Alvaro Uribe

In a nation long plagued by impunity, the historic conviction of Colombia’s powerful former president is testing the country’s judicial independence and raising the stakes for truth and accountability.

A NACLA Radio interview with Forrest Hylton and Aaron Tauss about their article “Peace in Colombia: A New Growth Strategy,” featured in the latest NACLA Report, Free Trade 2.0, and the latest developments in the peace process.

This edited transcript is of a talk given by Colombian journalist Hollman Morris at Georgetown University in Washington. Morris spoke in protest of the appointment of former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe as a "distinguished scholar" at Georgetown. As the host and editorial director of Contravía, a weekly investigative news show, Morris has regularly taken on the Colombian government for the myriad human rights abuses committed in the last decade by the country's military and its paramilitary allies. This work has earned him many awards internationally, but he also was targeted by Uribe's intelligence service as a part of a surveillance program and smear campaign. This originally appeared in the January/February 2011 edition of NACLA Report on the Americas.

In August, Georgetown University appointed former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe as a "Distinguished Scholar," despite accusations that he had been behind serious human rights violations in his home country. While Uribe received a warm welcome from university officials, many students and faculty have not been so comfortable with his appointment, although it follows a history of Georgetown appointing powerful and controversial figures (including former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar) to posts as professors. On November 3, many rallied on the Georgetown campus against Uribe's appointment, and this culminated with law students handing the former Colombian president a subpoena.

Sadly, the operation on March 1 in which the Colombian Armed Forces shot and killed Luis Edgar Devia Silva, a.k.a. "Raúl Reyes," spokesman for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), along with sixteen other guerrillas in a camp across the Putumayo River in Ecuador, was yet another case of the oft-mentioned "death foretold" that characterizes the country's seemingly endless civil war.

As the rest of Latin America continues its seismic political shift to the left, Colombia moves starkly in the opposite

In 1998, Colombians elected a presidential candidate who promised them peace. On May 26, 2002, they chose one who promised

In the countdown to the May 26 presidential elections, Colombians are bracing for increasing violence while support grows for independent