Considerable ink has been spilled over the results of the October 2 plebiscite on the peace accords between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Decided by the thinnest of margins, “no” prevailed by just under .3 percent, or 53,900 votes out of 13,066,025.

How are we to make sense of this outcome, and what does it mean for the prospects for peace in Colombia? How will it affect mobilization from below and the building of a new, independent left? And, most puzzlingly, why did almost two-thirds of potential voters (62.6 percent) stay home rather than weigh in on the most important issue facing the country?

There can be little doubt that in political terms, the historic bloc led by former president and current senator Álvaro Uribe was victorious, and the bloc led by Uribe’s former minister of defense and current president, Juan Manuel Santos, vanquished. It is equally certain that the two differ hardly at all on the fundamentals: both favor a militarized, export-based extractive economy powered by free trade and foreign and domestic investment, closely tied to US markets.

As in the 1930s, the weakness of the Colombian left has pushed it into Santos’s camp — despite its critique of Santos’s neoliberal economic policies. The Right, meanwhile, has rooted itself in the Catholic Church and the Evangelical Protestant sects, led by Miguel Arrázola.

In his quest to secure the referendum’s passage, Santos had assembled an impressive array of supporters: the country’s largest conglomerates, business associations, the United States and the United Nations, a decisive sector of the Colombian military high command, professors, students, cultural producers, feminists, LGBTQs, Afro-Colombians, indigenous peoples, a range of rural producers’ movements, victims’ rights movements, and even former right-wing paramilitary commanders.

But the peace deal could not contend with the organization of Uribe’s political machine and its ubiquitous message: that the accords would let the FARC get away with murder, thereby turning the country toward “Castro-chavismo.” Private property and the patriarchal family were said to be threatened by the FARC’s and the government’s proposal to create peasant reserve zones, their commitment to more equitable gender relations, and their willingness to accept alternative genders and sexualities.

As in the 1930s, the Right successfully equated political liberalism with godless, libertine communism in a country with a large number of mobilized religious fanatics — perhaps with greater success today than eighty years ago.

In retrospect, perhaps the most shocking thing about Uribe’s victory is that neither the supporters of the accord — signed by Santos and the FARC on September 26 — nor those opposed, ever contemplated it as a real possibility. So no one had made contingency plans for what followed.

There are a number of reasons why this is surprising. First, Uribe’s candidate, Óscar Iván Zuluaga, ran against the peace process and won the first round of presidential elections in 2014 by more than 3 percent (Santos triumphed in the second round by just over 6 percent, with 50.95 percent of the vote). The Uribe-led right gained about 500,000 votes, while Santos lost around 1,500,000, compared to the second round in 2014.

Second, Uribe’s home city, Medellín, and the region of which it is the capital, Antioquia, are reliably reactionary, and carry great demographic and political weight; with over 60 percent voting “no,” Uribe’s stronghold made the difference between victory and defeat, even though the former president’s machine delivered fewer votes there than in 2014.

Third, the two private media conglomerates, RCN and Caracol, campaigned against the peace process, apparently to considerable effect. The support of print media — Santos’s family owns the country’s most important daily newspaper — amounted to little more than preaching to the educated, literate, middle-class choir.

And fourth, those in favor of the accords did not have the requisite time, resources, or infrastructure to persuade desperately poor people on the urban peripheries — nearly all of which are undeclared war zones between local youth gangs involved in retail drug sales, and/or between contending factions of organized crime that employ some of them — that the peace accords’ implementation would bring benefits to all.

In the long run, Colombia’s future will be decided in these zones — that is where a majority (or close to a majority) of Colombians live. Organized crime, youth gangs, and their corollaries — extortion, narcotics, homicide — along with grinding poverty and precarious access to public services and waged employment in the licit economy, define everyday life beyond the reach of state sovereignty.

The US-backed Plan Colombia helped create this world, forcibly displacing residents as the war escalated. This is ironic, both because the scheme was designed to reduce drug traffic and because Washington and Bogotá repeatedly trumpeted the plan’s success in bringing legitimate central government institutions to regions and territories formerly off-limits.

Yet in most of these territories, neither the FARC nor the central government has ever ruled, much less with legitimacy. (Municipal governments, needless to say, haven’t been up to the task of state-building either.) Although urban peripheries in Latin America have expanded apace in recent decades — to the point where the border between city and country has become a continuum — only in Colombia have insurgency and counter-insurgency hastened, as in a hothouse, the emptying out of the countryside.

The cities haven’t come out well in the process. The cycle of primitive accumulation, characterized by violent dispossession and proletarianization — which Uribe led regionally (as governor of Antioquia from 1995–97) and nationally (as president from 2002–2010) — has born perverse fruit in the form of frightened, desperate, poorly educated, and un- and underemployed people in hyper-violent urban frontier zones. These people are highly susceptible to the siren song of right-wing demagoguery about the FARC, particularly through the Evangelical sects. And no independent left exists to win them over or to address their problems.

For this sector, the “no” vote represented not only a rejection of the accords, but also, and perhaps more significantly, a way to manifest their opposition to Santos’s economic management, which has left them in circumstances so precarious as to constitute a permanent crisis.

We do not know how widespread or influential the “no” vote was on the urban periphery. But anecdotal evidence from the eastern sector of Cali, where most of the city’s two thousand annual homicides occur, suggests it was both. Unless and until a broad urban left materializes — one that is independent of the country’s rural insurgencies yet linked to its powerful rural movements, and capable of rearticulating relations between the city and the country — state and society, along with region, race, and nation — Colombia will likely remain at a catastrophic impasse, evenly divided between progressive neoliberalism and regressive neoliberalism.