Juan Manuel Santos CalderĂłn (Spanish: ['xwam ma'nwel 'santos kalde'?on]; born 10 August 1951) is a Colombian politician.
From 2010 to 2018, he was the President of Colombia.
He was the sole recipient of the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize.
An economist by profession and a journalist by trade, Santos is a member of the wealthy and influential Santos family, who from 1913 to 2007 were the majority shareholders of the newspaper El Tiempo until its sale to Planeta DeAgostini in 2007.
He was a cadet at the Navy Academy in Cartagena.
Shortly after graduating from the University of Kansas, he joined the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia as an economic advisor and delegate to the International Coffee Organization in London, where he also attended the London School of Economics.
In 1981, he was appointed deputy director of El Tiempo newspaper, becoming its director two years later.
Santos earned a mid-career/master's in public administration in 1981 from Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and was a 1988 Nieman Fellow for his award-winning work as a columnist and reporter.
Santos was a Fulbright visiting fellow at Fletcher at Tufts University in 1981.
Santos has been a member of the Washington-based think tank the Inter-American Dialogue since 1990, and he previously served as co-chair of the Board of Directors.
Santos worked in expanding international trade with Colombia, and worked in creating various agencies for this purpose including: Proexport, Bancoldex and Fiducoldex.
In 2005, he co-founded and led the Social Party of National Unity (Party of the U), a liberal-conservative party coalition that backed the policies of President Uribe, successfully supporting his attempt to seek a Constitutional reform to be able to run for a second term.
In 2006, after Uribe's re-election, when the Party of the U won a majority of seats in the two chambers of Congress, Santos was appointed as Minister of National Defence, and continued defending the security policies of President Uribe, taking a strong and forceful stance against FARC and the other guerrilla groups operating in Colombia.
However, some months after Santos' possession, Uribe became his strongest opponent, who also founded, three years later, the opposition party Democratic Center.
The Colombian government and the FARC signed a revised peace deal on 24 November and sent it to Congress for ratification instead of conducting a second referendum.
Both houses of Congress ratified the revised peace accord on 29â30 November 2016, thus marking an end to the conflict.
The treaty brought deep divisions and polarization in the country, which questions its legitimacy.
Juan Manuel Santos has been named as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people.