In a time of emerging-market juggernauts, Colombia gets little notice. Its $244 billion economy is only the fifth-largest in Latin America, a trifle next to Brazil, the $2 trillion regional powerhouse. Yet against all odds Colombia has become the country to watch in the hemisphere. In the past eight years the nation of 45 million has gone from a crime- and drug-addled candidate for failed state to a prospering dynamo. The once sluggish economy is on a roll. Oil and gas production are surging, and Colombia’s MSCI index jumped 15 percent between January and June, more than any other stock market this year. This is more than a bull run. Since 2002, foreign direct investment has jumped fivefold (from $2 billion to $10 billion), while GDP per capita has doubled, to $5,700. The society that once was plagued by car bombs, brain drain, and capital flight is now debating how to avoid “Dutch disease,” the syndrome of too much foreign cash rolling in. Stable, booming, and democratic, Colombia has increasingly become “a bright star in the Latin American constellation,” as emerging-market analyst Walter Molano of BCP Securities calls it. Michael Geoghegan, CEO of HSBC, recently picked Colombia as a leader of a nascent block of midsize powers, the CIVETS (after the smallish, tree-dwelling cat), which stands for Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa. “These are the new BRICs,” he said. There is something else that is now separating Colombia from the rest of the pack: in a region known to swoon for chest-thumping autocrats like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, and populist charmers like Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina, this nation has come to rely not on personalities but on institutions grounded in the rule of law. Exhibit A: the election of Juan Manuel Santos as president. A former defense minister known as a technocrat, he labored for years in the shadows of his predecessor, Álvaro Uribe, the massively popular and seemingly irreplaceable leader. Uribe’s hardline policies against drugs and thugs rescued the nation from almost certain ruin, and his 70 percent–plus approval rating seemed to go to his head. But his aggressive, if undeclared, attempts to lobby the Congress and the courts to change the Constitution to allow him to run for a third term grated on the Colombian elite. Against all predictions, the Constitutional Court turned down Uribe’s reelection bid, a show of institutional nerve that struck a chord in a region still populated by tone-deaf leaders. “Can you imagine the Argentine courts saying no to Cristina Kirchner?” says Johns Hopkins’s Latin America scholar Riordan Roett of the populist Argentine president, who often has bullied the courts and cowed Congress into submission. But saying n to Uribe was hardly a automatic s for Santos. Low-key and bureaucratic, Santos was often dismissed a