This is the second in a series of posts about Colombia. The first is here.
After Bogotá, we headed to one of several regions in Colombia where coffee is the name of the game. This part of Colombia is very fertile; being near the equator but high in the Andes there are good growing conditions all year round. Coffee is fundamental to the economy, although in some areas another crop, coca, has been a scourge. More on that later.
On the coffee plantation we learned about the process of sorting beans for quality, but that even the “bad” ones get sold to the coffee growers’ collective, albeit at a lower price. I am starting to understand where Tim Horton’s coffee comes from.
Then we started to dive deeper into Colombia’s troubled and violent history. We were guests at a ranch run by Alejandro, who had returned to Colombia 7 years ago after spending half of his life in the US. Along with his parents, brothers and sisters, he left the ranch in the 1990’s as they feared for their lives, even after paying extortion to the FARC guerrillas. Alejandro went to the US to learn English and eventually ended up working for CNN in Atlanta. The rest of his family stayed in Colombia, but moved to the nearby city of Armenia. He is the only one who came back to the farm after Colombia reached an accommodation with FARC, and normality returned to the region.
He runs it now as a self-supporting operation, and is slowly reforesting the property, returning it to its original state. He says that by the time he dies, it will likely be a nature reserve not a farm.
More to come….
The drugs and violence were the primary reason Peggy and I never visited.
It’s very different today. That’s the primary message that the people we met hoped we would convey once we came home.