This chapter examines freedom of thought in Colombia. No Constitution of Colombia has stipulated the right to freedom of thought since the country’s independence. However, its existence is currently undisputed in the Colombian legal system due to the Constitutional Court jurisprudence. Since 1997, the Court has defined this freedom as a stand-alone forum internum right and has delineated its content and attributes. However, case-law references to this right have been mainly rhetorical for at least three reasons. First, scepticism about its practical utility given that thoughts have been considered impossible to access. Second, cases related to the right to freedom of thought usually involve interests that also fall under the protective remit of other rights, which are directly stipulated by the Constitution. Third, the Court’s characterization of the relation and differences between the right to freedom of thought and other rights (i.e., freedom of expression and freedom of conscience) is inconsistent, complex, as well as conceptually and practically unclear. We do think it is necessary for the Colombian legal system to make advancements on the conceptual and normative independence of freedom of thought to reinforce the protection of the forum internum.

The conclusion reflects on the profound transformations undergone by the New Kingdom of Granada by the late seventeenth century, and how this began to powerfully shape the images of the early colonial past that began to appear in works of historical writing in that period, with long-lasting consequences. This triumphal register of writing, that cast the Muisca as the third great empire of the Americas and asserted the swift success of the Spanish colonial administration, has long obscured perceptions about the Indigenous people of highland New Granada. As this book has demonstrated, a granular exploration of an exhaustive array of colonial archival sources paints a very different picture: on the one hand, of the anxieties and limitations at the heart of the colonial project, the incomplete and contingent nature of colonial power, and of deep and multi-layered crises of governance; and on the other, of the complex ways in which Indigenous people, in their interaction with Christianity, made possible the coming of the New Kingdom of Granada.

This chapter analyzes recent conservative efforts to build parties in Latin America. Its main case study is Argentina’s Republican Proposal (PRO) party, one of the most important examples of conservative party-building in Latin America. This chapter explains the success of right-wing parties born in nonauthoritarian contexts through the strategic decisions of leaders about whether to invest in high-cost resources (ideational and organizational) that will allow parties to take root in inhospitable contexts. This chapter demonstrates that the competitiveness of right-wing parties has been driven by three factors: programmatic innovation by personalistic leaders; organizational mobilization of both core and noncore constituencies; and an elite fear of the "Venezuela model."

This chapter presents an analysis of the distinctive features of constitutional transitions that took place in Eastern Europe, Latin America and parts of Africa, gaining impetus in the 1980s. It explains that these transitions were historically unique as they marked the first moment in which many states converted to constitutional democracy without general experience of warfare. However, it shows how security policies framed the transitions, especially in Europe. It also examines how in Latin America new constitutions were again stabilized using elements of international law. It contains a case study of Colombia to illustrate this.

This chapter explains the performance of the Centro Democrático in Colombia and its concurrent success at the national level and underachievement at the subnational level. It argues that this disparity is linked to two interrelated variables: the security cleavage along which the Centro Democrático has developed its partisan identity, and the party’s weak subnational partisan structures. Security issues mobilize voters on the national level, but are too broad to be relevant in local elections.

This chapter examines the emergence of constitutional law in South America, showing how military politics in the Spanish and Portuguese empires had enduring impact on the formation of citizenship regimes in this region. It focuses on Brazil and Colombia as two divergent but also overlapping models of militarized constitutionalism. It assesses how both states acquired military and semi-imperialist features as their independence was consolidated. It also discusses how national processes of integration and citizenship formation were conducted by armies, such that, in Brazil in particular, the army was an early trier of democratic institution building.

The introduction reflects on the peculiar position of the New Kingdom of Granada, and the nature of colonial and scholarly writing about the region, which both developed under the shadow of the centres of Spanish colonial power in America, Mexico and Peru, showing how the expectations, assumptions, and perspectives of better studied regions have distorted our understanding of this region’s history. It outlines the book’s principal methodological arguments: the importance of an exhaustive and granular approach to colonial sources that takes into account the intellectual, institutional, and normative circumstances of their creation and transmission as a methodological imperative; the need to centre Christianisation, and the relentless challenges it posed, to understand the construction of colonial rule in the New Kingdom; and the need to overcome antiquated and counterproductive approaches to the study of religious change among Indigenous people, and instead focus on their diverse, contradictory, and complex interactions with Christianity.

Between the early 1990s and the mid-2010s, citizen security in Medellín dramatically improved and police violence declined. But residents’ trust in police stagnated. We evaluate a police-led effort to build trust through town-hall-style police–community meetings. In 174 treated neighborhoods – but not in 173 control neighborhoods – the police held more than 500 such meetings over a period of nine months. We find that the meetings induced small positive changes in perceptions of the police, though they did not alter trust in police per se – or crime reporting behavior, much less crime itself. We interpret these findings as evidence that voluntary informal contact between residents and police officers is a weak but not irrelevant policy for reshaping police–community relations.

This chapter delves into evolving policy and regulatory dimensions shaping the emergence of hydrogen in the Latin American energy landscape. With a focus on three regional leaders – Chile, Colombia and Brazil – it explores the distinct strategic paths these countries are charting as they seek to position themselves in the burgeoning hydrogen economy. Chile, Colombia and Brazil, aiming to capitalize on their abundant (renewable) resources, have moved swiftly to outline ambitious hydrogen strategies and legislation. Despite this progress, as the chapter reveals, important regulatory challenges still limit their ability to fully tap the hydrogen well. Even as these obstacles persist, interest in hydrogen projects continues to soar, as exemplified by the numerous developed or in-development pilot projects pragmatically leveraging the existing frameworks. Ultimately, while clean hydrogen promises to usher in an era of sustainable development for Latin America, regulatory efforts matching policy ambitions will continue to be needed to successfully transition from promise to actual production.