Colombia

To prolong influence over Colombia, every US administrations from Nixon to Obama has embraced a ‘war on drugs,’ or more recently a ‘war on terror,’ as a means to deploy counterinsurgency campaigns to silence antagonistic sectors of said population. It is increasingly clear, when concerning the recent actions of Bogotá and Washington to facilitate seven fortified bases controlled by the United States on Colombian territory, that both states have coordinated a strategic alliance to militarize the region, not simply one country. […]

A photo essay of recent political graffiti from the streets of Bogotá provides creative commentary on militarism, US military bases, President Álvaro Uribe and extrajudicial military killings. […]

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The mountain went dark. Flicking on a light switch or turning the bathroom faucets did nothing, and even the telephone lines had gone silent. Tacueyó is one of the fourteen indigenous reservations in Colombia’s southwestern Cauca department, a thickly forested region dominated both by small-scale coffee farmers and roving bands of Colombia’s Marxist revolutionary group, the FARC. […]

In her new book Blood & Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, Jasmin Hristov seeks to expose the rational motivations behind state violence for capitalism’s economic elites in the US and Colombia. In meticulous detail, Hristov shows how the super-rich benefit from state repression and how the violators of human rights have essentially become immune from any consequences for their actions. If death squads are truly to be abolished in Colombia, we must look honestly at how and why they exist today. […]

Civil conflict, high-profile kidnappings, and entire cities run by drug cartels; these are just some of the images of violence and terror that steered tourists away from Colombia for over thirty years. […]

Conflicts between multinational corporations and indigenous groups are not only confined to legal debates over property rights. For the Embera in Choco, a fight against a controversial mining project in the region isn’t just a conflict about their legal ownership of the land. This project threatens to completely wipe out their ancient culture. […]

A small path descends from the town of La Jagua, crossing a field and forest until it ends at a cliff overlooking the Magdalena River. Pairs of buff-necked ibis take flight announcing their local name, “cocli cocli.” Above the beach where children swim, the rock is carved by erosion and dotted with small holes occupied by birds. The landscape is dotted, too, every 100 meters, with concrete markers declaring the land, river, and everything else a “public utility” that Colombia has given to the energy company Emgesa as part of the Quimbo Hydroelectric Project. […]

Since his death in 1993, the image of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar has been shrouded in mystique. Escobar, whose accrued cocaine wealth once earned him a nod from Forbes Magazine as one of the world’s richest men, has become, at least in U.S. pop culture, the personification of the kind of bravado only exhibited by the most criminally successful. […]

Carlos Trujillo is an organic coffee farmer in Colombia‘s lush, green Andean region known as Cauca. This past harvesting season, his 23,000 trees produced a record low. While local buyers are paying record prices for the unusually scarce supply of coffee, Trujillo knows that farmers and laborers will benefit little from the bonanza. And the shortfall is causing him to question whether Colombia‘s manual laborers – who hand-pick the crop berry by berry – are in need of a technological upgrade.   […]