability, though the Nobel was for a deal, not a clean slate. I couldn't open pages on the Odebrecht campaign-funding questions that have followed him, so I haven't judged them here.

So where does that leave us? A leader who ended a war, backed marriage equality in his own words, and said sorry for a dark chapter from his defence-ministry days. Against that, the questions about that chapter are unfinished and this card rests on a thin set of pages. It's a lean yes, with a note to check the fine print.