Columns & Blogs

A decade ago, when my grandfather was 20 year old, Colombia had trains, a national postal system, a public health system, and a national telecommunications company; prestigious higher education was almost exclusively in the hands of the state, public services were provided by state-run companies, and there weren't tolls on the highways because the state had built them.

Reforms are less impassioned than revolutions. To exclaim from a microphone "Everyone get out!" generates more interest than a detailed proposal on how to reform the judiciary.

The War on Drugs has been, principally, a war against vulnerable populations. Among its victims are many low-income women and their families.

The Judge Pretelt's denial to resign for the grave accusations levied against him raises a question, which is abstract but relevant not only in this case, but also many other similar cases: does a public servant's duty to resign exist or not in these type of circumstance?

Abelarde De la Espriella, Jorge Pretelt's lawyer, published this week a column in El Heraldo, where he responds to those who criticized him for saying that ethics have nothing to do with law.

I do not share the deluge of personal attacks agains Senator Paloma Valencia for her unfortunate proposal to split the Cauca Department in two: "one indigenous department so that they can strike, protest, and invade, and one department dedicated to development, where we can invest in infrastructure, promote investment, and where there can be decent work for its inhabitants."

The greater the difficulty a survivor of sexual violence has telling what happened, the greater the recipient's responsibility to understand it.

The accusations against Justice Pretelt and ex-Justices Rojas and Escobar of the Constitutional Court (CC) are very serious and cannot be brushed under the carpet. It is right that it should generate a strong citizen rejection and that we demand that there be more transparency, definition of responsibilites, and adoption of structural reforms. But it is necessary to distinguish between possible individual transgressions and the CC's institutional problems.

Societies that constantly experience scandals, like ours, suffer from a type of collective squizofrenia. Each story of corruption produces two opposite reactions: while some, the moralists, throw up their hands in horror and clamer for exemplary punishments, others, the cynics, shrug their shoulders and say that nothing has happened until there's a final conviction. 

There are two ways of seeing the justified citizen and media indignation in response to the serious accusations against Judge Jorge Pretelt and the ex-Judges Rodrigo Escobar and Alberto Rojas. And two corresponding forms of navigating out of the Constitutional Court's crisis.