barcelonahomes.net

Colombia has long been associated with violence, drugs, and death. Until recent years, relatively few leisure travellers included a holiday apartment in Bogota, the country’s capital, in their South American travel itineraries; But a PR campaign, directed by Bogota, seems to have somewhat successfully distanced leisure travellers from the serious realities of the country’s problems.  Now increasing numbers of foreigners arrive just to drink aguardiente, snort llello, and party.

Perhaps helped along by the expanding literary Hay Festival, which now hosts a sister festival in the Colombian city of Cartagena, Colombia has stepped into the tourist mainstream.  Swish holiday accommodation in Bogota and Cartagena, including Cartagena and Bogota apartment rentals as well as swanky hotels and more basic hostels, could vie with their European equivalents.  Columbia’s flourishing tourism industry points to renewed economic confidence, but how many Colombian people benefit?

Not much has changed for the average citizen of Colombia.  A ravaged society has in effect endured over 30 years of civil war, enabled by military aid from North America under the ‘War on Drugs’ smoke screen.  Under President Bush Junior, the cover was officially changed from counter-narcotics to counter-insurgency, or ‘anti-terrorism’, otherwise referred to as ‘internal security’ - meaning war against your own population.

The highly militarised ‘aid programme’ subsidises the North American military and industrial complex, and keeps a pro-Rich World (anti its own population) Colombian establishment firmly in place.  Institutions, meaningful social investment, and effective people and political opposition have been swept clean away.

The law of supply (in the Poor World) and demand (in the Rich World) of course means farmers keep harvesting coca.  Now Bogota accommodation owners are reporting rising numbers of cocaine tourists.  This coarse side of tourism reflects the oligarchy governing Colombia for its own ends.

US contractors carry out the fumigation of so-called illegal crops inside Colombia.  The imprecise aerial fumigation targets the small fish in the drug ocean - the farmers - and is a proven failure in its stated aims a hundred times over.  US chemical companies are commissioned for the production of the harmful defoliants used.

The links between the North American trained military and the paramilitary are irrefutable and long proven including ground communications between them.  Everyone knows they are one and the same, with the paramilitary carrying out the atrocities, the slaughter of civil society people, unhindered.  “An illegal industry of death serves the legal industry of death,” wrote Eduardo Galeano.

The forced exodus of rural people to urban areas frees up strategic lands for foreign investment, as cities become ever overcrowded with the dispossessed masses including the “throw away” street children.

Tourists might mind their money-belts and cameras, step over some hapless vagabond, and avoid completely the least desirable areas.  But, in truth, the visitor knows no comparable risk to the daily risks encountered by the lowest rungs of Colombian society.

Death squads in Colombia call themselves ’social cleaning groups,’ and protect themselves under the legal mask of ’security companies.’  Under contract to the highest bidder - landowners, traders, and the like - they can get rid of any living nuisance, be they adult or child, should they be exacting a negative impact on business.

In the capital of violence, the tourists have Bogota accommodation to go back to, and then they fly away home.   The street children have no such temporary refuge or destination.  Seeking any available hideaway including the darkness of the sewers, they squirrel away their lost childhoods, get high, and hopefully sleep uninterrupted by water, rats, or violence.

Colombia: World-renowned for its coffee, the number one exporter of cocaine despite the War on Drugs and fall of Pablo Escobar, and new best Latin American tourist destination.  Thanks then to the undesirable masses, the heart and lungs of Colombia and our world.  Without them we would be without our relative wealth and the luxuries afforded by it.