TO HAVE A BAD MAYOR REMOVED from office and replaced by another one, what else would one like. The problem with this is that it isn't easy to find an appropriate mechanism to achieve this purpose.

I've never been convinced by the arguments of those who defend the benefits of privatization and the dismantling of the state.

DURING THESE DAYS of winter tragedy I wonder why we Colombians give so little importance to environmental issues and why in this country the ideas of the Green parties do not thrive.

MONIQUE PERRIAUX IS A FRENCH FRIEND I have known for over twenty years. She was born and lives in Grenoble, but spent six years of her life in Colombia (between 1998 and 2006) from which she keeps many memories and an adopted son named Sebastian. Last week I met Monique and we walked through the mountains and talked about life, friends, and Colombia.

When I was little, in the previous days of Easter (as these that have just gone) something extraordinary happened within families: older men went to church to confess their sins.

IN THE SEVENTIES A group of economists argued that, in certain stages of country development, corruption is not only inevitable but is a beneficial disease. It's a kind of social fever that may be necessary to achieve modernization.

ON THE OCCASION OF THE murder of judge Gloria Constanza Gaona the president of Judicial Asonal, Mr Nelson Cantillo, complained this week that, except for the condolences he received from his colleagues in the Judiciary (and one more from the mayor of Medellin) no one from the government or other public or private entity regretted the fact before Asonal.

Earlier this year I wrote a column in which I criticized the national anthems. I said that almost all of them had lost the basic connection they once had with reality and therefore seemed anachronic and even ridiculous. The columnist Daniel Mera Villamizar disagreed with this view and this week answered in these pages.

OF THE MANY terrible images that have circulated on the accumulation of disasters that occurred this week in Japan, there is one that draws my attention: a video shot inside a supermarket during the earthquake, in which employees are seen holding shelves that swing from side to side, ready to collapse and from which bottles, tins, and all sorts of products fall, amid a deafening noise and a shaky floor in which they can hardly balance. How is it possible that these employees do not go running? That they stay calm? That they don't even shout?