Colombia

 Colombia is one of the most devout countries in Latin America. Here, where from 1610-1821 the Inquisition held sway. When the country became independent the citizens took away the instruments of torture and burned them.

Colombia's 1887 concordat firmly linked Church and state. Though on paper this tie was loosened by the 1973 concordat, in practice Church influence is “rarely questioned”. In the capital city the Virgin has even been appointed “The Queen of Transportation” in an attempt to convince drivers that traffic safety involves a bit more than hanging a religious icon on the rear-view mirror. The logo of the municipal transport system of Bogotá reads, “The Virgin of El Carmen protects me because I obey the traffic rules.”

	Some Colombian concordat summaries
	In 1887 Colombia's first Concordat gave back to the Church much of the power it had enjoyed in the colonial period, including broad civil powers in the more than 60 percent of Colombia’s area designated as “mission territories”. The standard work in Spanish details all the concordats up to 1988: here are a few summaries in English from the web that show how Church and state were interwoven in Columbia.
	Concordat (1973) : text
	This concordat could not be challenged under the 1887 Constitution which had been expressedly designed to accommodate an earlier concordat. However, the new 1991 Constitution, with its emphasis on human rights, and the establishment of a Constitutional Court the same year finally permitted rulings against many articles of the 1973 concordat.