"I guess they didn't expect a 26-year-old," recalls Polanía. Now all of 31, Polanía no longer needs an introduction. As the founding director of the Center for Arbitration and Conciliation of the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce, she has emerged a leader in Latin America's growing ADR community. Last year her staff of 40 handled some 2,000 conciliation proceedings and 300 arbitrations, resolving disputes worth around 2 billion Colombian pesos. The center also runs six ADR training programs in countries throughout the region and is helping to strengthen 60 smaller Colombian conciliation centers with funding from the IDB.

None of this existed when Polanía took an entry-level position at the Chamber of Commerce right out of law school. An academic interest in ADR led her to volunteer at what was then an ad hoc conciliator center at the chamber, and she immediately fell in love with the role.

"People would show up very angry," she recalled. "Some would cry, scream, pull out weapons, threaten to call guerrillas. I had no training, and anyway, lawyers aren't really taught how to deal with human passions and hatreds."

Nevertheless, Polanía quickly developed a knack for extracting voluntary agreements from even the most intransigent parties. In 1993, the chamber decided to create a formal conciliation center. Polanía was named director, "but I was also mediator, secretary and everything else," she recalls. Within a few years, the center was handling multimillion dollar disputes involving the government, foreign investors and Colombia's largest corporations.

Despite her busy schedule and the help of some 40 staffers, Polanía still personally handles some 100 conciliation sessions each year. "I keep doing it because I love it," she says. "Two furious, bitter people come in, and then you perform this magic of helping them to see things differently. You are doing something positive in people's lives."

--Paul Constance