When I ask Foreign Secretary Bermúdez about the impact of the scandal on the free-trade negotiations, he angrily answers: "First, this government is the one that has most battled the paramilitaries. They were taking over the government, taking over the regions, people knew where they were and nobody battled them efficiently. This government is the first one that decided to battle them so strongly and to propose to them that if they are truly interested in peace that they should cease hostilities. The government initiated the process. It is this government that has managed to demobilise 30,000 men. Therefore, there can be no doubts [as to our position]."

I ask a taxi-driver about the impact of the Uribe presidency. "Well," he answers matter-of-factly, "at least now we can drive on the motorway. Before you couldn't drive anywhere, like from Bogotá to Medellín. Depending on where you were driving, the guerrillas or the paramilitaries would set up barricades and they'd stop every car, check ID and enter it into laptops before deciding whether to kidnap you, kill you or simply rob you." On a country walk, a fellow rambler tells me: "President Uribe has given us our country back." 

Nevertheless, precautions are still tight.   At the Andino shopping centre, the bogotanos spilling out of the Juan Valdéz Café are watched by machine-gun-toting guards as bomb-sniffing dogs inspect the boot of every car entering the underground car park. Unfazed, they continue to shop in Bulgari or the Spanish high-street chain Zara, which is tremendously successful here.

Other shop windows betray the national obsession. The nation's two bestselling books are Captive, Clara Rojas's account of her kidnapping with Ingrid Betancourt, captivity and jungle childbirth, and Out of Captivity, about the captivity of Gonsalves, Stansell and Howes and their rescue in last year's acclaimed Operación Jaque (Operation Check — as in checkmate), the military rescue where not a single shot was fired and the Farc were duped into mistaking the Colombian military for a humanitarian organisation in Venezuelan helicopters.

Much of the vastly increased security has been achieved along two fronts: by Plan Patriota's relentless pursuit of the Farc, which has lost three of its leading commanders in the past 18 months, and the AUC's demobilisation under the Peace and Justice Law, where reinsertados, former paramilitaries who admit their crimes, make restitution to the affected families and enter a government programme for their "reinsertion" into Colombian society. Only the most important and violent commanders face that great persuasive negotiating stick: extradition to the US for trial, every narco's greatest fear.