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Colombia at the Crossroads

The victory of Gustavo Petro is a historic breakthrough in a country where independent popular forces have been systematically excluded from formal political representation for two centuries. What lies ahead?

The Battle of Bogotá

In a high-stakes election, South America’s most ruthless recent embodiment of reaction, Álvaro Uribe, lost his bid to install a minion in the presidential palace and pursue the extermination of guerrilla forces in Colombia. Mauricio Velásquez analyses the electoral victory of Uribe’s one-time confederate Santos, and the prospects for civil peace in its wake.

Scars and Faultlines

The art of Doris Salcedo as test-case for the complex interaction of aesthetics and commerce. For works aiming to commemorate lives lost in Colombia’s civil wars, what are the consequences—economic, ethical, critical—of integration into the circuits of both memory and market?

Remaking Medellín

Transformed from murder capital to corporate boom town, Medellín has been hailed as a rare urban success story for neo-conservatism in South America. The singular progression of Escobar and Uribe’s hometown—cattle-trading post, industrial centre, drug-trafficking hub, neoliberal Latin Mecca.

Colombia: An Evil Hour

The longue durée of Uribe’s Colombia, from its origins in the mid-19th century, through the Violencia of the postwar years, to the coming of today’s guerrillas, narco-traffickers and paramilitaries. Conditions and prospects of the latest campaign to wipe out armed insurgency against Latin America’s oldest ruling order.

Andean Impasses

Social and political turmoil is spreading in Venezuela, Colombia and Peru, as recession deepens throughout Latin America. The historical roots of the current crisis in the region, and the watershed of the last decades.