Countryside First: Security Prescription for Colombia

Lee, Erika, Harvard International Review

Once the Colombian Constitutional Court denied Alvaro Uribe a third presidential term in February, several candidates stepped forward, with former defense minister Juan Manuel Santos and Green Party candidate Antanas Mockus leading the pack. All candidates predictably campaigned on a more or less similar platform of continuing Uribe's hard line policy of cracking down on crimes and violence in the urban areas; after all, this policy has been successful and has earned Uribe a wildly high 70 percent approval rating from the public. But Colombia's new president must do more than simply continue Uribe's security policy: he must expand its scope from an urban-centric focus to include the countryside. The new administration can no longer afford to neglect the issues of growing violence in the rural areas, as the left-wing guerillas and right-wing paramilitias reestablish their power centers in the countryside along the Colombian border.

Colombia has been suffering from an armed conflict since the 1960s, and the resilience of violence is in large part due to the fact …

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Publication information: Article title: Countryside First: Security Prescription for Colombia. Contributors: Lee, Erika - Author. Journal title: Harvard International Review. Volume: 32. Issue: 2 Publication date: Summer 2010. Page number: 7+. © 1999 Harvard International Relations Council, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale Group.

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