Articles about Alvaro Uribe - Los Angeles Times

OPINION

Colombia's Alvaro Uribe -- return of the South American strongman?

April 16, 2009 | By Michael Shifter, Michael Shifter is vice president for policy at the Inter-American Dialogue and adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

Riding in a taxi in the coastal Colombian city of Cartagena some months ago, I was chatting with a Colombian colleague about whether the country's president, Alvaro Uribe, should be allowed to run for an unprecedented third term. Abruptly, our taxi driver turned and interjected: "You don't know what it was like here before Uribe. Taxi drivers like me were attacked and assaulted all the time. Now we have security."