Colombian Democracy Essay -- Politics Political Science

Colombian Democracy There is a practical problem to capturing a cogent understanding of Colombia in a single snapshot. There are two realities of Colombia scholars use to frame analysis of the birthplace of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magical realism: â€Å"armed conflict† and â€Å"political democracy.† These phenomena are a defining feature of modern Colombia. They have coexisted since 1958 when the National Front political pact ended intra-elite conflict in La Violencia but failed to guarantee a stable social order. In a sense, Colombian society was never successfully â€Å"pacified† in the way its neighboring nations were. The question of whether and how these two realities will be linked in the future is what stimulates my interest in this Andean nation. To submit an intelligible diagnosis and prospective commentary about Colombian democracy, it is worthwhile to review how scholarship treats the trajectory of this unique arrangement. Divorced research approaches to studying Colombia For a number of reasons, under the current administration of President Alvaro Uribe the tradition of utilizing an integrative approach to understanding the tortuous epic of Colombian democracy and violence is diminishing in credibility. In general, divorcing the realities of the Western hemisphere’s second oldest â€Å"democracy† (defined as the electoral party politics practiced in Bogotà ¡ and other urban centers) and the significant violent resistance and repression which characterize vast rural areas from one another by politicians is a means to establishing a binary of terrorism and democracy. The corollary is often to promulgate attractive panacea-like policy prescriptions. In the academy, scholars too can fall victim to this oversimplification an... ...d de Chile, Instituto de Ciencia Politica, Vol. 42, Fall 2004, 1-25. Pizarro, Eduardo, Una democracia asediadaa, Bogotà ¡: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2004. Posada-Carbà ³, Eduardo, ed., The Politcs of Reforming the State, London: Institute for Latin America Studies, University of London, 1998. Richani, Nazih, Systems of Violence The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Vargas, Ricardo, â€Å"State, Esprit Mafioso, and Armed Conflict in Colombia,† in Burt, Jo-Marie and Mauricci, Philip, eds., Politics in the Andes: Identity, Conflict, Reform, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. Whitehead, Laurence, â€Å"Reforms: Colombia and Mexico,† in Garreton, Manuel A and Newman, Edward, eds., Democracy in Latin America: Reconstructing Political Society, New York: United Nations University Press, 2002.