Search

This paper focuses on the opportunity, in the short and medium term, for a Colombia that is an OECD member and NATO partner to face the challenges of the public security transition, despite no explicit mention of it appearing in the Peace Agreement (or Final Agreement). To do this, an anomaly will have to be overcome: the so-called 'Lleras Camargo duality', which has facilitated excessive decisional autonomy of the security forces, scant parliamentary control and insufficient political leadership of defence. The paper is divided into contextual and a priori section, with another analytical section focussing on conceptual clarifications and practical lessons of a comparative nature. The final part is dedicated to Colombia's particularities and the presentation of a proposal for addressing eight major challenges: three general, two focused on external security, and three on internal security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/context: In this paper, we describe the evolution of municipalitylevel homicide rates, during the 2003-2014 period in Colombia. Methodology: Quantitative analysis with multi-level regression models and finite-mix models. Conclusions: Our results show an important and statistically significant reduction of violence at the national level, and a large variability across geographical areas. We identify an association between profiles of change and a general government performance index, which provides support to the hypothesis of a differentiated State across time and space, and motives further studies and differential public policies across municipalities. Originality: The relationship between homicidal violence and the role of the State has been commonly analyzed on an aggregated level that ignores the disaggregated territorial view and heterogeneity of microterritorial realities. This article recognizes the local differences for the design of public policies that reflect contextual realities and assume that the performance of the State is heterogeneous and not static. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The starting point for this paper is the Colombian 'success story'. That is, the claim that a transition has taken place from a problematic conflict situation to a successful postconflict one. As the debates about the Colombian success story revolve around the presence or absence of violence, a proposal is made here to think of the postconflict period in terms of the transformation of the rules on the use of violence. The main aspects of the professionalisation programme accelerated and deepened via the Plan Colombia are analysed in an attempt to grasp the terms under which the Colombian military's expertise is understood. Finally, the reorganisation of violence in the postconflict period is discussed by mapping out the main features of military training programmes in the context of peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1993, when the System of Surveillance of Deaths of External Causes (SVMCE, in its Spanish acronym) was established -- today the Security Observatory -- a reliable record of homicides has existed in Cali which has allowed the control of organised crime to be evaluated as a strategy for reducing homicides. This strategy has been based on the pursuit and prosecution of urban criminal gangs, placing emphasis on intelligence and investigation, as well as coordination between the Police and the justice system. Drug trafficking allowed urban criminal gangs to develop that have had a significant effect on the homicides in Cali and other cities in Colombia. This paper evaluates the impact of the fight against criminal gangs implemented across the whole city of Cali from 2013 to 2015. The deactivation of several criminal gangs and the reduction in the overall homicide rate in the city have brought positive results, above all in the category of "organised crime", but also to some extent in "common crime". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a first instance, the following article proposes an analytical itinerary around three "cursed" words (violence, populism and Gaitanism) of the Colombian historiography. In a second instance, an inquiry is suggested over those categories and over their own digressions under the light of a non-pejorative interpretation of both populism and Gaitanism. Finally, the article exhibits an exploratory hypothesis and argues that Gaitanist populism could be thought of as a particular way of processing and stopping political violence. To illustrate this proposition two specific dimensions are described to understand the Gaitanist process between 1924 and 1948: its political-comunicative practices and the oscillations between rupture and integration in the Gaitanist discursivity. By analyzing Gaitán and his followers' discursivity, we can consider that Gaitanism, as a framework of political-communicative practices, contributed to process popular demands that diminished bipartisan tensions in Colombia in the first half of the 20th century. The construction of a popular subject, and the "face to face" presentation between the leadership and the masses in the public arena, among other elements of the Gaitanist identity, served to process --in a belligerent but peaceful way-- the political and social discontent of the time. Likewise, Gaitanism as an identity process --between 1944 and 1946-- raised as a movement that arrogated the representation of a "true country" (rupture) and the construction of a restoring order for Colombian democracy (integration). In short, the proposed disquisitions in this paper seek to highlight the relevance of thinking historical processes, such as populism, through a conceptual framework aimed at the study of political identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a comparison between the drug violence in Peru and Colombia. These two countries are the greater cocaine producers in the world, but present different levels of violence. In the case of Peru there are low levels of violence, whilst in the case of Colombia, the levels are high. The paper argues that the cocain cultivation and production in itself is not a source of high levels of violence. The intensity of the violence depends on the presence of other variables that will be proposed and analized here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of victim has been applied in the human rights (HR) field with a series of different connotations in each country. In this paper we aim to reflect on its uses and appropriations within the context of a series of laws and government programs designed to compensate the victims of state terrorism in Argentina and of the armed conflict in Colombia. Based on the gathering of documents and fieldwork with public servants and diverse groups of people who have been identified as victims, we analyze the meanings that this category has acquired and its possible applications in heterogeneous social contexts. O conceito vítima vem sendo aplicado no campo dos direitos humanos (DH) com uma série de conotações particulares em cada país. Neste trabalho, ocupamo-nos de refletir sobre seus usos e apropriações no âmbito de um conjunto de leis e programas governamentais destinados a reparar as vítimas do terrorismo de Estado na Argentina e do conflito armado interno na Colômbia. A partir da recopilação de documentos e do trabalho de campo com servidores públicos e diversos grupos de pessoas que têm sido identificadas como vítimas, analisamos os sentidos que essa categoria e suas possíveis aplicações adquirem em contextos sociais heterogêneos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I analyze the continued existence of the Colombian state despite widespread crime and violence. Contemporary theorists posit that the state must subscribe to the image of an entity that is relatively autonomous from civil society and able to monopolize violence. However, citizen culture (cultura ciudadana), the innovative crime reduction policy I study here, is based on the premise that the state is unable to provide security for its inhabitants given the existence of a culture of violence. The policy encourages citizens to assume responsibility for their own security provision by adopting a culture of citizenship. I argue that citizen culture functions to legitimize the state despite ongoing violence by transferring responsibility for security provision from the state to civil society. It does so by inundating public space with educational spectacles, symbols, and slogans that circumscribe public debate and instruct citizen's behavior. Citizen culture uses educational and symbolic programming to shift responsibility for security provision from the state to society, thereby altering the boundary between state and society and redefining the very essence of the modern state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Colombia, there are quantitative databases on armed conflict, some of them public and open-access. This paper reviews the main theoretical and methodological traits in some of those databases and their main features when defining and measuring political violence. Based on the results of a research performed in a Colombian region, several methodological issues will be presented in order to process --statistically, spatially and cartographically? the information delivered by those databases. After the exposition, several procedures are described, which allowed to measure differences among databases. Those contents are addressed aiming to show the consequences that using one or another database has in the quantitative analysis of armed conflict, since the results of those analyses will depend on the source used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Violence" in Colombia in the 1950's was closed without a trial of responsibilities, without reparation to the victims or a process to assimilate the meaning of what had happened. This paper shows that general Rojas Pinilla's trial at the Congress of the Republic between August 1958 and April 1959, was not only a way to confer legitimacy upon the political agreement in the National Front, but also a privileged scenario to challenge and discuss the responsibilities on the events, as well as an arena to build and recreate collective memory at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Commission to Inquiry for the Causes and Situations Present on inland Violence, better known as La Investigadora, was founded in 1958 at the dawn of the socalled National Front. This research paper explains, based on some documentary sources and newspaper accounts, how in a context of transition negotiated by elites, this initiative condensed a set of official practices and narrative plots structuring the way the Violence would be politically and socially processed and represented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]