Nobel Peace prize winner spoke at KU, his alma mater, in 2012

Juan Manuel Santos spoke at Kansas University on Sept. 26, 2012. This is a transcript of the interview and Q-and-A session.

My youth, I was brought up in a family that has been dedicated to public service and to journalism. As a matter of fact the reason why I came to KU, and I will tell you that story a bit later, was because of my family’s background in journalism. I went to a British School, an American School and then I went to the Navy. I served in the navy for 2.5 years and after that I decided to continue my career in the civil side of public, of life and I chose to come to KU. I spent six months at Los Angeles in Colombia and then came here directly to McCollum Hall as a freshman. I was two years at the fraternity where I went this morning, DU Delta Epsilon. My last year was in an apartment, so I had the whole life, the whole student life. I repeat my experience here has been extremely extremely helpful. During your university life you consolidate those principles, those values, those experiences you have as a student that will then eventually give you the instruments to be successful in life, and those instruments again I repeat with pride were made at KU.

What were some of the memorable experiences you had at KU?

So many stories. First of all at that time the student union was very, was very rich, or at least they pretended to be very rich, and they brought the best bands in the whole country. And I remember very well I used to go to the concerts, of the very famous, James Taylor, Crosby Still Nash and Young, Jefferson Airplane, you name it they came here. That was a great experience personally. I improved my ability to play poker. (Laughter.) At the fraternity and some of my fraternity brothers are here and they were sometimes victims or I was a victim but I, I remember something very special. The first car I had in my life was bought here as a student and it was a combination of, I remember I was in the business school and I invested in a small enterprise called Pizza Hut. At that time it was over the counter, so I went here to Lawrence and I went to put some money that I had earned from my poker games and the stock went up and I was able to buy a car for the first time in my life, so I started my business side. But living in the fraternity was a great experience, it was an experience that taught me and not only the fraternity, but living in Lawrence and KU, taught me to appreciate and admire the US, the American way of life, your strong commitment to certain values, to freedom, democracy, and this has been present in my mind and my heart throughout all this time. I can tell you some anecdotes, for example I have here a Senator from my country, I invited him to come because he is also a KU graduate, he graduated with a PhD in Psychology and he saved my life. He saved my life once because we were in a party and I was flirting with a very beautiful girl and he came to me and said to me, “You must leave now and I said, “Why?” and “This is the girlfriend of the fullback of the football team.” And so I went, I had went, because he was already furious. All those experiences you have in the university, they are all good memories, of course my professors, everything that KU has to offer, made a great impression in the formation of my character and my education.

At what point did you decide to get into public service and politics?

My family has always been directly or indirectly involved in public service. One of the heroes of our Independence was my great uncle, great grand aunt. My great uncle was president of Colombia between 1938 and 1942, he became very close ally of the US in the war. And my family founded a newspaper 101 years ago. So I sort of lived and was raised in this atmosphere of politics, public service journalism, they were very much interrelated. I after I graduated, I went to work with the Coffee Federation, I was an economist and I did a masters degree and postgraduate work at LSE and I stayed in London for about eight years and I was drafted by my family to work in journalism. I had an experience I want to share with you. After eight years as deputy publisher of the newspaper and I was going to be the publisher, I went to have an exam made and they diagnosed incorrectly that I might have cancer. And I was shocked, and I started sort of thinking, and there was an advice that my grandfather used to give me, he said you must, it doesn’t matter if you are sorry for the things you did. But don’t feel sorry for the things you could have done and did not do. And I remember saying, I didn’t really like journalism, I liked to be in the action, politics. And at that time by pure coincidence I was offered the job, after the doctor said, “I’m sorry it was a mistake, don’t worry.” I was offered a job as a Minister of Trade, which was a new ministry. Because at that time Colombia had a very closed economy, the decided to open and it was a big responsibility and I said this is really what I like and so I jumped into public service and I’ve been in public service since.

You’ve also served as Minister of Finance and Minister of Defense. Talk about how those three roles work in Colombia.

Well I by coincidence had to do very particular jobs, special jobs, as minister of trade I had to open the economy. This was something completely new. I started negotiating free trade agreements. But I needed to build the institutions that would back our new foreign trade policy. So I build, I created a bank, a foreign trade bank and an institution to promote exports and all the competitiveness, how to promote competition, with that implied. As minister of Finance, that was another very interesting experience. My country was going through a tremendous crisis, probably the worst crisis in 100 years, economic and political crisis. There was a governability crisis, the president did not have the majority in Congress and we had to take some very tough reforms. And he sent part of his cabinet to ask me if I would join the government. I came from another party, different from the president at that time. And I said, “In what Capacity, what do you want me to do?” And he said, “Whatever you want.” And I said, “My god.” And so I went to some friends, look what happened, this is an opportunity. They said you are a risk taker, high risk and high return, which is the worst, the most difficult situation right now? I said well, “The economic situation, the financial situation.” Well choose that. So I chose to be the Finance minister. Everybody thought I was suicidal because we had to take very tough situation. They used to burn me, they used to burn my picture in every single town in Colombia and my kids were very small at that time. And they used to say, “Dad, I see you on television they are burning your picture.” I said, “Don’t worry the smoke goes up to God and it’s an honor they have given me.” Anyway we took very tough decisions, we managed to get through Congress, some very tough reforms that today in today’s financial situation worldwide we are one of the darlings of investors all around the world, our spreads are lower than most of the countries in Europe, so we had big success there. It was difficult at that time but it taught me how important it is to take tough decisions that afterward you will benefit from the results. And as defense minister, I was appointed in a very particular moment in our history. I served in the Navy, I was the first civilian Defense Minister to have served in the military in our history, that helped me tremendously, starting with the fact that I knew how to march. We have been going through almost 50 years of internal war, internal conflict with some very tough guerrilla groups. At that time we were having success but we had not been able to really strike at them where it hurt. So what I did is a complete re-engineering of the way the military worked, especially from the intelligence, and what I did is exactly the contrary of what the United States did, sorry to say. It’s getting the whole of the intelligence community together, instead of competing one with the other, sharing the information and creating synergies. That made a tremendous difference and we started knocking the theaters of these groups one after the other and weakened them and changed the whole strategy, the whole security doctrine and we have had tremendous success there to the extent today as President, having been signaled and I don’t know what the word is in English, “burdugo,” the one who chops people’s head in, the executioner of the FARC. I am not starting a peace process with them to see if we can negotiate a termination of the conflict. Because when you fight a war, you fight a war for a purpose, not for the sake of fighting, you fight a war with an objective. And since the beginning I knew the objective was to try to consolidate peace in my country after 50 years, we have been killing each other for 50 years. And I hope the next time I come to KU I can say we achieved this very important objective in my company to have peace.

One of your policies I was very interested in, and I thought folks would love to hear about it, was your effort to help more young Colombians to attend higher education or to be trained for jobs. Talk about what you are trying to do there.

Education is something so fundamental to every country’s development. Any sensible head of state will have to put education as one of the top priorities and we have been trying to do that. And with my wife who is here me, we have been giving a lot of importance from the moment you are born up to six years old, that’s when children learn how to learn and acquire the fundamental capacities to learn. In Colombia and most of the developing countries that has been a neglected part of the education and we even brought in one of the Nobel prize winners from the University of Chicago, and said the most important investment you can make socially is give more importance to young infancy, what you call it, then basic primary and basic education, this year, first of January of this year, I signed a decree giving free education to every single Colombian who wants to go to primary and basic education. But we have a tremendous bottleneck after you graduate from high school. We don’t have enough universities and enough technical programs but also people don’t have the money to pay for universities and part of universities are public and free but not all of them. So there is a tremendous challenge there and what we have been trying to do is give scholarship to the most needed and open up technical schools all around the country and try to break that bottleneck because in many countries that age between 18 and 24, 25, is the age if you don’t have students or young people, men or women, studying or doing something productive, that is when they become delinquents or drug addicts or whatever, so we are doing a tremendous effort in that area, there is a long way to go but we are making it a priority.

Tell us about one of the first acts, you won, the victim and land restitution area.

When I was fighting these guerrilla groups, making war is much easier than making peace. Making war is even accelerating, you achieve certain victories and you feel very proud, it is part of the rules of the game. But since then I’ve been saying we’ve been at war for so many years, we need to start thinking about peace but in order to achieve that peace we must be strong militarily, you make war to achieve peace not for the sake of war. And since then I felt how deep the wounds after 50 years of accumulating violence, we had in our society. So I said when I became president, I said, we need to start healing those wounds if we really want peace, so I put in place, or I presented to Congress a very audacious piece of legislation, that allowed me to start repairing victims of the conflict, in the middle of the conflict, and start giving back to the peasants, the land that was taken away from them by the violence. And that’s what we started, it was such an audacious piece of legislation that the Secretary General of the UN went to Colombia for the singing of this legislation. It is part of the process of creating the environment for peace, if we are able to end the conflict, by an agreement with these groups, this is a necessary condition, a fundamental condition, but it is not enough. You have to build a much stronger environment, through social policies, through fighting against poverty, through policies that will decrease the tremendous inequalities that we have in our country. It is a whole strategy that has many components; one of the fundamental components is this law to repair the victims and to restitute land to the peasants.

One of your objectives also has been the Colombian infrastructure, what steps have you taken on that?

Infrastructure has been one of those areas that for many many years, the presidents that preceded me in this office, when they had to sacrifice something from their budgets, they say, the least expensive in political terms, is infrastructure, so we have been accumulating a situation of backwardness in terms of infrastructure, and if we want to be a sustainable growing economy we need good infrastructure, and I read I am very fond of biographies and I have read many biographies of Teddy Roosevelt and his new deal and what he did with the infrastructure in this country, not only did he with the war but he is in many places remembered by the investments in infrastructure that we made, we decided in the government to really make a big step here, the problem was that our financial situation, how do we pay for that and how do we do that with a sensible fiscal situation for our public finances. So we started being creative and came up with a formula will allow us and is now in place to increase the investment in infrastructure using private investors and foreign investors, that will allow us to go from three, to give you a sort of magnitude of numbers to show you difference, between 3 and 5 billion pesos, we’re going up to 40 billion pesos, so it’s about 20 times more, there is a tremendous job there, a tremendous opportunity there, and we win and the investors win because with today’s economic situation around the world, many of the engineering companies big engineering companies are seeking work all around the world and Colombia is one of the few economies that are growing very fast, and we need that infrastructure and so the conditions were put together and so we put together a tremendous effort in modernizing our infrastructure.

Talk a little bit about what kind of opportunities that mid-western or US companies have to do business in Colombia. I met the head of the top executives of a company based here in Topeka, Pay-less Shoes, I said, “Great to meet you,” and he said, “We already have 32 stores in Colombia, or even more, 50 stores.” and I said, “My god what do you plan to do?” And he said, “We are going to open 30 more.” So that gives you an example of the opportunity. Colombia is a country that is growing, the last figure that we had was 4.9 percent and last year we grew 5 percent. It is a young population; we are taking people out of poverty so they can be consumers of all kinds of goods. We have energy, we have biodiversity, we have water which is an increasingly scarce resource. We have a lot of land to increase the production of food in a world that is starting to have a food crisis. We just became the third largest economy in Latin America, we surpassed Argentina in terms of economic GNP terms in per capita income. This is something that shows you that Colombia is a rising star and what we need is investment. The global competition today is not as much access to the markets, it’s investment because that’s what creates jobs and what produces prosperity, and so the Midwestern companies that have, that had success her in the US market or in the Midwestern market, should explore, like we are exploring, many of our medium and small companies are coming to the U.S., we now have a free trade agreement, the US and Colombia. Senator Dole helped us a lot with this free trade agreement and I appreciate that very much. This is a tremendous opportunity for both countries. It’s a win-win situation. There are Colombia, Colombia is a very interesting market, 46, 47 million people and we need the investment, so there are tremendous opportunities for a closer relationship between Midwest and Colombia, both ways. Colombia doesn’t know much what Kansas looks like and the people from Kansas don’t know much what Colombia looks like, but if we get to know each other better, and I tell you because of a personal experience, we would like each other much better and we can create a lot of synergies together.

How did you make the decision to run for president? How did you make that decision and why did you want to do that?

Sometimes I say why did I do this? (laughter) It’s a very, it’s a response that is not easy to make with a sort of exact descriptions it’s a process. I was doubting very much since I entered public office it’s natural that anybody who goes into public service wants to be president, to get to the top. I had periods where I said I want to do it. Others where I said it’s not worth it, or sometimes doubting your own ability. But after the experiences I had as ministers of the three areas where I was minister and the opportunity presented itself when my predecessor wanted to run again for office, but the constitution said no you ran twice, third time is not possible. I was sort of the ideal candidate, the stars aligned and I said i want to do it. And also many times when you are a minister you have a certain degree of freedom to do what you want but in the end it’s the president that takes the decisions. And you are completely free in the end is only when you have nobody on top of you. And I think what we have done in the last two years proves that. A lot of the things I wanted to do for a long time, have been able to do. This is extremely satisfying. Sometimes you make mistakes, sometimes you fail. But at the end if the pluses are above the minuses, you can go to your grave satisfied to do what you did.

Do you care to make a real announcement here on campus?

No thank you.

My last question is you had to make some real tough decisions especially as minister of defense, do you think that having to be really tough, puts you in a much stronger position to go make peace?

Yes definitely. I will share with you one of the very tough decisions I had to make. When I started my government, we started having messages with the enemy: Would you be interested in having a possible conversation here and there? And the person who indirectly communicated with was the number one, their leader. At the same time I said, I would be interested provided you we have two very clear conditions: First, completely confidential until we both decide to make it public. And second, there is no contemplation whatsoever in the political speeches, whatever, how you refer to each other, at least from us to them, in the judicial area and in the military, in other words, the war continues with no contemplations whatsoever. And he was my, in a way, interlocutor, and we I had given orders to take all these people out, especially the high value targets, and I was confronted, it was a very difficult decision, we have him surrounded, what do we do? And I said, the rules are the rules, and we must, if we want to be successful, we have to be very clear on the rules of the game and persevere, and I had to take the decision to take him out and we took him out. Those are the types of decisions that are extremely difficult but I think that is one of the reasons we are sitting down in two weeks in Oslo Norway to talk about peace.

PUBLIC Q AND A

Please describe a headline you would write in El Tiempo right now to describe your relationship with right now?

I would say from this side to my predecessor, there is no ill will. I am a bit frustrated by him not understanding what we are trying to do.

I’m an importer of premium Colombian Chocolate here in the Midwest. I’m curious as the 9th largest producer of cacao, Colombia is, do you see any opportunity to replace the cocao? Isn’t there some kind of program to help them grow cocoa, let’s get the bad product out and a wonderful product instead? Any plans for that?

This is a program we are already starting? Not only cocoa, but many products that we need in the world markets today. As I mentioned, the world is starting to have a food crisis, who is going to feed millions of Chinese, and Indians and Indonesians that are demanding more and more food. Colombia is one of the eight countries in the world, that has been singled as countries with tremendous potential to increase the production of food, to increase the production of food. You mentioned how do you replace the coca plantations the produces cocaine that poisons the young people here in the US and all around the world, with cocoa, which is a delicious chocolate, with chancellor today made out of chocolate, it’s a big difference and we want that. One of the points we introduced with FARC is the issue of drug trafficking. If they decide to come part of the institutional framework of the country and become ally and not defenders of drug trafficking, the US, Colombia and the whole world is going to win a lot. And we have alternative production, cocoa or other products, this is a win-win situation for everybody. We are already doing that in many areas in Colombia and we plan and hope to d that on doing that in all areas, to continue eradicating the production of coca, the primary product of cocaine, we have been able to reduce that by more than 50 percent of what we had some years ago and we need to reduce it to zero if possible.

One of the most fascinating things to me about program for peace is not only your toughness but that you have allowed rebels if they join in the peace program to be part of the government. Can you tell us how that came about that, and what provided you the strength to allow a former enemy to join?

First of all we haven’t taken that specific position yet. This is part of what we are negotiation. It’s called transitional justice. There are some important philosophical, moral decisions, discussions in any society, things like where do you establish the limit between the collective interest and the individual rights, more recently where do you establish the line of the role of the state and the role of the markets. In any conflict, in any process to resolve a conflict, the most difficult decision is where do you put the limit between justice and peace? If you ask a victim that question they will always answer, we want more justice because he has been a victim, if you ask the same question to a future victim, they will always say we want more peace. What does more peace mean? It means sacrificing the punishment or the justice and be able to say i will forgive you, that’s where transitional justice comes into the scenery. You need some principles, you need the victims to be repaired, you need the truth. Sometimes knowing the truth liberates you from the hate that you feel, and also some kind of punishment, what kind of punishment. What kind of punishment? Transitional justice allows what they call alternative punishment, sometimes you don’t have to go to jail. Those are the questions that have to be answered by a society that wants to end the conflict and have peace. That is exactly the discussions we are starting right now, where do we draw the line? I have no doubt when we take the final decision, there will be people on both extremes that will not be satisfied. The people who would like more justice will say this is unacceptable and people who would like more peace will say this is unacceptable, but if the big majority of the country takes a decision and I hope it will and we negotiate a good agreement, then that’s the only solution we have.

Some Latin American leaders expressed an interest in changes to US changes and international policy toward illegal drugs, I wonder if you can characterize some of those sentiments, and what advantages those changes might have.

Well it was me who proposed that discussion. I will tell you what I am trying to achieve. Colombia has been probably the country that has paid the highest cost in this war on drugs out of any country in the world. Our best judges, our best politicians, our best policemen, our best journalists have been killed, thousands of people, and the violence that this has generated, there is no other country that has suffered more. We have been relatively successful because we united at a certain moment we cannot be dominated by these drug cartels and those big cartels that were very famous in the 1980s and 1990s have disappeared and the big famous drug lords are all killed or in jail. The last of the big ones, as a matter of fact, we caught him last week, the last of the big ones. And we have been able to reduce the amount of land under cultivation of coca, and we have hit the whole chain of drug trafficking extremely hard, the number of tons of coke that have been seized and the assets, and again we have been relatively successful. At the same time our success is that the problems around the region have increased. Central America is having a tremendous problem; Mexico is having a tremendous problem. You see consumption is going up in Europe, you see the west African countries becoming more and more involved in drug consumption. Other people say it is going up but the problem still is there. The amount for example of people in jail here in the US, simply by the recent being involved in some way of the drug trafficking is enormous. You have more people in jail in the American jails than in the whole of Europe, how much does that cost? So what I said is that in Colombia, even if we have been successful, we sometimes we feel like we are on a static bicycle, you peddle, you peddle but do not advance. So I said, is it not time to start seeing this with other eyes, analyzing if what we are doing is the correct thing. And if it is the correct thing, what is we are not doing correct, because the problem is still there and it’s growing? Or are there other better alternatives that for a society would be less costly than what we are doing? So let’s open up the discussion without common prejudice that this highly sensible political discussion creates because you immediately and I have seen it in my country and I have seen it in other countries, this is an issue that polarizes society immediately. People go, “Oh you are proposing the legalization of drugs, how awful?’ Nobody is proposing any legalization of drugs, simply let us discuss the issues, and see if we can find together because no country by itself can win this war on drugs, we need a multilateral, international position. That is what I proposed to the 32 leaders at the summit in Colombia and all of them said this is a sensible thing to do. We named or we established the OES, as the organization that will conduct this study, to be a scientific objective study without the political ingredient. And then if they have alternatives let’s discuss them. But not doing nothing, adopting the ostrich attitude this is a problem because it’s too sensitive politically, is not the way to correct these types of problems. So that’s what I proposed and I must say all the leaders including President Obama said we have the courage we are interested in discussing it, that doesn’t commit anybody to the solution. But I think to open up the discussion is a good step forward.

I’m from the DU house in 1970. I would like to inquire what the medical facilities, I have MS, are they currently doing any stem cell research in your country?

I remember you were a very good basketball player. My brother-in-law he is a doctor now. How do I answer that? We are doing research in that and my present position regards that research I am open to it.

I’m a current brother at DU. Did you hold any leadership positions at KU on campus or fraternity? If so how did that shape the leader you are today?

Quite frankly, no, I was not a leader in any respect. I was a common student, struggling with my grades, trying to be a good student, trying to be a good fraternity member at the DU. I was very disciplined. It was a very interesting time. I remember the Vietnam war was on, passionate discussion about all these issues and participating in those issues helped me a lot to see the different point of view, the dilemmas that a student, many of my companions, I remember that the partner that I had at McCollum Hall, he had to go to Vietnam, that was an experience that helped me a lot. The answer to your question was I was not a special leader of any sort during my years here at KU.

My name is Joe Spease and we used to go to parties together through your friend. She was a KU grad who was the first democratically elected president of Venezuela. My question for you is about energy policy. I’d like to have you talk about energy policy and whether renewable energy is part of what you are considering.

Colombia is a very energy rich country, we have lots of water, we have lots of hydrolic energy. Almost 50 percent is hydro-produced energy. We have very clean coal, second exporters in the world. We have oil and are discovering more and more oil. But we are certainly interested in developing alternative and new sources of energy. One of the ideal sources, energy produced by wind, since Colombia is in the top of South America, the wind there is ideal for that. The problem is that since we can produce such low cost energy with our hydro, the technology has been too expensive to justify that type of energy in Colombia, the same thing happens with the solar energy. We have sun all year round, but still it’s too expensive to compete with our hydro. But of course we need to develop new energies. We are starting with fracking but we have a big question mark of the effect of that on our water resources. We don’t know if we stimulate that or not. But any other sources of energy are more than welcome. You are more than welcome to go to Colombia and explore that. We need foreign investors, we consider foreign investors as a necessary part of our development, we treat foreign investors as our partners, if they do well we do well. So you will find a friendly country to your investment in Colombia.

Presentation of award.

Thank you very very much. Really a great honor for me to have received this Jayhawk. Next time that President Obama is going to go for North Carolina I’ll tell him Jayhawks. No thank you very much. This is for me extremely important and be sure these three objectives that you are telling me to follow with this award, they will be very much taken care of. When we reach peace after perceiving we will say thank you to the University of Kansas for your generosity and hospitality and all that you have done for me.

This story was originally published October 7, 2016 at 9:36 PM with the headline "Nobel Peace prize winner spoke at KU, his alma mater, in 2012."