Every Sunday Bogotá, Colombia's capital city, holds its weekly ciclovía where major streets are closed to vehicular traffic from 7AM to 2PM so citizens can enjoy biking or walking without worry from cars. This Sunday, the Partido Verde, the Green Party, held its first major political rally of the campaign using the ciclovía. As you can see, the turnout was extraordinary and the enthusiasm boundless.

The international press tends to portray Colombia as completely enthralled with Alvaro Uribe. Certainly, Uribe remains popular with an approval rating of about 60 percent as most Colombians, including myself, are deeply appreciative of the gains in the security situation. But many Colombians are also acutely aware of the limits of Uribe's policies and the serious lapses in human rights that have occurred under his watch. During Uribe's tenure, 2.5 million Colombians became refugees in their own country, displaced either by the guerrillas or paramilitarism. The false positive scandal in which the army lured innocent young men to their deaths in order to pass them off as FARC rebels and thus collect bounties remains for too many Colombians an unacceptable violation of the trust Colombians have placed in their armed forces. 

On the economic front, Colombia enjoyed record economic growth under Uribe but it was uneven. In the past decade, Colombia was the only country in South America where income inequality actually widened. The country's GINI coefficient went 0.51 in 2001 to 0.56 in 2008. Thirty-seven percent of Colombians still live below the poverty line with nearly a fifth of the population living in endemic poverty classified as living on $2.00 or less a day. Whatever the progress under Uribe, the reality is that the country still is not living up to its potential and leaving too many Colombians further and further behind.

And then there is that nagging corruption that has continued to plague the country. As of last year, 48,000 government officials, including 800 mayors and 30 governors, were being investigated for corruption. One third of the members of the Colombian Congress during the Uribe Administration were expelled for having ties to paramilitary groups or nacro-trafficking cartels. Scandals have touched politicians across the political spectrum. It's not just those in the Uribe Administration but also members of the far left Polo Democrático Alternativo (PDA) who have been implicated. The current leftist mayor of Bogotá, Samuel Moreno Rojas, the leading PDA official in the country, is running one of the country’s most corrupt and dysfunctional municipal administrations. 

In the above, you have the makings of the green revolution that simply states that every life is sacred and every peso in the public treasury is also sacred. Colombia is a country fed up with politics as usual and if the above is any indication a country ready to embark on a different path, perhaps on a bike.