Medellín authorities want tourists and youngsters to be mindful of the victims of drug trafficking, not view mobsters as merely rogues or ‘Robin Hoods.’
Tag: colombia
Colombia’s biggest project to make livestock farming sustainable is showing that farmers can raise cattle and even boost dairy production without destroying the forest.
After voting to ban metals mining, residents in the mountainous area west of Bogota are staking their future on farming and tourism.
Expected to return to Cali after serving prison time, some old gangsters will find a ‘new generation’ of criminals running businesses in town. Will that mean trouble,
Protests in Nicaragua against a proposed tax hike to finance the social security system have revealed the people’s disgust with President Ortega’s regime. His brutal response does not bode well.
The Colombian government’s fondness for ‘happiness’ polls may be an attempt ot distract people from poor basic services that are a public responsibility.
Countries like Colombia, traumatized by decades of violence, have yet to shake off the tyrant’s favored arm of fear. Now it also spreads on social networks.
BOGOTA — Maybe money does grow on trees. This week, in the Ciudad del Río sector of Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, passersby were surprised to see a tree “flowering” with banknotes. Fastened to the tree’s branches (with laundry clips) were real peso bills. Too good to be true? Some people seemed to think so […]
A quirky hostel in Colombia offers guests bucolic surroundings, Indian tents to sleep in and a generously stocked bar.
Indigenous communities in the country’s Caribbean coastal area dug in for more than decade to keep their traditional lands from being trashed.
Venezuelans are sloshing their way across the Táchira River to seek jobs in Colombia, or smuggle food and fuel. Out of sight, but very much in control, are a pair of powerful criminal gangs.
-Analysis- Good news for the people of Cape Town: “Day Zero,” when South Africa’s second most-populated city is expected to run out of water has been pushed back. But it’s only a very temporary reprieve. The city is now expected to go waterless — and confront all the chaos that it implies — on July […]
Civil conflict has lasted so long in Colombia that many ordinary people now view gratuitous violence as customary, and in some cases even admirable.
Bitcoin has proved popular in Colombia, especially in small retail operations. But is it being used by criminals?
Barranquilla’s gay events at carnival time have shed social shaming and police harassment to become part of the intangible patrimony of this historic Caribbean city.
Asian long-horned beetles in North America. Tropical parakeets in the capital cities of Europe. The plague of frogs Bart accidentally unleashed that time the Simpsons visited Australia. Yes, invasive species are a growing problem in our globalized world. And yet there’s something absurdly uncommon about the animal invaders that, over the past quarter-century, have made […]
Decades ago, thousands of war-weary Colombian made their way to Venezuela in search of better opportunities. Nowadays, the flow of migrants runs in the opposite direction.
BOGOTÁ — A new in-depth study of the well-being of Colombian coffee farmers could help provide the prescription for good health for us all. Understanding the fundamental elements of healthy living could lead to something of a “positive pandemic,” according to researchers of a project that began in 2012 after medical experts gathered in Toronto […]
Colombian cultural officials have been busy trying to recover an ancient burial treasure displayed in a Madrid museum.
The Afro-Caribbean village of El Paraíso is seeking reparations as it tries to put itself back together after decades of being caught in crossfire of Colombia’s civil war.
We’re drawn to it, tempted to wade in its bittersweet waters. And yet, for the most part, nostalgia just makes us miserable. Some wisdom from Latin America.
QUITO — Stashes of cocaine kept in boats and dinghies in the remote Galápagos Islands. Dozens of operatives transporting narcotics on rivers across the border into Colombia. Over the past three years, powerful Mexican drug cartels have systematically moved supplies and operations into Ecuador. According to Quito-based daily El Comercio, at least four Mexican cartels […]
Colombia’s best known painter, Fernando Botero, was in France to open a joint exhibition of his works alongside those of Picasso. It is bound to be a reckoning.
Businesses in Colombia have been invited to display gay-friendly signs as a traditionalist society, slowly, grows more tolerant.
Building underground rail systems is a major investment, but increasingly it is one that is justified economically — and otherwise.
BOGOTÁ — The dragon fruit, or pitaya — that exotic fruit resembling a yellow or red flame and touted for its many health benefits — might just be the great new hope of Colombia’s economy. Though the worldwide market for pitaya has long been growing for several years in such countries as China, the United […]
Companies like Tres Montes in Santander are focusing on quality, not just quantity, and improving the lives of small-scale growers in the process.
Health and medicine were constant themes of the famed Colombian novelist. He also spent his life trying to understand how the human brain works, and why the memory breaks down…until he himself was afflicted by Alzheimer’s.
Plans to build highways through the Amazon rainforest are clear violations of pledges made in Paris to end deforestation by 2020. But the situation on the ground is not a one-way street.
The Marxist leader killed in an ambush in 1967 achieved icon status as a warrior for the revolution. But it’s his proposals about the economy that have lasting value.
-OpEd- BOGOTÁ — After more than half-a-century of fighting, Colombia’s FARC guerillas have surrendered their weapons and officially transformed themselves into a formal political party. But still, the U.S. government apparently isn’t satisfied. “The FARC hasn’t followed through on the issue of drugs,” the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Kevin Whitaker, said matter-of-factly in a recent […]
-OpEd- BOGOTÁ — In August 1894, while traveling to Venezuela, the Colombian poet José Asunción Silva spent time in Cartagena de Indias, the colonial port on Colombia“s Caribbean coast. He wrote about his impressions of the city to his mother and sister. He had taken a liking to the locals, who were cheerful and informal, […]
-Essay- BOGOTÁ — I always had mixed feelings about the Netflix series Narcos. The first two seasons were based on the life and times of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, and the show has just released a third season. Initially, I did not want to watch a series depicting what I had watched on the […]
El Espectador, Sep. 6, 2017 Pope Francis begins a five-day visit Wednesday in Colombia, as the country looks to move beyond decades of armed conflict between leftist rebels and the government.
-Essay- BOGOTA — “Despacito,” the title of this summer’s hit song by Luis Fonsi, means “slowly” in Spanish. Listening to it is like drinking an unsavory broth. Slowly. It’s my own silly fault really for being exposed to it, namely by opening a Spotify account and asking my children, aged 9 and 6, to create […]
-OpEd- BOGOTÁ — Father Jorge, dear Pope Francis, less than a month remains before your visit to Colombia. Before Sept. 6, you still have time to make your excuses and cancel. Believe me, you really needn’t expose yourself to a trip that wil inevitably be both a failure and a risk. Colombia is irredeemable. We […]
A Bogotá family invented a system to drain rainwater from any rooftop and store it in an ‘Ekowall’ of plastic bottles.
A wealth of hidden, unfamiliar fruits could help protect Colombia’s embattled rainforests by luring peasants and settlers away from coca farming.
In spite of the thousands of miles and cultural distances between Colombia and Japan, Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece has become a national treasure among Japanese readers and artists.
A project that encourages villagers to protect local river sources is helping revive community life and traditional culture.