Managing cities: Bogotá's rise and fall
Can Enrique Peñalosa restore a tarnished municipal model?(22)
Economist Asks: Free trade awaits
Economist readers expect the United States to ratify free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama this year(1)
Colombia and the United States: Trade disunion
Santos’s China card(12)
Security in Colombia: Guerrilla miners
The FARC turn to gold(2)
Organised crime in Central America: The rot spreads
Drug-trafficking gangs find a promising new home in some of the poorest and most vulnerable countries in the Americas(25)
Latin America's economies: Waging the currency war
Strong economies, soaring currencies and rising inflation have brought a dilemma for policymakers. Some are reaching for unorthodox tools(20)
Floods in Brazil and Colombia: Inundated
Torrential rain prompts tragedy, and a need for prevention(34)
Colombia's foreign policy: We'll be there
Colombia reverses its plan to skip the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony(4)
A round-up of stories on the Americas in the latest issue of The Economist(0)
Colombia's foreign policy: Seeking new friends
Juan Manuel Santos tries diplomacy(5)
Impunity in Colombia and Panama: A get-out-of-jail-free card
Panama grants asylum to a former Colombian spy chief(6)
Asset seizure in Colombia: Seizing control of a wayward agency
ASK anyone involved in Colombia’s long battle against organised crime about the keys to the country’s success, and one of the first responses will inevitably be the state’s attack on the mobs’ finances. In 1996 the government passed a law that allowed it to confiscate any asset whose owner could not demonstrate that it was acquired legally. At first, officials made little use of the tactic. But once Álvaro Uribe became president in 2002, he had the law streamlined, and began taking advantage of its inversion of the burden of proof to strip hundreds of suspected drug lords of their presumably ill-gotten gains, with no need for a criminal conviction that would have been difficult to secure. Mr Uribe has called asset seizure one of the anti-narcotics tools “most feared” by criminals.(7)
AFTER analysing the causes of Dilma Rousseff's victory in Brazil's presidential election on this blog, our correspondent in São Paulo has now taken a look at how she is likely to govern in print. The current issue also includes stories on judicial probes into spying and corruption by members of Álvaro Uribe's government in Colombia and Canada's rejection of BHP Billiton's bid for PotashCorp.(1)
Spying and corruption in Colombia: The dark side
The former president and his aides are called to account for dirty tricks(18)
Media freedom in Latin America: Shooting the messenger
Threats from criminals and governments(9)
Security in Colombia: The beginning of the end
Demise of the FARC’s top killer(8)
Colombia's FARC: A prize scalp
FRESH off a bruising strike on a camp belonging to the FARC guerrillas earlier this week, Colombia’s army announced an even bigger success today: the killing in a bombing raid of Víctor Julio Suárez Rojas, nicknamed “Mono Jojoy”. Mr Suárez was the group’s military-operations chief, a member of its seven-man ruling secretariat, and the commander of its Eastern Bloc, the strongest unit, with an estimated 4,000-5,000 fighters. Also known as Jorge Briceño, he is believed to have been behind the FARC’s direct offensives against army posts in the early 1990s, a wave of kidnappings of politicians and many of the organisation’s cocaine-trafficking operations.(16)
Ingrid Betancourt's memoir: A diary of despair
The hostage-célèbre recounts her captivity(19)
AMONG the many innocent victims of Colombia's violent struggles with guerrillas and paramilitaries over the last few decades were rural peasants, whose land was often forcibly seized by belligerents. The Americas section of this week's print issue leads with a look at how Juan Manuel Santos, the country's new president, plans to restore their ownership. The issue also addresses Venezuela's byzantine foreign exchange controls, the Cuban government's plan to fire 1m state employees and Mexico's celebration of the 200th anniversary of its independence struggle.(0)
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