Colombia (Lonely Planet, 5th Edition) - Jens Porup [11]
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COLOMBIAN COFFEE
Colombia’s coffee boom began in the early 20th century, and found its exclamation point when the mustached Juan Valdéz, and his mule, became the Colombian Coffee Federation’s icon in 1959 (voted the world’s top ad icon as recently as 2005). In 2004 Juan Valdéz went after Starbucks, opening more than 60 cafes in Colombia, the US and Spain – helping locals shift from a cup of weak coffee to espresso.
Despite competition from low-cost, lower-quality beans from Vietnam, Colombia’s high-quality arabica-bean industry still employs 570,000 and brings the country US$1.6 billion annually.
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The incomprehensible brutality stemmed from generations of Colombians being raised as either Liberals or Conservatives and imbued with a deep mistrust of the opposition. From 1946 to 1957, these ‘hereditary hatreds’ were the cause of countless atrocities, rapes and murders, particularly in rural areas.
The 1953 coup of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla was the only military intervention the country experienced in the 20th century, but it was not to last. In 1957 the leaders of the two parties signed a pact to share power for the next 16 years. The agreement, later approved by plebiscite (in which women were allowed to vote for the first time), became known as the Frente Nacional (National Front). During the life of the accord, the two parties alternated in the presidency every four years. In effect, despite the enormous loss of lives, the same people were returned to power. Importantly, the agreement also disallowed political parties beyond the Liberals and the Conservatives, forcing any opposition outside of the normal political system and sowing the seeds for guerrilla insurrection.
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Gabriel García Márquez depicts the back-and-forth brutality of Liberal and Conservative rivalries and vendettas in ongoing conflicts from 1885 to 1902 from the fictional village of Macondo in his magic realism novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
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GUERRILLAS & PARAMILITARIES
While the new National Front helped ease partisan tensions between Conservatives and Liberals, new conflicts were widening between wealthy landowners and the rural mestizo and indigenous underclass, two-thirds of whom lived in poverty by the end of La Violencia. Splinter leftist groups began emerging, calling for land reform. Colombian politics hasn’t been the same since. Much of what happened has been documented by international human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch.
New communist enclaves in the Sumapáz area, south of Bogotá, worried the Colombian government so much that the CIA-trained and funded military bombed the area in May 1964. The bombing emboldened some leftist groups, including one – under the leadership of Pedro Marín (or Manuel Marulanda, aka Sureshot) and the more military mind-set of Jacobo Arenas – called the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC; Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), which became increasingly organized, and started fighting back.
Other armed guerrilla groups included a fellow Marxist rival, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN; National Liberation Army), which built its popularity from a radical priest, Father Camilo Torres, who joined up (and was killed in his first combat experience). The urban-based M-19 (Movimiento 19 de Abril, named for the contested 1970 presidential election) favored dramatic statements, such as the robbery of a Simón Bolívar sword and seizing