Law, Development and the Coloniality of Power: A Post-Occidentalist view.

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? ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]