A prologue of a book by someone who is not the book’s author can play different functions. One of these functions is explaining the main contributions and importance of the book and situating it within one or more bodies of literature. In this sense, this book by Astrid Liliana S?nchez Mej?a is a very significant, original and insightful contribution to our understanding of two of the most important phenomena in global and regional criminal justice trends. The first phenomenon is the victims’ rights movements that have led to substantial changes in criminal justice in many places around the world. The second phenomenon is the wave of adversarial criminal procedure reforms in Latin America, arguably the most important change that all Spanish-speaking Latin American countries underwent in the area of criminal procedure in the last 25 years—a trend that can also be considered part of a broader global trend toward adversarial reforms in other jurisdictions beyond Latin America. This book describes and critically analyzes the role that victims’ rights discourse played in the adoption and implementation of the adversarial criminal procedure reform in Colombia, and, in turn, the effects that this Colombian adversarial reform has had on the actual rights of victims of crime. The book argues that crime victims’ discourses played a crucial role among the arguments and legitimizing discourses for the adoption of the adversarial criminal procedure code, but that the adversarial criminal process reform paid mostly lip-service and had mixed and problematic effects on the rights of victims of crime in Colombia. This is the main argument of the book and it constitutes a very significant and original contribution to our understanding of not only criminal justice in Colombia, but also the possible relationships between adversarial systems and crime victims’ rights more generally.