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. 

As UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Zainab Hawa Bangura said, breaking the armed groups' silence about sexual violence is one of the first necessary steps to guarantee truth and justice to victims.

Coauthored by Angélica María Cuevas

The idea calling for a second phase of the El Cercado dam in the Riego Ranchería District of La Guajira (a Department in Northeastern Colombia), has revived the indigenous group Wiwa's concerns. They belive that, for a second time, their opinion has not been considered in the government's plans to authorize, since this year, the construction of preliminary public works for the construction of damns and irrigation systems in the Districts of Ranchería and San Juan del Cesar. These works, according to Ariel Borbón Ardila, head of the Colombian Institute for Rural Development (Incoder, by its name in Spanish), are estimated to cost $546 Billion Colombian Pesos (about $227.5 Million U.S. dollars). 

Peace, according to the FARC, is basically a political process that should remove the "legal vine" with which some would like to choke the life out of it. César Gaviria has weighed in similarly ashis idea of "transitional justice for everyone" is not legal but political: the ex-President thinks of it as a "collective political decision," that cannot be put off by international law.