Criminal violence in Latin American cities is increasing. Meanwhile, with urbanization, greater numbers of people are moving to cities and into the crossfire. What self-protection strategies do residents adopt to keep safe in violent cities? Drawing on qualitative data from Medellín, Colombia, and Monterrey, Mexico, we document the strategies residents use to stay safe. We synthesize insights from studies of civil war, criminal governance, and urban violence to construct an analytical framework to systematically catalog and name these strategies. We posit that the type of violence residents face—indiscriminate or targeted—influences the strategies they pursue. Responding to either the indiscriminate or targeted form, residents employ survival strategies to avoid, withstand, or confront violence. Our research underscores the centrality of agency for residents’ “staying power” amid urban violence.

This article examines how people gathered and transmitted political information in Colombia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Existing scholarship has predominantly focused on the study of the press in Colombia and Latin America. However, few historians have explored other forms of information, such as telegrams, rumours and letters, or how Colombians combined these. By focusing on how various forms of information circulated through political, familial and commercial networks, this study offers a new dimension to our understanding of communications in Colombia. It argues that this was a period of increasing circulation of information due to social, political and economic change, as well as new links between oral and written practices. Thus, this article illuminates how Colombians circulated political information in a society of restricted literacy in post-colonial Latin America, offering new insights into politics, communications and the interplay between written and oral culture.

Fifty-two years ago, in 1971, President Nixon declared the “War on Drugs”, identifying drug abuse as a public enemy in the United States. Since then, US drug policy has been militarized and, more recently, privatized. Every year, the US government increasingly contracts private military and security companies to provide intelligence, logistical support and training to armed forces in drug-producing or drug-transit States. In Latin America, this militarization and privatization has increased the intensity of violence and has complexified domestic situations, to the extent that the existing international legal regimes now seem inappropriate to respond to the challenges posed by the War on Drugs. On the one hand, human rights law does not adequately address situations where the State faces organized crime groups that are able to control territory. On the other hand, international humanitarian law (IHL) was not created to address law enforcement situations, which the War on Drugs and the fight against organized crime ostensibly are.

This article examines the situation in Latin America, looking at examples of different types of situations through the lens of intensity and organization of the group involved and, in some cases, the group's control over territory. It discusses the application of IHL and human rights law (focusing on the inter-American system of human rights) in these situations and their complementarity, and debates how these bodies of law are adapting or may need to be adapted.

This article describes the process of legal contention between civil society, political parties, and state institutions for the baldíos lands in the Colombian Altillanura region in the last two decades, a region considered the country’s “last agricultural frontier.” The article focuses on the dual and sometimes contradictory roles of the state institutions, both as facilitators of baldíos grabbing and as guarantors of the peasants’ legal land rights. It analyzes the different attempts by the Colombian government to remove the legal limitations to land accumulation and the resistance put up by civil society and the political parties, which resorted to the existing legal mechanisms to deactivate those attempts. The results reveal the two-sided role of the state: while the government introduces legal changes to facilitate baldíos grabbing, state bodies are actively denouncing and sanctioning illegalities or ruling in favor of peasants deprived of their lands.

How does the execution of horizontal accountability mechanisms affect cabinet members’ instability? This article analyzes distinct features of no-confidence motions (NCMs) in presidential systems, using a mixed-method research design that identifies elements of legislative control mechanisms in Peruvian and Colombian polities. Although the congress in presidential systems rarely approves NCMs, high salience policy shocks trigger their proposal, resulting in the dismissal or resignation of the cabinet member in question. Those results are subtle opportunities for opposition legislators to indicate the incompetence of the incumbent government in particular policy areas. This study contributes to understanding how contextual factors affect the effectiveness of the check and balance principle in presidential systems.

Earlier empirical research on party list proportional representation systems shows that women spend less on campaigns than men, particularly when quotas are applied. An analysis of the candidate campaign expenses for the 2014 and 2018 Colombian Lower Chamber elections provides a novel test of this gender gap and its underlying causes. The research design leverages Colombia’s unique context of electoral institutions, with interdistrict variation in terms of quota rules, and the availability of detailed information on campaign spending and funding. The regression models show that the gender gap in campaign spending is limited to districts with quota rules and disappears among incumbents and candidates listed first on the ballot. As for funding, women candidates are most disadvantaged with regard to personal funds and corporate donations but attract as many individual donations as men do.

Since a peace treaty in 2016, Colombia has faced a significant challenge to reduce poverty and strengthen its institutions. A few studies have analyzed the relationship between institutions and subjective poverty, but none has demonstrated this influence in the Colombian context at a municipal level. This article estimated a logit regression including a cluster effect to evidence the influence of municipal institutions over perceptions of poverty by the inhabitants of twelve main cities in Colombia in 2016. Findings include that having a better rule of law and fiscal performance, reducing political fragmentation to have better governance, guaranteeing property rights, fostering the benefits of metropolitan areas, and improving citizen participation reduce the probability of feeling poor.

This article provides a picture of the political economy of tourism and violence in Medellín. It analyses the way criminal actors and tourism entrepreneurs share a territory, by shedding light on the extortion of tour guides, street performers and business owners in some of its barrios populares (poor neighbourhoods). The main objective is to demonstrate how intimate relationships – between and among kin, friends, long-term acquaintances – impact what is considered the criminal governance of tourism. This contribution shows that extortion in Medellín meets only limited resistance from tourism entrepreneurs. It also emphasises how criminals, tourism actors and tourists themselves contribute to the creation of fragile secured spaces in the developing touristscapes of Colombia's second city.

This article explores the experience of the Afro-Colombian movement over the course of two peace processes, investigating the relationship between opportunities for participation and effective inclusion. The 1991 Constituent Assembly that emerged from the peace processes of the late 1980s presented a particularly open opportunity for civil society participation, and yet the Afro-Colombian movement was unable to gain representation in negotiations for a new constitution. In the 2016 peace process with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC, despite insistence from the government that its negotiations with FARC were exclusively bilateral, the Afro movement was able to gain a seat at the table along with its Indigenous counterparts and generate a commitment from both parties to protect ethnic rights, known as the Capítulo Étnico (Ethnic Chapter). In contrast to existing literature that focuses on international actors as drivers of inclusion, we argue that effective inclusion reflects in large part the internal capacity, coherence, and unity of the movements themselves.

The blue-billed curassow Crax alberti is an endemic Colombian species categorized as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List because of the effects of hunting and habitat loss. Conservation and management actions are required to ensure its persistence in the forest remnants across its range. We conducted a population viability analysis for a population in the municipality of Yondó, Antioquia, based on data collected in the field and available information on the reproductive ecology of the species. We evaluate seven realistic conservation scenarios by comparing the effects that changes in mortality from hunting, carrying capacity and initial population size have on the survival probability of the population. Our results indicate that: (1) the studied population is not viable over a 100-year period under current conditions; (2) mortality as a result of hunting and the size of the initial population have the greatest impacts on the mean time to extinction; (3) a strategy based on eliminating hunting in the two sites with the largest forest remnants in the landscape could ensure the viability of the population over a 100-year period; and (4) other strategies (i.e. population supplementation with captive-bred individuals, reduction of deforestation in the landscape) do not guarantee the viability of the population if mortality from hunting remains constant, even at low levels. These results confirm the susceptibility of the blue-billed curassow to the threats it faces in this landscape, particularly hunting, and provide information on the conservation actions that could allow this remaining population to prevail in the long term.

A persisting question about investment treaties is whether they lead to regulatory chill – the reluctance to regulate on environmental and social issues due to fear of investment claims. The literature on this topic has been predominantly focussed on how the state responds to international pressures, and little has been written about what happens within the state itself. This article aims to fill that gap by analysing the interplay of domestic laws and institutions in the context of potential investment claims, based on the case study of mining in the Santurbán páramo region in Colombia. The article shows that even though Colombia had created laws and institutions that internalized international investment law, it did not bring about regulatory chill in the case of Santurbán; this is due to the role of domestic constitutional law and the Constitutional Court. This case study also adds to the understanding of how the Liberal International Order is shifting from international to domestic governance, by showing how domestic laws and institutions can have diverging priorities when determining how the risk of investment claims is dealt with.

One commonly used method of managing confiscated wild primates in Latin American countries is to release rehabilitated individuals back to their natural habitats. However, little information has been collected from confiscated animal releases, so no clear guidelines have been developed to measure the success of this type of procedure. In most countries, the collection of critical post-release data is too costly and time-consuming for it to be incorporated into the routine procedures of institutions managing confiscated fauna. Therefore, this project was carried out in conditions similar to those of other Colombian and Latin American rehabilitation centres. A group of eight confiscated and rehabilitated brown capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) was released in Los Llanos Orientales in Colombia, and monitored for 6.5 months to determine their adaptation and survival after release. Results were analysed according to how the animals adapted to their new environment in terms of foraging, feeding, locomotion, sleeping, social interactions between the group and with other animals and species, prédation, orientation, and establishment of a territory. The results show that the short-term adaptation and survival of the group 6.5 months after release was successful. Five of the eight animals remained together, two separated, and only one was lost during the first month. Implications for animal well-being are discussed.

A substantial amount of scholarly work has been conducted on considerations (or lack thereof) of gender in the context of peace negotiations. While gender-specific concerns, particularly those focused on women’s empowerment, are now emphasized in the language of international and national organizations involved in peacebuilding (e.g., UN Security Council Resolution 1325), many times this language is just “talk.” Often, on-the-ground practice and policy does not reflect the lived experiences of women in post-accord or transitional contexts. This article analyzes the change in roles and the roles available to women in pre-negotiation and framework-setting negotiation processes between the Colombian government and nonstate armed actors. The study examines the negotiations between the Colombian government under the Juan Manuel Santos administration and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia (FARC) in 2012–2016 to interrogate the ways that women, feminist groups, and women’s organizations play a role in pre-negotiation processes.

This article analyzes the role of the Colombian Council of State, the administrative court of highest level in Colombia, in cases of collective litigation (acción popular). It answers the questions: Do outcomes in these cases vary depending on the right under litigation? Do parties with more resources achieve better outcomes? Does the government hold an advantage when facing other parties? The article analyzes quantitatively an original database of collective litigation cases on environmental protection, public security, the rights of consumers, and administrative morality, and interprets these findings using interview data. Results show that parties’ success rates vary depending on the right under litigation. The national government has the highest litigation success rate, but individuals are more likely to win than stronger parties like department and local governments. The article presents implications following the literature on courts and rights protection in the Global South and party capability.

Corruption has pervasive effects on economic development and the well-being of the population. Despite being crucial and necessary, fighting corruption is not an easy task because it is a difficult phenomenon to measure and detect. However, recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence may help in this quest. In this article, we propose the use of machine-learning models to predict municipality-level corruption in a developing country. Using data from disciplinary prosecutions conducted by an anti-corruption agency in Colombia, we trained four canonical models (Random Forests, Gradient Boosting Machine, Lasso, and Neural Networks), and ensemble their predictions, to predict whether or not a mayor will commit acts of corruption. Our models achieve acceptable levels of performance, based on metrics such as the precision and the area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve, demonstrating that these tools are useful in predicting where misbehavior is most likely to occur. Moreover, our feature-importance analysis shows us which groups of variables are most important in predicting corruption.