ARTICLE: The perils of “parapolitics”, The Economist, Mar 22nd 2007

Very interesting piece. Reads almost like an internal intervention led by a tough-but-fair leader (Uribe) with lots of mil aid from outside (US). In this push, you see all the same dynamics and challenges of any post-conflict nation-building (bolstering internal security forces, rehabbing baddies, extending networks of police that trigger the return of just enough social trust, and all of these things leading to the sine qua non of recovery: rising FDI. Long way to go, yes, but very encouraging and proving the utility of the great leader with vision. I get a lot of readers and audience members trying to get me to upgrade Latin America from sort of bad to truly ugly, in effect asking, what will it take to get us down there militarily? I always have a hard time doing that, because I think the process will simply be slow and steady and largely economic, since I have a hard time coming up with serious military interventions down there, even with Chavez (despite reports to the contrary, I have never declared Chavez's overthrow to be necessary, much less imminent; actually you need the counter-example to prove your point on markets, as Chavez will do nicely soon enough). I would love to see Colombia escape any downstream international intervention of the sort I sketched at the end of BFA. But there's a lot of ground to be successfully covered between Uribe's current achievements and a Colombian government that actually controls all its territory. But it's good to remain optimistic, which is why I only rarely write about Latin America in a security sense. Thanks to Steve Pampinella for sending this.