ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the traditional Colombian political system, the challenges to it, and the Pastrana government's attempts to salvage it. In foreign trade, Colombia has diversified from production of one crop. Coffee, long the most important export, has been joined by petroleum, cut flowers, and drugs. In 1988 the minister of justice reported there were some 160 death squads operating in the country. The National Front went a long way toward ending the partisan identification of the military, but beginning in 1962, with the aid of the US government, the army began a program employing its personnel, equipment, and skills in social and economic projects. Historically the machinery of government has been manipulated by political elites, as in the National Front, for certain goals. One product of the traditional government role in the economy is a large bureaucracy. The Colombian public policy process is conditioned by the features of the government machinery just discussed.
