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 his studio, we stopped at a fancy bar on beautiful Liberty Avenue and while sipping an espresso a deep roar cut off our conversation. Naive and grown up in an uneventful small town of Northern Italy, I could not interpret that thundering, but in few seconds Pintacuda's bodyguards shoved us in the armored car, which at great speed headed to a security bunker. Over the radio, the agitated voice of a man alerted that a car bomb had gone off. Pintacuda and I remained petrified. A few weeks earlier, judge Giovanni Falcone had been killed. Whose turn was it now?
While I enjoyed the coffee, judge Paolo Borsellino had arrived at his mother's building, and as soon as he stepped out of the car a bomb exploded killing the judge, the five members of his security detail and destroying the facades of the surrounding buildings. The following day, when I made it to the scene of the attack, I saw the devastation and my heart sunk into deep sadness. I felt lost and powerless.

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 there was a new game in town and that scandals such as the euphemistically called false positives - the kidnapping and killing of almost 2000 innocent young men by members of the Army - would not be tolerated. Colombian officials present at the meeting paled, and Bermudez kept his gaze fixed at the floor.

In Bogota, the perception is that with the Obama administration the mood in Washington changed dramatically. Gone were the days of great cultural and political tuning between Uribe and Bush. Gone the days in which glorious reports reached the desks of the State Department and the Pentagon. For Washington's changed attitude, in Colombia many blame the democrats and Obama himself. There is no doubt, that the message in Washington changed since Obama is at the White House, but not just for Colombia. And yes, this administration--though slow in defining a coherent policy towards Latin America--is putting greater emphasis on human rights and the role of the judiciary.

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 the Obama syndrome.

I am passionate about politics and become quite restless, and thus I resolved to take advantage of a blog's capacity to break down barriers. I decided to fast forward, to day after the elections, that is on May 31st, and to explain why Antanas Mockus became the president of Colombia on the first round, defeating Juan Manuel Santos, the candidate of the oligarchy, who thought the presidency was his, even before starting campaigning.

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 with the guerrillas and who successfully negotiated the realease of FARC hostages, Piedad - I thought - must be already in one of the airports from where helicopters provided by Brazil will soon take off and reach an unknown location in the thickness of Colombia where the FARC guerrilla will finally release two soldiers; Pablo Emilio Moncayo, who has been living in captivity for 12 years, and Josue Daniel Calvo, captured 11 months ago and injured by enemy fire. The FARC promised also to hand over the remains of Julian Ernesto Guevara, a police officer, who died four years ago in captivity. According to the Colombian government, the liberation should happen before Monday.