Colombian Democracy Essay -- Politics Political Science

Colombian Democracy There is a practical problem to capturing a cogent discernment of Colombia in a single snapshot. There are two realities of Colombia scholars use to frame analysis of the birthplace of Gabriel Garcia Marquezs magical realism armed date and political democracy. These phenomena are a defining feature of modern Colombia. They have coexisted since 1958 when the National Front political pact ended intra-elite conflict in La Violencia but failed to guarantee a stable social order. In a sense, Colombian society was never successfully pacified in the way its neighboring nations were. The enquire of whether and how these two realities will be linked in the future is what stimulates my interest in this Andean nation. To submit an intelligible diagnosis and prospective commentary just about Colombian democracy, it is worthwhile to review how scholarship treats the trajectory of this unique arrangement. Divorced research approaches to studying Colombia For a number of re asons, under the current administration of chairman Alvaro Uribe the tradition of utilizing an integrative approach to understanding the tortuous epic of Colombian democracy and violence is diminishing in credibility. In general, divorcing the realities of the Western hemispheres second oldest democracy (defined as the electoral party politics practiced in Bogot and other urban centers) and the significant violent resistance and repression which characterize big rural areas from one another by politicians is a means to establishing a binary of terrorism and democracy. The corollary is often to promulgate attractive panacea-like policy prescriptions. In the academy, scholars to a fault can fall victim to this oversimplification an... ...d de Chile, Instituto de Ciencia Politica, Vol. 42, Fall 2004, 1-25. Pizarro, Eduardo, Una democracia asediadaa, Bogot Grupo Editorial Norma, 2004.Posada-Carb, Eduardo, ed., The Politcs of Reforming the State, London Institute for Latin America Studies, University of London, 1998.Richani, Nazih, Systems of Violence The Political Economy of War and relaxation in Colombia, Albany State University of New York Press, 2002.Vargas, Ricardo, State, Esprit Mafioso, and Armed Conflict in Colombia, in Burt, Jo-Marie and Mauricci, Philip, eds., Politics in the Andes Identity, Conflict, Reform, Pittsburgh University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004.Whitehead, Laurence, Reforms Colombia and Mexico, in Garreton, Manuel A and Newman, Edward, eds., Democracy in Latin America Reconstructing Political Society, New York United Nations University Press, 2002.