Law, Development and Neoliberalism: the case of the reform to the Colombian
Criminal Justice System
Abstract
In January 2005 a new reform to the criminal justice system came into force in Colombia. As a result of this reform, that
implied a change in the structure of the 1991 Constitution, the system was transformed from being an accusatorial
European system to be a sort of American accusatorial system. According to the defenders of the reform, the Colombian
legal system has proven to be unable to deal with the enormous amount of criminal acts that are committed every day in
the country. For the reformers, we need to modernize the Colombian Criminal Justice System to respond to the
challenges of new forms of criminality and the challenges of globalization. Crime and inefficiency of the criminal justice
system not only affect the stability of the country, but at the same time it is considered an obstacle to its development.
Several questions arise when we see this reform: why is the criminal justice system transformed as a whole? How is this
connected to the war on drugs where some aspects of the CJS were changed as a result of American pressures? What are
the agencies involved in the reform? What kind of development is promoted? What is the role of the law and the state in
this process?
We hope to provide answers to these questions and show the role of the state and particularly criminal law in the
project of globalization. The role of the law and the criminal justice system has been hardly analyzed from a world
system perspective. In analysis of the state and the law, the stress is put in the role of private or constitutional law, but
criminal law, the criminal justice system, and the studies of crime and criminality are hardly mentioned. When criminal
law is analyzed it is done from an instrumental perspective, showing the role of criminal law in protecting the interests of
the bourgeoisie. Other perspectives analyze the law as part of a process of constitution of identities, but in this process the
attention is placed in the Nation State and National Law as the units of analysis. In this paper we want to set the basis for
an analysis of criminal law from a world historical perspective which means that we are going to pay attention to the
historical trajectories of criminal law in Colombia in order to show the agents involved in this process and to determine
the role of the state in the process of negotiation between law as global and local.
It is our claim that in criminal law we see a dispute between global designs. On the one hand the European one
where liberalism is part of the doctrine of criminal substantial law (the idea of penal dogmatic) and the American one,
where efficiency affects the whole system. By showing this process we hope to highlight the importance of criminal law
to understand the process of constitution of global identities, and how global designs are in tension at the local level.
Farid Samir Benavides Vanegas
Erika Marquez
Department of Political Science
Department of Sociology
University of Massachusetts
University of Massachusetts
Amherst.
Amherst
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association Washington, 1-4
September 2005
This is a work in progress. Please do not cite without consulting with the authors.
Law, Development and Neoliberalism: the case of the reform to the Colombian
Criminal Justice System
Introduction.-
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