This chapter analyzes the different banking models that were debated and adopted by the elites of the various Latin American nations after midcentury. The examples of the financial and monetary institutions of Europe were influential, but they were not simply replicated. In fact, there was a creative process of adaptation of foreign models of banking organization and regulation that were adjusted to local and regional situations in each country in a prolonged process of trial and error. In Chile and Colombia the advocates of the free banking model tended to gain the upper hand, whereas in Argentina and Brazil the supporters of a single bank of issue tended to dominate. The intense political and financial discussions in each country revealed strong differences between orthodox theorists, in favor of a strict gold standard, and pragmatists, who preferred the flexibility of inconvertibility. These confrontations remained characteristic of many later episodes in Latin American financial history and resonate down to the present day.

This chapter tests the book’s main argument and the three proposed mechanisms by analyzing the effectiveness of vote-buying schemes in Argentina, Colombia, and Turkey. To avoid repetition, I highlight one mechanism per country, using a critical-case approach. In Colombia’s 2022 elections, weak partisanship and an atomized party system imply that recipients might respond instrumentally to electoral gifts. Nevertheless, using a conjoint experiment, I show strong partisan response, thus highlighting the low bar for partisan affinity to disrupt machine politics. Competitive authoritarianism in Turkey should bias elections in the incumbent’s favor, but I show that local competition for the Kurdish vote and intensive campaigns in the 2015 elections caused the incumbent party to target many unbuyable voters and made the vote buying strategy to fail nationally. Finally, in Argentina the use of partisan ballots should increase recipient compliance. Employing observational data and a photo-based survey experiment from the 2021 elections, I instead show that recipients believe in ballot secrecy and vote their true preferences where prior local electoral competition was vibrant but comply by voting for the machine where it had been locally dominant. The findings from these three critical-case tests show the surprisingly weak conditions that can make vote buying ineffective and imply that my argument generalizes to other competitive systems rife with clientelism.

Chapter 8 explores two questions: Is there a far right in Colombia? To what extent are far-right ideas present in Colombian politics today, and what are their prospects going forward? Given the internal conflict, a militaristic and anti-guerrilla right has been historically strong and dominant, but it is different from the contemporary Latin American far right. Colombia lacks an organized far-right party, though this should not be taken to mean that far-right ideas are irrelevant to understanding political dynamics. The chapter evaluates the reach of contemporary far-right ideas among key figures in the Colombian political elite, relying on speeches, interviews, social media posts, and legislative output. It focuses on Álvaro Uribe and Rodolfo Hernández, arguing that neither should be understood as an exponent of the contemporary far right, though some far-right ideas can be identified in their discourse at different points, with varying degrees of coherence. The seeds of the contemporary far right are found elsewhere – in subnational politicians, emerging outsiders, and figures within existing parties, most strongly in Senator María Fernanda Cabal. The chapter explores the evolution of Cabal’s public discourse, identifying an inflection point in 2020, when she began emphasizing moral conservatism and became more involved in international far-right networks.

This chapter engages with a Colombian performance action by a group called Cuerpos Gramaticales, or Grammatical Bodies. Members of the collective symbolically sow themselves in public places, planted for six hours with their lower bodies under mounds of dirt and their upper bodies rising as trunks, stems, and leaves from the earth. The action is undertaken to denounce violence, achieve collective catharsis, and (re)align relationships among body, territory, and memory. That is, it is an exercise putting the body at the center of a project to restructure – and to synthesize – ethical, spiritual, ecological, and political grammars that guide sensemaking about violence, life, and death in Colombia. The action was first initiated to denounce a joint state-paramilitary urban massacre two years before Colombia ratified peace accords ending a fifty-three-year armed conflict with its oldest guerrilla army. The chapter discusses actions taken in the early stages of the accords’ implementation, as surviving kin of victims of state-perpetrated crimes against humanity struggled to make state and society acknowledge the significance of their loved ones’ lives and the cruelty of their deaths.

Chapter 8 examines political systems with the highest values of T, or time since the last successful coup. It explains how and why dictatorships as different as the PRIs in Mexico (1929–2000) and the Somoza family’s in Nicaragua (1936–79) effected an autocratic exit out of the coup trap. And it analyzes how the republics of Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay escaped from golpismo by constructing constitutional democracy. Successful transitions away from the Coup Trap, I find, occur if they survive what I call “trial by fire” – assaults on their authority – that allow them to purge the armed forces of sedition. Escapes from the Coup Trap are also a function of convincing the political opposition to desist from joining coup coalitions, which dictatorships and democracies accomplish in slightly different ways.

The primary source at the center of this chapter’s analysis is produced by a Colombian evangelical pioneer and focuses on the expulsion of his family and the evangelical church in the village of La Tulia, Valle, Colombia, in 1949. The autobiographical account, written some years after the event, recounts memories of the experience and its interpretation considering what it meant for him to be an evangelical Christian in Colombia in the mid-twentieth century. The expulsion occurred against the backdrop of a struggle between liberals and conservatives that involved the Catholic Church and the evangelicals, resulting in an unraveling of the social fabric of the communities where the evangelical presence was very important. Pedro Aguirre, author of the text, was the founder of the town of La Tulia, Valle, and a social and liberal leader who, after having supported the construction of the Catholic temple, abandoned Catholicism for Protestantism. The analysis aims to identify the elements at play in the construction of evangelical memories, which will facilitate not only the use of the source itself but also a deeper understanding of the context in which it was produced.

José María Samper (1828-1888) was born in the provincial town of Honda, Colombia. A prolific author, he combined his writing activities with politics, journalism, and teaching. In his earlier career, Samper became prominent within a young generation of radical liberals who advocated universal and direct suffrage, the separation of church and state, and the abolition of the standing army. In 1855, In what was perhaps one of the first usages of the expression “Latin American,” Samper proposed the formation of a federation of Spanish American republics to defend their emerging “democracies” and their interests from the ambitions of the European monarchies, the Brazilian Empire, and US expansionism (Reflexiones sobre la federación colombiana, 1855). “Colombia” was the name Samper gave to his proposed union. Later in his life, however, Samper tempered the radicalism of his youth and moved closer to the Conservative Party. Yet in the convention that adopted the 1886 centralist, “conservative” constitution, Samper’s interventions revealed that he continued defending key liberal principles. Samper’s selected passages in our volume come from his earlier liberal phase.

An anonymous and rarely cited text, Fe política de un colombiano was consulted by the editors at the John Carter Brown Library, whose catalogue attributes it to Eloy Valenzuela (1756–1834), a Catholic priest from Santander, Colombia. However, it is highly unlikely that Valenzuela, who was close to Simón Bolívar at the time of publication, penned a pamphlet which appeared to be criticizing (though not in explicit terms) the Convención de Ocaña, convened by Bolívar to replace the existing 1821 Constitution. The main message of the Fe política was against the concentration of power in the executive, then perceived to be Bolívar’s purpose in convening the Ocaña Convention. On April 1, 1826, the Gaceta de Colombia registered its publication stating that “the author … was born in one of the departments of the antigua Venezuela.” Its author might have been Javier Francisco Yanes (1776–1846), particularly as in his Manual político del venezolano, Yanes used the Fe política without attribution, in a book that is seemingly generous in acknowledging the work of others. But if the Gaceta de Colombia was right, this would rule out Yanes’ authorship as he was not born in Venezuela but in Cuba.

Miguel Antonio Caro (1843–1909) was notable among the most systematic conservative thinkers in Spanish America. He was born in Bogota in a socially prestigious and politically influential family. Caro rose to prominence for his scholarly work on grammar, his translations of Virgil, and, above all, for his defense of the Catholic Church and his critical stand against the radical governments that ruled the country after 1861. He was appointed to his first public post in 1880, as director of the National Library, by the then president, Rafael Núñez, a liberal who broke with the radicals to lead the Regeneración Movement in Colombia. Caro became the closest ally of Núñez, and one of the main architects of the 1886 Constitution. Caro succeeded Núñez after his death (1894) in the presidency of the country. His vast intellectual production, however, preceded his rise to power, including a critical study of Bentham’s utilitarianism. In 1871, he founded El Tradicionista, a newspaper whose pages advocated the protection of the Catholic Church by the Colombian state, and where his series of articles against religious tolerance, the basis of Caro’s piece in our volume, were first published.

Florentino González (1805–1875) was one of the “founders” of classical liberalism in nineteenth-century Colombia. His early life was marked by the experience of independence since his family was forced to move from their home by the loyalists when he was still a child. He completed his studies in jurisprudence in Bogota in 1825. As Gran Colombia tore apart, González participated in the plot to assassinate Bolívar in 1828, and subsequently suffered prison and exile. He was back in Bogota shortly after Bolívar’s death and became actively involved in politics and journalism for the next two decades, when he held a succession of important posts, including elected member of Congress and State Secretary of Finance. In 1840, he published Elementos de ciencia administrativa, a two-volume treatise about public administration, a subject he then taught at the university in Bogota. He authored a significant number of essays, some of them in the newspapers he edited. Appointed to a diplomatic mission that took him to Lima and Santiago de Chile, he resigned it in 1861 and remained in exile until the end of his life, first in Chile and later in Argentina.

Businesses have a long-standing record of involvement in severe human rights violations, a trend that continues today and is likely to persist, and that is often aggravated during periods of conflict. However, corporate actors have mostly been excluded from transitional justice mechanisms, and corporate accountability remains an elusive element of transitional justice. In this context of impunity, scholars have called for the inclusion of economic actors in transitional justice processes and for stronger links between the transitional justice and business and human rights (BHR) fields. Focusing on Colombia, this chapter explores the mobilisation of victims’ organisations during and after the Peace Agreements, highlighting their pivotal role in shaping transitional justice and BHR debates and contesting corporate impunity. It underscores the need for context-sensitive, legally binding accountability mechanisms, and argues that addressing corporate complicity in conflict is not only essential for achieving justice but also a demand rooted in victims’ lived experiences, offering valuable insights for the intersection of transitional justice and BHR.

While the international legal issues related to the search for disappeared persons have received considerable attention, limited research has been conducted on how participation in the search impacts victims’ lives. In particular, we argue that the importance of victim recognition needs to be inserted into these discussions, and our understanding improved about what types of institutional and social responses are needed to ensure effective and victim-oriented search processes. Our chapter utilises the concept of ‘recognition relationships’ with reference to two cases: Colombia and El Salvador. Our discussion illuminates the ways in which a focus on recognition relationships captures the dynamics of power, mobilisation, and participation which are central to any successful and just search process.

In Colombia, the category of ‘victim’ constitutes a significant legal and political identity, granting access to truth, justice, and reparation measures. Yet transitional justice processes often reinforce hegemonic narratives of ‘ideal victimhood’, reproducing gendered, racial, and political-military stereotypes that marginalise those who deviate from these norms. Focusing on conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), this chapter examines how social movements, particularly women’s and LGBTQI+ groups, contest dominant imaginaries of the ‘ideal SGBV victim’ as a passive, cisgender, heterosexual civilian woman. These groups advocate for inclusive approaches within Colombia’s Truth Commission and Special Jurisdiction for Peace. The chapter contrasts their efforts with the case of Corporación Rosa Blanca, former FARC women combatants who strategically embrace the ‘ideal victim’ narrative to secure legitimacy. This group contrasts with more progressive victims’ groups and illustrates how they navigate between complex identities and traditional victimhood narratives in Colombia’s transitional justice.