Colombia is a country geographically, ethnically, and culturally diverse.  It has a perimeter of 1,141,748 km2 and is divided into territories, departments, districts, municipals, and indigenous territories.  The municipality is the main administrative political division in the country. Currently, there are 32 departments and 1,098 municipalities. Its population is predominantly mestizo.  Three large ethnic and social sectors, geographically and culturally different, can be identified in the bulk of the population: the Afro-Columbian communities, the indigenous populations, and the communities from San Andrés and Providencia, recently recognized as Gypsies or Roms. 

For Colombia, the 2004 Human Development World Report showed that indigence went from 21.8% in 1997 to 25.9% in 2003. This means that the country has not been able to stop the social crisis. According to the HDI, Colombia has moved down 9 places on the global scale.  The General Auditor in its report “Evaluation of Social Policy,” concluded that poverty has continued to rise, affecting 64.2% of the population.  Indigence has gone from 18.1% in 1997 to 31% in 2003, which means that two out of three people do not have sufficient income to satisfy essential basic needs.

For more than a century, Colombian society has lived with constant violence, and various forms of profound social conflicts that have made it difficult to conform to the Project of the Nation, with the possibility of embracing the diversity and complexity of the realities that coexist in the country.  This situation has generated exclusions, authoritarian practices, constant frustrations and conditions that develop insurgencies, crimes, para-militarism, drug-trafficking, and most recently, terrorism. These conditions have their own social codes and values, based on violence towards the civil population and institutions as a strategy for control of geographic and social spaces, as well as other interested areas.

Social organizations, still without strong political processes that would allow them to participate in the political arena with more or less feasible proposals, have found themselves extremely fragmented.  It is necessary, however, to point out some important gains that came from the most recent electoral process in the country.  In the three major cities of Colombia (Bogotá, Medellín and Cali), the traditional political parties have won the elections for the position of Mayor, as well as in the Cauca Department by independent sectors. The traditional parties have outlined the challenge, jointly with social organizations, of a democratic and transparent public management. From these proposals, the social development plans are highlighted, which aims to make visible issues that had been ignored previously, such as the socio-economic crisis in which a great part of the population lives and affects youths in particular. There is also a need to change the developmental model that would benefit the people and not infrastructure work, like a phenomenon that is increasingly affecting the cities and the entire country.

Since 1986, the trauma and violence has become the main public health problem for the general population of Colombia. The generalized violence affecting the country is especially prevalent in students, adolescents and youth.  However, these indices have been gradually diminishing for peace processes, negotiations and territories by one of the actors of the war, according to analysis done by diverse specialists.  The number of recognized acts of violence according to Legal Medicine is of concern; in 2000, 48,539 of youths under the age of 25. There is a clear difference in gender: common violence generally affects men, in which 63.7% of common violence among youths under 25, while inter-family domestic violence primarily affects 76.7% of women under 25 years of age. 

Formal guidelines exist today that guarantee youth participation. These can be found in the 1991 National Constitution, the 1997 Youth Law 375, and the 1994 Law 115 (the General Education Law).  These standards help regulate the two most important formal mechanisms for youth and adolescent participation: Municipal, Departmental and National Youth Councils and the Democratic Participation Mechanisms for Schools.  These mechanisms have been well diffused, appropriated and recognized by youth institutions and organizations, but on the contrary they have also been the subject of many debates and evaluations concerning their relevance and social and political legitimacy.

In addition to youth participation, it is also important to emphasize certain points, that although do not currently reflect current youth participation and movements, there are many possibilities and means that youths can or cannot be a part of fundamental decisions in the country. In the last electoral process in 2003, with elections of governors, mayors, councilmen and congressmen, the number of youths between 18 and 26 who participated was 2,860,799, where the majority was between the ages of 19 and 22. This can be explained because the 18 year olds are in the process of verifying their documentation, and youths over the age of 23 are more resistant, since they have a better knowledge of failed promises and a general scepticism of this process.  Among young women, the majority registered were between the ages of 19 and 26, where 20 year olds had the greatest participation and 18 year olds had the least interest.

At the institutional level, since the Colombian youth gained public visibility and greatly influenced the approval of the 1991 Constitution, the State has tried to focus its attention more towards new generations, changing the Colombian Youth and Sport Institute (in the 70’s and 80’s) to the Presidential Council for Infants, Youths and Women (early 90’s), to the Vice-Ministry of Youth (second half of the 90’s), and currently the Colombian Presidential Youth Programme, that articulates the diverse programmatic initiatives related to youths (now within the framework of the 10-Year Youth Plan 2005-2015).  The active participation of various specialized NGOs have allowed an accumulation of experiences and learning in these varied spheres. Although currently, many of the instruments are being revised, what is certain is that many Latin-American countries have learned or are learning, even today, of the Colombian trial experience in this domain.

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