Colombian Constitutional Court Says "No" to President Uribe´s Second Reelection

Last Friday, the Colombian Constitutional Court announced that President Uribe would not be allowed to run for his second reelection. At the end of 2009, Congress had passed a law calling for a referendum on whether Presidents were to be allowed for a third consecutive term. The decison of the Court against the referendum was a 7-2 vote. When announcing the decision, the President of the Court read a press release that explained that many anomalies had taken place - for instance, the fact that much more than was allowed by law was spent in the campaign for the referendum. The press release also stated that allowing for a third consecutive term would violate the doctrine of separation of powers and that of checks and balances. I have not read the decision, but I´m sure that this is a historical decision in Latin American constitutionalism and will have decisive effects on the Colombian political landscape.

Cell Phones in the streets of Colombia

At Bogotá and other cities of Colombia that I visited recently - Medellín and Cartagena de Indias - I saw something that I found very useful and interesting. Every downtown corner has 3 or 4 persons offering the use of cel phones for between 150-200 Colombian pesos - 1 dollar approx. per minute. Before seeing this at Colombia, I had thought of it when I was in need of a phone to make an emergency call or report myself to friends when I was lost in a city. Of course, you don´t see many public phones around. Conspiracy theorists like myself would say that this is all product of cell phones companies lobbying against public phones. Others may say that it is probably the other way round: once this market for short phones calls emerged, there was no longer need for public phones and, thus, the project of installing public phones was cancelled. I don´t know what is the proper explanation but, in any case, I found it interesting.

Constitutional Issues at Colombia

I am blogging from Bogotá, a very beautiful city - I am spending part of my summer break here and also working on a lecture on "odious debts," the issue that I am currently working on. For the legal scholar, fascinating yet very unfortunate things are going on here. To begin with, the Colombian Constitutional Court is currently analyzing a petition regarding the constitutionality of a possible third re-election of the President. If the Court were to accept it, a referendum on Uribe´s re-election would take place. The deadline for the referendum is forthcoming - March 24 - and the Court is to decide in the next few days. Besides the constitutional debate, it is interesting to pose the question of what is it that happens in Latin America that most presidents work on their re-elections? There are a few recent exceptions, such as that of Lula at Brazil and Bachelet at Chile. Why is it that this ambition is not present elsewhere? As I suggested on an earlier post on Honduras last year, it may be that our societies in the south are not yet in a liberal equilibrium, that is, that we do not yet value liberal constitutional democracies that much.