WorldcrunchStay updated with comprehensive news on Colombia from Worldcrunch. Discover insights on Colombian politics, economic strategies, societal issues, and cultural landmarks with translations from top international sources. Highlights include Bogotá, Colombian history, and cultural events.
Peace is a process, never a single event. Negotiations for peace are always far more complicated than the public understands, and the results are not always miraculous. Even so, the majority of modern conflicts — 80%, according to the School for the Culture of Peace in Barcelona — eventually end after negotiations. The school’s reports […]
BOGOTA — With the expansion of Chiribiquete National Natural Park, Colombia’s National System of Protected Areas has gone a long way to preserve an additional 1.8 million hectares (4.4 million acres) of Amazonian jungle. The importance of this new area is not difficult to measure. In those 27,800 square kilometers of jungle located between Guaviare […]
BOGOTA — The LGBTI community (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual/Transgender and Intersexual) in Colombia has suffered disappearances, forced migrations, mutilations, humiliation and abuse. The phrase “damaged bodies, silent crimes’ has come to be used by this community to describe their suffering often made even worse by the civil war that has torn Colombia apart over the […]
Some say that entrepreneurs are born out of necessity. Looking at Hernán Jaramillo and Roberto Cuartas, it becomes clear that only perseverance makes them come to life. The two young men from Colombia are trained industrial engineers and the creators of TareasPlus.com, an online learning portal for young people and adults that is revolutionizing online […]
-Essay- BOGOTA — Have you heard? Your phone is spying on you, Apple isn’t as friendly as you think, and Facebook is getting scarier by the day! Today, information is an increasingly valuable currency, not only because it allows companies to generate strange intangible assets that are so difficult to replicate, but also because what […]
-OpEd- BOGOTA — “Thinking that everything can stay the same is the biggest utopia of all…” Margarita Marino de Botero is a Colombian environmentalist who aims to be as creative as she is dedicated. Environmentalism — dynamic and obsessed with changing reality — is continually touching upon the concept of utopia. This is, in fact, […]
BOGOTA — After a long, drawn-out build-up, Starbucks has confirmed it will be coming to Colombia. The arrival of Howard Schultz’s company’s in the South America country famous for its coffee production will be the start of a very interesting showdown with local chain Juan Valdez — as well as all the small coffee shops […]
Striking farmers in Colombia say free trade agreements are responsible for their woes. Better to look closer to home, including industrial cartels and all the contraband entering the country.
A school located in a remote stretch of the Amazon teaches indigenous children, many of whom come to learn Spanish, under extraordinarily rustic conditions.
With talks on in Havana to end the decades-old civil war in Colombia, a push is on to force negotiators to meet face-to-face with victims of the violence.
Global warming is a big problem in Latin America, but the private sector is busy developing alternative energy sources. Has the rush to innovate arrived in time?
When the well-meaning environmental concerns of city folk clash with the lives of the poor and indigenous who inhabit South America’s rain forests and mining territory.
BOGOTA – Negotiators for rebel group FARC — engaged now in historic peace talks with the Colombian government — received an interesting visit in Havana last month. During a pause in negotiations with Bogota officials in the Cuban capital, FARC loyalists met with a group of former members of the IRA. Indeed, the veterans of […]
We are well past the tipping point, where governments are violating privacy and limiting the people’s rights in the name of some faceless enemy.
President Santos’ decision to try to negotiate an end to a decades-long civil war is the only path for a nation that has suffered too much already.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 HEAVY FIGHTING IN SLOVIANSK At least one Ukrainian soldier was killed and 13 more were injured in the eastern city of Sloviansk overnight in what the country’s interim Interior Minister described as an “active offensive phase of the anti-terror operation,” The Guardian reports. There were also victims among the insurgency. This […]
KERRY AND LAVROV EXCHANGE BLAME In a phone conversation with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry urged Moscow to “tone down escalatory rhetoric,” criticizing Russia for failing “to de-escalate” the crisis, The Guardian reports. During the conversation, Lavrov replied that Ukrainian ultranationalists were responsible for the collapse of the deal […]
A book by a longtime friend of the Colombian legend includes never-before-released letters from when Garcia Marquez was writing his epic “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
BOGOTA – According to legend, Colombia is blessed with coffee thanks to sinners. The legend comes from Francisco Romero, the priest of Salazar de las Palmas in the Santander province, who had a strange penance for residents who confessed their sins: to sow coffee seeds. The priest wasn’t naive – it was yet another push […]
BOGOTA – If Latin America were a game of Monopoly, we would be watching as one player put all his chips in the bank. That is the big offensive of Colombian banks, which have expanded from 35 international branches in 2007 to 175 last March. In 2007, Bancolombia bought the Banco Agricola conglomerate in El […]
BOGOTA – Last month marked the third time in a half-century of armed conflict that the FARC rebels and Colombian government started a bona fide peace process. Colombia faces more than one threat to public safety, but the fight against the FARC insurgence is the most burdensome for the military budget, which surpassed 3.7% of […]
Tanja Nijmeijer joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) when she was barely out of her teens. Now, at 34, the Dutch woman is negotiating for the Marxist rebels in the peace talks with the Colombian government that began this week in Oslo. With her long, dark-blonde hair, brown doe-eyes and engaging smile, Nijmeijer […]
TAMAQUITO II – When a new baby is born in Tamaquito II, a Wayúu indigenous settlement in La Guajira, in northern Colombia, the child’s family digs a hole near its pichi (hut) and buries the umbilical cord. The Wayúu practice this ancestral ritual as a way to connect to the land, to remind themselves where […]
BOGOTA – In the middle of July, as the Colombian government was presenting a bundle of measures to reform the health-care industry, 5,000 people congregated in the Plaza de Bolivar in Bogota to hold a “White March.” One block away from the president’s office, the protest was led by a group of women in black, […]
-Analysis- LIMA – The negotiations that are set to begin formally in October are by no means the first attempt to demobilize members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and incorporate the guerilla organization into the political process. There’s no guarantee, therefore, that these talks will succeed where others have failed. And yet […]