Forget rule of law, income distribution or social justice, turning guns into guitars will solve Colombia's violence

Link and another link
This iss typical cockamammy Colombian cultural policy. Prettify things, sweep the violence under the rug, ignore any practical solutions for addressing the violence, and expect this kind of hokey cheap symbolic peace PR to solve everything. Violence, I'm sorry, is a lot more deeply-rooted than a lack of guitars or a preponderence of guns, and this kind of thing, while it might seem innocuous, is actually harmful in the way that it disctracts people's attention from more fundamental ways of trying to address this situation. (Notice that the picture of the guy who invented the rifle-guitar is of a middle-class white guy, which is its own way of brushing inequality under the rug.) This is a very typical usage of music in Colombian cultural policy, as you'll all see in an article that will be coming out fairly soon in the Iberian Society for Ethnomusicology's journal TRANS. The sad part is that, according to the article, this is being taken up by the UN, whcih should know better. Of course, the status of the UN in Colombia is often up fpr grabs, President Uribe has made it difficult for them to work there, at least as far as human rights stuff goes, and there have been quite a few changes in leadership and personnel in the UN High Comission for Human Rights.