In her autobiography/homage to a president, "What I Saw at the Revolution," Peggy Noonan wrote what compelled her to move to Washington DC and become a speech writer: "Every generation gets a president. My grandmother's was FDR; for my parents it was JFK; for me and for the young people I worked with in the White House, it was Reagan. We came to Washington because of him. He moved us. We loved him."

Well, I didn't grow up in the United States, and I was too young to remember Reagan anyway, so I can't claim him as "my president." However, my home country of Colombia has a man right now who fits that historic role for me and my generation. His name is Alvaro Uribe Velez.

He was born in Medellin, capital of the state of Antioquia on July 4th, 1952. He got his start in politics in 1976, at the age of 24, when he became head of the Real Estate Office of the Public Works Department of Medellin. He held other positions in government, and made a mark as Senator in the late 1980’s by updating the Colombian labor laws for the first time in 40 years, reducing the size of the state, reinforcing the armed forces, and rooting out corruption.

In 1999 , after 4 successful years as governor of the department of Antioquia where he instituted major reforms and was very popular.  As a result,  Uribe set his sights on the presidency.  He left the Liberal party to run under his own banner because, in his own words, “There has been a very ambivalent position against violence, which changes according to surveys. Personal interests are put before responsibilities with the country. There is talk about corruption but nothing is being done to defeat it, social democracy is confused with state politics and bureaucracy”

This was when I first started hearing about him, as I grew up in Santander, a different area of Colombia.  My first thoughts were “who is this guy and why do people like him so much?”

But then I started listening to his ideas. His "Democratic Security" initiative, which he sold as “Strong Hand, Big Heart” made sense to me. It was similar to Reagan’s “Peace through Strength” but more aggressive.   The president at the time, Andres Pastrana, had created a disastrous situation in an attempt to make peace by giving the Marxist FARC their own sovereign chunk of land the size of Switzerland right in the heart of my beloved Colombia. The terrorists used the area as staging grounds for murderous raids into other parts of the country, a safe area to train new recruits, and as a place to hold their kidnap victims.  They weren’t exactly demonstrating the “social justice” they claimed to be fighting for. Meanwhile, our economy was in horrible shape, government spending had skyrocketed, and tourism and foreign investment were drying up. Geopolitical analysts across the globe were saying Colombia was on the verge of becoming a failed state.

Uribe knew this was nuts. His own father had been kidnapped and murdered by the FARC, his aunt and cousin in law had also been kidnapped, and his brother had been badly hurt in a kidnap attempt.  He had no illusions about the monsters that had plagued my Country for decades, holding us back economically, and leaving us isolated in the cities, afraid to travel by car because we knew the FARC and ELN would be waiting to drag us into the jungle and tie us to trees like some kind of animal while taking our family savings for a ransom.   This terrorist guerilla had also touched my life in a more personal manner: two of my relatives had been kidnapped.

Pastrana had given peace a chance and found out it doesn’t work when only one side wants it. Uribe had a different plan. He promised the day after his election the army would invade Caguan, the converted terrorist stronghold Pastrana had given the FARC.  I was now an enthusiastic supporter of candidate Uribe.

The FARC anticipated their new enemy. They tried to assassinate him while campaigning in Barranquilla by bombing his car, and they greeted his inauguration by launching rocket attacks on the Plaza de Bolivar, Colombia’s equivalent of the White House.

But Uribe stayed resolute. On Election Day, he won by a landslide.

In his inaugural address he promised to “…retake the unifying lasso of the law, the democratic authority, the freedom and the social justice… We didn’t come to whine, we came to work”

We now had a president who would do whatever it required to take our country back.  The FARC had reached their high-water mark.