Parents know very well that when it comes to banning something it is better to remain silent than to impose a sanction that children will not comply or that they will not be able to impose.

BY THESE DAYS I have been following the fate of the 33 Chilean miners of the Atacama Desert.

To the surprise of all Colombians, the Minister of Agriculture has said the government wants to put forward an agrarian reform.

IN SOCIETIES THAT HAVE Latino heritage, like ours, there is a particular liking for abstract discussions.

Mauricio García Villegas' intervention in the launch of the book "and they refounded the homeland... On how the mafia and politicians reconfigured the Colombian State".

DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION OF Juan Manuel Santos, Armando Benedetti, the new Senate president, began his speech by lamenting that Colombia was one of the most unequal countries in the world.

TODAY, LAST DAY OF WORK OF President Uribe, the most popular governor in recent decades, I am reminded of the following sentence from Plutarch:

BY THESE DAYS there is an advertising campaign which talks about the epidemic of excuses that we Colombians call on when we are in public thoroughfares. "There are behaviors that make us act irrationally," says the advertisement, and to avoid them "we must use our road intelligence."

When a child asks how long a horse lives, some old people in Antioquia still answer this: see millet, a chicken lives three years, a dog three chickens, a horse three dogs and a human three horses, count yourself. I thought of this explanation last weekend when celebrating the Bicentennial. And how long does a country lives?