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Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos won the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his efforts to end a 52-year-old war with Marxist guerrillas, a surprise choice and a show of support days after voters rejected a peace deal he signed with the rebels.

Santos has promised to revive the plan even though Colombians narrowly rejected it in a referendum on Sunday.

The fact that a majority of the voters said ‘No’ to the peace accord does not necessarily mean that the peace process is dead.”

“Colombians will have two options, between those who prefer an end to the war and those who want a war without end,” Mr. Santos said after the results were made public. His main challenger, Óscar Iván Zuluaga, a former treasury minister, received 29 percent of the vote, with more than 99 percent of polling stations counted, officials said. Mr. Santos received slightly more than 25 percent in the field of five candidates.

Mr. Santos, 62, had cast himself as the peace candidate and urged voters to empower him to finish talks he started in 2012 with the rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Mr. Zuluaga, 55, an ally of the right-wing former president, Álvaro Uribe, has been a harsh critic of the talks and could break them off if he becomes president.Colombia, a country of 47 million people, is one of Washington’s closest allies in Latin America and has received billions of dollars in American aid in recent years to combat drug trafficking and guerrilla groups.

If a final accord is signed within six months, as the negotiators have pledged, Colombia would offer an example of hard-won peacemaking at a time when so many other conflicts, which are spawning the largest wave of refugees since World War II, seem intractable.

As of last year, the three-way fight among guerrilla factions, government forces and right-wing paramilitary bands that often acted as proxies for the state, had killed more than 220,000 people and displaced an estimated 5.7 million. At the peak of the conflict, in 2000, kidnappings for ransom surpassed 3,000 a year.

The talks have forced Colombians to take stock of a painful past and face uncomfortable truths. Dozens of victims traveled to Havana to speak about abuses they endured at the hands of guerrilla leaders. Some implicated government forces in brutal acts. When I met some young FARC members in Havana last year during a reporting trip, I came to see them in a new light as they described taking up arms as a desperate choice they were forced to make to survive.

At 2:30 p.m. on June 15, 2000—more than ten years after the U.S.-sponsored Contra war officially ended in Nicaragua—a guerrilla unit of rearmed ex-Sandinistas and ex-Contras surrounded the small campesino home of Guadalupe Montenegro in the rural municipality of Siuna

Without saying a word, the men opened fire indiscriminately, killing Montenegro and all ten members of his family before burning the corpses and torching the house.

Perhaps nowhere else in Central America are the problems of demobilized soldiers, weapons left over from the Cold War and poverty more obvious than in the rural area of north-central Nicaragua—a region where the war that began in the 1980s has still not ended.

In a world dominated by horrific forever wars, Colombia's agreement with the Farc guerrilla movement stands out as an extraordinary moment for this country, and a rare affirmation of the power of peace talks.

"What we have seen in Colombia is an example that if you work hard at it, with a lot of international support, you can get something worthwhile," he said, while a Colombian choir rehearsed Beethoven's Ode to Joy on the edge of the picturesque harbour.

Every conflict is different, but every peace process throws up similar challenges and controversies.

NECOCLI, Colombia — As the Colombian government nears a deal to end its 50-year conflict with FARC guerrillas, it is intensifying another war in the jungles here along the Caribbean coast, the stronghold of a shadowy drug organization known as Clan Úsuga.

Both the government and the traffickers know that a big share of Colombia’s billion-dollar cocaine trade will be up for grabs if FARC — whose rebellion runs on drug profits — goes out of business. Some of its 7,000 battle-hardened fighters may be looking for new jobs. Clan Úsuga will be hiring.

That $10 billion program, funded by Congress, is considered by many Republicans and Democrats to be one of the most successful U.S. foreign policy achievements of the past generation, forcing FARC to the negotiating table after a half-century of violence that has left more than 220,000 dead.

On Jan. 10, 1978, my father was assassinated by hit men of the Somoza regime. His death meant the end of whatever remained of Nicaragua’s political arena. But it also unleashed an enormous wave of protests nationwide, because the country now saw rebellion as the only way left to end the dictatorship.Four decades later, we have gone through a tortuous cycle of revolution and counterrevolution, civil war and foreign aggression, democratic transition and, now, a return to authoritarianism. History is repeating itself as farce under the regime of Daniel Ortega, the former guerrilla leader who was the elected president from 1985 to 1990 and who returned to power in 2007.

Ironically, when the Sandinista revolution’s leaders were voted out of power in 1990 (allowing my mother, Violeta Chamorro, to become Nicaragua’s president for seven years), it was Mr. Ortega himself who contributed to the establishment of an electoral democracy by conceding defeat, thereby setting the country on course to transfer power peacefully among political parties. However, Mr. Ortega and the next president, Arnoldo Alemán, who later was accused of corruption, arrived at a political compact in 1999 that weakened the trend toward pluralistic democracy by setting up bipartisan control of the electoral system. In 2007, that, too, collapsed when Mr. Ortega, now back in office, took sole control.

In 2008, well-documented fraud marred municipal elections. And in 2011, Mr. Ortega, defying term limits law, was “re-elected” in balloting that was denounced as unconstitutional. He has used the time since to consolidate an institutional dictatorship that concentrates absolute power and that derives political support from an alliance with private business interests and from citizens who benefit from government policies that aid the poor.

After years of watching his influence in Latin America slip away, Mr. Obama suddenly turned the tables this week by declaring a sweeping détente with Cuba, opening the way for a major repositioning of the United States in the region.

Washington’s isolation of Cuba has long been a defining fixture of Latin American politics, something that has united governments across the region, regardless of their ideologies. Even some of Washington’s close allies in the Americas have rallied to Cuba’s side.

“Our previous Cuba policy was clearly an irritant and a drag on our policy in the region,”

Uruguayan voters elected Tabaré Vázquez as president on Sunday in a show of support for the leftist coalition that has governed the country over the last decade, presiding over robust economic growth and a pioneering set of socially liberal laws, including a state-controlled marijuana market.

The election came after a stretch in which Uruguay’s president, José Mujica, 79, a former guerrilla, raised the country’s profile with legislation that legalized abortion and same-sex marriage and created the marijuana market. He is set to leave office with high approval ratings.

Dr. Vázquez is more moderate than Mr. Mujica, having vetoed an abortion law during his first term as president. He has also expressed opposition to parts of the marijuana law, a position shared by many Uruguayans as broad skepticism persists over the project. Still, he has said that he would enforce the law.