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This chapter presents the results of a study conducted in Colombia to determine how some Latin American companies successfully expanded into international markets, and to identify business models and common characteristics of these companies and their affiliates in other regions worldwide. The foods division of the Colombian ‘Grupo Empresarial Antioqueño’ (Antioquia Business Group), which consists of a conglomerate of companies owned by Inversiones Nacional de Chocolates, was selected for analysis because it is probably the group that has achieved the greatest success in Colombia in the globalization process. The study identifies the outstanding characteristics that enabled the group to develop the core competences that provided the foundations for establishing successful strategies to penetrate different international markets; learn from the different cultures associated with those markets, but at the same time expand its own culture in those places, specially in the retailing activity to neighbourhood stores; and develop processes to manage risks, add value to the products, and face the increasing competition from other multinational firms.

Although there is now a general recognition that capital market liberalization failed to help developing countries achieve economic growth and stability, there are still a number of unresolved controversies, including the fundamental issue of what types of capital market interventions governments should undertake, and more centrally, whether there exist any interventions for which the benefits exceed the costs. Given the importance that capital account interventions can play in macroeconomic policy-making, this chapter analyzes alternative modes of regulations, including case studies of Chile, Colombia, and Malaysia. Though economists have a strong proclivity for price-based interventions (taxes and subsidies) over quantity-based interventions (administrative restrictions and controls), theoretical work in economics has shown that sometimes quantity-based restrictions can reduce risk more effectively than price interventions. In addition to direct forms of interventions, such as taxes and restrictions on inflows and outflows, interventions in capital markets can also take on a variety of indirect forms such as limiting banks’ short-term foreign borrowing or applying adverse tax or bankruptcy treatment to foreign-denominated borrowing. Though the regulations vary in their methods, they generally serve to segment (or separate) the domestic and foreign exchange markets. The chapter concludes with a number of arguments for and against the various modes of capital market intervention.

This chapter argues that peacebuilding operations cannot fulfill their potential and achieve justpeace without “strategic” planning and implementation. The authors employ vignettes from Mozambique, Colombia, and the Philippines to illustrate the current challenges of conflict transformation and peacebuilding. The multiplicity of peacebuilding actors and increasing interaction between the local and global point to the need for strategic responses to conflict. The authors sketch the contours of a theory of strategic peacebuilding, arguing that it includes a confluence of disciplines, practices and expertise that is intended to promote social change and healing that would not naturally occur. They propose principles of strategic peacebuilding and offer practical suggestions for peacebuilding practitioners.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about opiate production and heroin trafficking around the word. This book provides a comparative analysis of national experiences in trying to control international trafficking and analyzes systematically the effects of differences in the stringency of the enforcement of global production and trafficking prohibitions on the organization of the market, the behavior of its participants and society at large. The first part of this book reviews the historical development of the world opiate market, the second part explores market conditions in Afghanistan, Burma, India, Colombia, and Tajikistan and the final part proposes a theoretical model of effective illegality that may helps to explains a country's participation in the heroin trafficking.

This chapter explores the emergence of Colombia as an opiate producer during the 1970s. It suggests that some of the factors that contributed to the development of the opiate industry in Colombia are natural and socioeconomic. These include the pre-existing cocaine industry, the existence of established drug-smuggling networks for the U.S. and the weakness of the Colombian government. This chapter contends that the emergence of Colombian heroin production is informative about what risk factors might lead to new countries entering the opiate trade.

The political preferences that legislators bring to the legislative arena are an important dimension of substantive representation and help explain how legislators behave in office. Using an original survey of legislators in Argentina, Colombia, and Costa Rica, this chapter shows that female representatives place a higher priority than do men on representing female constituents, women’s groups, and women’s equality issues. At the same time, female legislators’ special attention to women and women’s issues does not detract from the importance they place on other issues and constituencies in any of the three countries. Male and female representatives elected to office in Latin America have very similar political attitudes on a wide range of issues, particularly those that traditionally have been considered to be women’s domain or men’s domain issues. Women represent women but place high priority on non-women-specific issues and constituencies as well.

Policymaking is one of the most important aspects of substantive representation. This chapter examines the bills that female and male legislators sponsor, cosponsor, and debate in Argentina, Colombia, and Costa Rica. In all three countries, female legislators are more likely to sponsor, cosponsor, and debate women’s issue bills. However, male and female legislators’ similar attitudes on other political issues do not always translate into gender equality in bill sponsorship behavior. In Colombia, women are as likely as men to focus on a diverse array of issues. In Argentina and Costa Rica, female legislators are more likely than male legislators to sponsor some social issues and are less likely to focus on some men’s domain issues. Women substantively represent women by placing greater priority on women’s issues in all three countries, but at the same time, appear to be marginalized in their bill sponsorship behavior in some legislatures.

Legislators also do substantive representation by serving in leadership posts in the legislature and sitting on committees. This chapter presents descriptive statistics on the chamber leadership posts that women have held in Argentina, Colombia, and Costa Rica over the past 30 years showing the paucity of women in leadership. Then, it analyzes committee assignments showing that women are more likely than men to sit on women’s issue committees, but significant gender differences exist in other types of committee assignments, particularly in Argentina and Costa Rica. Finally, it shows that women are less likely to serve as committee presidents in all three countries. Women are getting elected to legislatures, but they are not making their way into chamber or committee leadership posts, and in some legislatures, they are not gaining access to the full spectrum of committees in the chamber.

Much of a representative’s job centers on policy and takes place inside congress, but representatives also participate in activities in their electoral district that emphasize securing support for their political future, often referred to as a legislator’s “home style.” Using data from the survey of legislators, this chapter examines the amount of time that male and female legislators spend in their district (allocation of resources), their constituency service (presentation of self), and frequency with which they seek publicity of that work by making public presentations or speaking with the media (explaining activity). In Argentina, Colombia, and Costa Rica, female legislators do these activities more often than do male legislators when they relate specifically to female constituents or women’s groups. Gender has little effect on other forms of home style, however. Women are substantively representing women, and at the same time, are not being marginalized in their home-style behavior.

The increasing intensification of Colombia's internal wars since 1990 has exacted a heavy toll in uprooting large segments of the country's rural population. As of 2002, it was estimated that 2.9 million Colombians (of a total of 42 million) had become internally displaced. The lack of census variables that capture the dynamics and impact of such dramatic demographic flux has produced a statistical conundrum that hides the crisis from policy‐making spheres as well as from political debates, creating an ‘official invisibility’. Explores the way in which an official ‘narrative’ can obliterate the political standing of the forms of ‘otherness’ that it creates through such state classificatory devices as the census, vital statistics, laws, and maps.

This chapter begins by discussing that in the recent past, numerous associations bind Antioquian people together across class, promoted either by individual initiative, by the Church, or by the government. It then explains that the dynamism and positive outlook of Antioquia, mirrored in the proliferation of these societies, coincided with the economic expansion of the region. It adds that by the 1920s, the region was the busiest economic nucleus in Colombia, and led the modernisation of the country. It notes that sociability did not abolish class distinctions. It argues that even after facing years of threats posed by the drugs trade and the growth of guerrilla and paramilitary numbers and activity, the Antioquian society demonstrated the degree of resistance and even the capacity to recover. It suggests that the region’s past has played a more important role than is now conventionally accepted in responding to challenges posed by recent difficulties.

This chapter charts the stellar success and then tragic failure of Simon Bolívar’s attempt to unify several states in northern South America into Gran Colombia. Despite his great charisma and military skill, Bolívar was unable to hold together his state for long after independence. The chapter argues that the Napoleonic Wars cropped Spanish power and hobbled its finances, such that the previously formidable colonial power transformed into a minimal threat. This reversal in Spain’s fortunes drove the initial successes and ultimate failure in South American unification. Leaders that acted in accord with this reality advanced while those that did not were destroyed. External threat explains Gran Colombia’s trajectory.

This chapter presents four stories on transcending violence and discusses the morals behind them. The first story involves the emergence of peace amidst the ethnic conflict in Ghana during the 1990s. The second story details how women of Wajir — a district in northeastern Kenya — stopped a war. The third story tells how a group of peasants in Colombia dealt with the violence of numerous armed groups that traversed their lands and demanded their allegiance. The fourth story involves the Tajikistan civil war and how one professor talked philosophy with one of the warlords and convinced him to join peace negotiations with the government.

Iraq and Afghanistan are hardly alone in having to face failure in their transition to peace. Since the end of the Cold War, countries at low levels of development — ranging from Haiti to Timor-Leste, to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burundi, and others in Africa, and several in the Balkans — have emerged from civil conflict to establish a fragile peace. Others, such as Colombia, the Palestinian territories, and Sudan, it is hoped, will begin such a transition soon. The purpose of the book is to integrate theoretical and practical issues related to post-conflict economic reconstruction in a methodical, comprehensive, consistent, and rigorous way to facilitate effective reconstruction and national reconciliation and to ensure that conflict will not recur. The book is based on personal experience but in addition provides a comprehensive review of the literature.

This chapter describes key aspects of the history of clinical legal education in Latin America, which began in the 1960s, and the evolution of new approaches to clinical education in the region. It also explains the influence of the “First Generation” and “Second Generation” of the Law and Development Movement on the Latin American clinical movement, and the emergence of clinical programs based on the ideological and practical tenants of Public Interest Law (PIL). It explains further that while PIL clinics have been particularly fertile in proposing new forms of judicial intervention—they have just recently started to think more consciously about the limits of these strategies and the necessity to reconsider their role in both legal education and professional practice. The chapter then examines these developments from the perspective of four countries in the region with substantial clinical experience: Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico.

High-skilled student migration may lead to a brain drain for developing countries. After a brief review of the literature, this chapter provides an analysis of patterns of student migration to the US. Estimates based on panel data for fifty countries over the period 1990-99 provide some limited evidence on brain drain or gain, although Latin America may be more vulnerable than other regions to brain drain. In order to fight brain drain, programmes can however be implemented in order to ensure that students who have migrated abroad return to their country of origin. Examples of three programmes implemented in Colombia and Mexico that aim to mitigate the risk of brain drain into a gain, or more generally, to optimize ‘brain circulation’ are provided.

Preventive capital account regulations have three potential roles in developing countries. First, as a macroeconomic policy tool they provide some room of manoeuvre for counter-cyclical macroeconomic policies, to help to cool aggregate demand and to avoid the accumulation of unsustainable debt burdens. Second, as a ‘liability policy’ they help to avoid risky corporate balance-sheet structures (excessive reliance on short-term external debts, maturity, and currency mismatches) and thus the worst effects of the volatility of capital inflows. Finally, capital controls help to avoid asset bubbles and thus prevent potential crashes. The experiences of Chilean, Colombian, and Malaysian regulations on capital inflows indicate that they fulfilled those key aims. However, the macroeconomic effects depended on the strength of the regulations and tended to be temporary. The basic advantage of the price-based instrument used by Chile and Colombia was its non-discretionary character, whereas quantity-based controls in Malaysia proved to be stronger in terms of short-term macroeconomic effects.