Bogotá...and some commentary on Colombia

As expected, Bogotá, turned out to be even bigger and more sophisticated than Medellín. For the most part, I spent 3 very tranquilo days walking around the old section of the city, La Candelaria, where my hostel was located.

One of the most important landmarks in Bogotá is without a doubt Plaza de Bolivar (shown above). It´s an impressive square enclosed by the Supreme Court building, a cathedral, the Senate building, and the municipality offices. It was a nice place for people watching.

My first full day in the city I visited the Botero Musueum, an art collection whose primary works displayed are the paintings of Fernando Botero, Colombia´s most famous artist.

I´m not always a huge art fan, but I really liked his paintings. He´s most famous because of how he plays with dimensions in his paintings, most notably by making people and objects look fat or inflated. Case in point below.



In this painting you´ve got a really fat woman, lying on a very wide bed, with almost no space left elsewhere in the room to even walk, and she´s reading a letter from a lover and crying, all the while eating these silly, fat looking orange slices. It´s pretty hilarious.

The shapes, dimensions, and colors make his paintings a lot of...well...fun.

Also during my time in Bogotá I took a train up the mountainside behind the city to the Monserrat monastery which overlooks the capital. The view from there really gives you a healthy respect for the sprawl of Bogotá and it´s 7.5 million inhabitants.

Yesterday (Tuesday), I took a quick day trip two hours outside of the city to a town called Zipaquirá. Zipaquirá is nestled alongside a mountain that is basically pure salt underneath. It has been used to extract salt since the 7th century, when the indigenous began gathering the salt water that ran from under the mountain and drying it out to form salt cakes.

The mine is famous today because a huge cathedral capable of fitting more than 7 thousand people has been built roughly 200 meters underground in the old mine shafts.

It´s supposedly the #1 tourist attraction in all of Colombia, and was definitely pretty impressive. We walked along with a guide more than 2 kilometers down the mine shafts to reach the cathedral.

In the afternoon, I came back into town on the Transmilenio public transportation system, or basically a huge line of buses that shuttle people throughout the city via dedicated lanes that only they can use. It´s no underground, but I found the system pretty impressive.

Once back in the city, I checked out the Gold Museum, run by the National Bank. It is one of the largest collections of gold in the world, mostly from indigenous sites located within the country.

So I stayed pretty busy during my time in Bogotá. I think I was trying to get back to the basics after our partying in Medellín.

Still, I managed to stay at a very active hostel, and every day found myself sitting down for beers to watch a World Cup match or the NBA finals.

Colombia´s History of Violence

I´ve been meaning to write some kind of commentary on the state of things in Colombia...so here goes.

Colombia has a pretty bad image as a very dangerous place to live or travel, and with good reason. It´s important to understand the country´s past to better understand what is happening now in Colombia.

I´ll only go as far back as 1948, when the Liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was poised to come to power, with a promise to unite the people of Colombia. Imagine someone with three times the charisma and popularity of Obama in a period of tense, uncertain times.

On April 9, 1948 Gaitán was assasinated while walking out of his law offices, unleashing massive riots in Bogotá. This unleashed a bloody conflict between Liberals and Conservatives throughout the country from the late 1940´s to early 1950´s, resulting in the deaths of more than 180,000 people. The period is simply called La Violencia.

In the late 1950´s a fragile peace was finally reached, but it could not stop the rise of guerilla groups, the most famous of which is the left-wing Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or the FARC.

In Colombia, the central goverment has a long history of not being able to extend control over it´s own borders. Or that is, to provide even basic security throughout the country. You can understand why this is once you realize Colombia is the size of Texas and California combined, and thick with jungle, mountains, rivers, and many hideouts for guerilla movements.

So the left-wing FARC and conservative central government waged what amounts to a constant civil war for decades. Bad, right? It gets much worse.

In response to the central governments inability to crush the FARC and left wing groups, rich landowners and members of the oligarchy took matters in their own hands, raising private armies known as paramilitaries.

These paramilitaries were allowed to operate in certain areas of the country against the FARC with the tacit approval of the national army forces. But as you can imagine the paramilitaries soon resorted to some very shady practices, such as organizing outright ¨death squads¨ to pass through areas known to harbor FARC forces, and eliminate suspected collaborators. (some members of a small village Derek and I visited outside Valledupar told us of past visits and killings by paramilitaries in that area)

So the country was now swarming with government forces, the left wing FARC, and right wing paramilitaries. The advent of cocaine in the 1970´s heated things up even more.

Once the size of the cocaine market became evident, cocaine cartel leaders began making hundereds of millions and investing them in their own set of armed groups and hired assassins.

As the FARC and even right-wing paramilitaries became aware of the huge potential profits, they too began operating in cocaine production to finance their organizations. Pretty soon the right wing paramilitaries had completely shaken free of their masters and become an end unto themselves. Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the drying up of it´s funding sources, the FARC would also take on cocaine production (not too mention kidnapping) as it´s primary financing mechanism.

It can probably be safely said that rock bottom was reached on November 6, 1985, when the Palace of Justice (or the building which houses the Supreme Court) was raided by the left-wing armed group M-19. More than 300 lawyers, judges, and administrators were taken hostage by 35 M-19 guerrilla fighters.

The building was surrounded by the national army forces, and after hearing the demands of M-19 and determining that negotiating or giving in to the group´s demands would only further weaken the government, it was decided the army would be allowed to try to remove the rebels by force.

During the raid by government forces, the Palace of Justice caught fire, and more than 100 hostages were killed, including 11 of the country´s 21 Supreme Court Justices.

Stepping back for a moment...Can you imagine what that would be like? It would be as if an armed group suddenly raided the US Supreme Court and killed four out of the nine justices.

Between the M-19 raid and assassinations of judges and lawyers by cocaine cartels, the Colombian justice system was effectively crippled. It took years for the justice system to regain it´s strength.

Assasinations of political officials (including the 1989 Presidential candidate) continued to afflict the government throughout the 1980s and 90s.

Why does all this matter? The point of this review of Colombian violence is not to romanticize or glorify any of this. Quite the opposite, the real reason is I personally simply can´t imagine violence of that scale.

It´s also important to taking into account the present circumstances in Colombia. The eight years of Alvaro Uribe´s presidency have seen incredible changes in the security conditions around the country.

Uribe´s government effectively cleansed itself of some corrupt elements, waged absolute war against the FARC and other groups that couldn´t be negotiated with, and also coordinated negotiated surrenders with many right-wing groups.

It has not always been pretty or clean. Many people argue (probably correctly) that some paramilitaries have been able to literally get away with murder.

However the changes speak for themselves. The number of yearly kidnappings has dropped from 3,700 in the year 2000, to less than 175 in the 2009. FARC, the only remaining active rebel movement, has dropped from a force of 16,900 to 8,900. More importantly, the have been pushed deep into the mountains and cannot strike at vital regions in the center of the country.

The last 8 years have seen Colombia rescued from a nightmare, and it appears ready to experience a boom - especially economically. During the next 5 to 10 years, I expect the country to become a major tourist destination. I´m really happy to have been able to travel in Colombia some before word gets out, and the masses come flooding in.

Culturally, Colombia has always been a regional leader - with writers such as Gabriel García Marquez, musicians like Juanes and Shakira, and it´s impressive architecture and art in it´s cities. However, in the future, look for Colombia´s image to change in a big way.

I think that about does it for my Colombia rant.

Quito, Ecuador

This morning I arrived in Quito, Ecuador after flying Bogotá. I´ll be in Ecuador roughly two weeks. One of the highlights that I´m really looking forward to is visiting a Peace Corps friend from Costa Rica who extended her service for 1 year here in Ecuador. This weekend I plan to visit her in her community (high in the mountains) and be around for an indigenous festival celebrating the first day of summer. Should be pretty awesome.