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?

Ingrid Betancourt's intention to sue the State produced an avalanche of reactions against her.

In my op-ed last week I said it was absurd that the World Cup referees saw less well than the match viewers.

Suppose your son is playing the final of an intercollegiate soccer championship and when everything is ready to get started you find out the referee is missing an eye. How would you react?

Every four years, after the presidential elections, we Colombians participate in a sort of collective rite where hope is renewed.

SIMON BOLIVAR is attributed the following sentence: "Ecuador is a convent, Colombia is a university, and Venezuela is a barracks." Now that we are in the Bicentennial celebration and on the eve of the election of a new president, perhaps it is worth wondering the value of the Liberator's phrase.