Colombia's democracy has always been a democracy with adjectives. Recently, references to its "controlled" or "restricted" nature have been replaced in the literature with descriptions of this democracy as "besieged" (Archer 1995) or "under assault" (Kline 1995). The shift in semantics is revealing. In this chapter, we argue that democracy in Colombia is still limited by a series of characteristics that merit the continued use of adjectives. Nevertheless, given that these limits have changed in nature, any adjectives used to characterize the current political regime in that country must be fundamentally different from those employed during the three decades spanning 1958 to 1991.