Venerdì scorso, 17 maggio, ero di passaggio a Bologna, e sono andato a prendere un caffè a casa di Romano Prodi. Con l'occasione, gli ho chiesto se c'era del vero dietro alle chiacchiere sempre più insistenti circa la sua intenzione di abbandonare il Pd.

"È solo un gossip o davvero...

What if we look at the life of gang members through the experience of child soldiers in Africa? Is the experience of children manipulated and dragged into war in Uganda all that different from the one of teenagers recruited by gangs in our own cities? Are the fears and the...

There is no democracy, unless there is dissent and that dissent can be overtly expressed. It obfuscates one's mind to see how heads of states, democratically elected, are trying to curb voices of opposition. Increasingly, there is a clear effort to silence those voices, which from the kernel of a...

On a hot afternoon of July 19, 1992, Ennio Pintacuda, a Jesuit and a pioneer of the anti-mafia social movement of Palermo in Sicily, picked me up with his armored car and two bodyguards. We were scheduled to work on his memoires. On our way to...

There is an anecdote circulating in Washington. It is about a meeting between the Colombian foreign minister Bermudez and the president of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, senator John Kerry. It was the dawn of the Obama administration. It was a rough meeting. Senator Kerry made clear to Bermudez that...

Over the past ten days, strolling along 7th street, a large, noisy and polluted avenue crossing Bogota from south to north, I was amazed to see the windows of apartments overspread with signboards of Antanas Mockus, the presidential candidate of the Green Party. It's the Colombian version of...

On the day the governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, signed an outrageous immigration law, I was at the JFK airport in New York about to embark on a one-month long trip to Colombia, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, and Spain. At the check-in, handing over my papers to the airline...

Wednesday night I took a short stroll along the bustling streets of downtown Bogota and when I passed the building where senator Piedad Cordoba lives, I looked up at her penthouse apartment and observed the lights were off. The leader of a social movement favoring a peace process...

A few days ago, I sat down with representative Jim McGovern, a democrat from the third district of Massachusetts. This time the opportunity was an interview for the Colombian daily newspaper El Espectador. We had crossed path before to talk about the slim chances for a peace process in Colombia,...

When Jose Saramago wrote that a benevolent Tsunami swept Barack Obama into the White House allowing him to become the first black president of the United States, the Portuguese author defined the wave of change that brushed the entire country from west to east. During the Bush-Cheney era, thick...

On Sunday I visited the Tercer Milenio Park, the area only a few blocks away from the President's palace that internally displaced people occupied in protest in Bogota. Since mid-March, about 2,000 people (one third minors) live here in fragile huts made of nylon and pieces of wood. By...

Last week, in her speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Hillary Clinton held out an olive branch to Taliban militants willing to lay down their arms. In March in an interview with The New York Times, President Barack Obama suggested Washington might be willing to talk with...

On Monday, the president of Colombia Álvaro Uribe will come face to face with president Barack Obama. The meeting is scheduled at a very sensitive moment for Colombia. Used to considerable familiarity with president Bush, Colombia is probably one of the few countries in the world where the election...

I followed the Summit of the Americas while in Colombia. The picture of the handshake between U.S. President Barack Obama and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez dominated all the front pages of the region's newspapers. The friendly smiles of the two countries'...

Can a culture of life be affirmed by intolerance?

As a Catholic, I have been asking myself this question again recently as a result of the controversy that arose around the invitation Notre Dame University extended to president Barack Obama. In a letter to the president of the...

With the formation of a new government in Israel, what are the chances for peace in the Middle East? Last Friday, as director of the Center for International Conflict Resolution, I invited to Columbia University Shlomo Ben Ami, a historian and former foreign minister of Israel, to talk about...

The war on drugs is a failure. How then to severe the tentacles of the drug cartels? To legalize drugs is the solution put forward by some voices that are getting louder and louder. Maybe legalization can change the dynamic of the drug trade for the better, but it...

At the end of March, Hillary Clinton will be heading to Mexico to address the escalation of drug related violence and the expansion of the drug cartels, which are an increasing threat also to the United States. In preparation for her trip, Clinton should call to mind the visit...