Andres Pastrana Arango was born on 17 August 1954 and is a Colombian politician who was the 30th President of Colombia from 1998 to 2002, following in the footsteps of his father, Misael Pastrana Borrero, who was president from 1970 to 1974.
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Andres Pastrana later acquired a degree in law at the Our Lady of the Rosary University in 1977, and attended Harvard University as a 1978 Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Fellow.
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Andres Pastrana founded the magazine Guion and a programadora known as Datos y Mensajes, whose flagship program was the newscast Noticiero TV Hoy.
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Andres Pastrana specialized in press articles on the production and trafficking of cocaine for which he gained many journalistic awards.
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Andres Pastrana was kidnapped on January 18,1988 in Antioquia by the Medellin Cartel, which was pressuring the Colombian government into preventing the extradition of Pablo Escobar and other drug lords to the United States.
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Andres Pastrana immediately accused Samper of using drug money to finance his campaign and provided audio recordings to the authorities that subsequently attracted much media attention and eventually led to a scandal known as 8.
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Andres Pastrana's presidency is remembered for his negotiations with the two left-wing guerrilla groups FARC and ELN, culminating in the grant of a demilitarized safe haven to the guerrillas the size of Switzerland, and for his breaking off the negotiations.
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Andres Pastrana was heavily criticized for all the seemingly-pleasure trips that he took around the world during his term.
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Some political analysts theorized that Uribe considered that Andres Pastrana would be a useful diplomat in Washington because he would help to renegotiate Plan Colombia and in general to maintain US aid to Colombia, which has contributed to the successes of the Uribe administration.
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In July 2006, a few days after Uribe had appointed former President Ernesto Samper as Colombian ambassador to France, Andres Pastrana told Uribe that he was "morally impeded" from participating in a government along with ex-President Samper.
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Andres Pastrana resigned and returned to Colombia, and Samper rejected his own appointment.
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Andres Pastrana is a board member in the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, and the honorary president of the Union of Latin American Parties.
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Andres Pastrana is a member of the Fondation Chirac's honour committee, and of the Club de Madrid, a group of more than 80 former leaders of democratic countries, which works to strengthen democratic leadership worldwide.
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Andres Pastrana now maintains a distant and hostile relation with his own party, even referring to it as "absolutely corrupt".
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Andres Pastrana has levied accusations of corruption against two of the most prominent party leaders, Efrain Cepeda and Hernan Andrade.
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In 2013, Pastrana was awarded the Hanno R Ellenbogen Citizenship Award jointly by the Prague Society for International Cooperation and Global Panel Foundation.
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