Trip to Colombia.

I've just returned from a three week trip to Colombia. I travelled around the city of Cali, home to more than three million Colombians, and the mountainous province of Quindío. Quindío contains some of Colombia's most beautiful mountain terrain. The lush hills are home to hundreds of small coffee plantations and plantain farms. The numerous valleys -- which must have been all but impenetrable before the advent of the automobile and modern roads -- are perfect for horse farms and cozy haciendas. The rugged terrain would be perfect for the guerilla, but for some reason which isn't quite clear to me, the guerilla have never found a foothold in Quindío. The military presence is strong, and, according to some of the people I was traveling with, the local identity of the "paisas" -- descendants of tough basque settlers -- works to ward of guerilla recruitment techniques. A successful coffee region for nearly a century, Quindío's citizens have not suffered the mass poverty suffered in other regions, where small farmers turned to illegal production of coca either by will or by force, and where youth respond to guerilla promises out of desperation or are conscripted at gunpoint. Now Quindío has a thriving tourism industry that attracts foreigners from Latin America and the broader world and also large numbers of Colombians with disposable income. In Quindío's small towns, one of which houses the national amusement park (Parque del Café), amidst advertisements for rafting trips, Senderos Ecologicos, and zipline canopy tours, it's easy to forget the reason for the large military presence. It's easy to forget that elsewhere in the country soldiers from other units patrol similar towns looking for signs of the guerilla. Other Colombian soldiers follow the sendero ecologico into ambush after ambush in the regions of Colombia where the guerilla remains strong, in many places stronger than the army.

In the city of Cali there are signs of a good deal of economic development. Notably, three or four enormous home improvement centers. Think Home Depot, but twice as big, so big that you can drive your car through the aisles (and you're supposed to, half of the store is drive-in-drive-out loading). There are also a slew of new shopping districts and beautiful restaurants designed with innovative architecture and boasting creative menus. Clearly there are a few thousand people with money to drop on new windows and tile flooring as well as chic dining. But what about everyone else? The slums are incredible, shanty towns lining dirt streets that turn to impassable mud with the first hint of rain. The overwhelming majority of Cali's residents live in poverty, and drug money offers one of the only escapes. Cali's small cadre of bourgeois citizens do not attempt to hide the fact that most of the signs of development are the result of trickle-down drug economics. The "traquetos" -- junior level narcotraficantes -- have a lot of cash on hand, and they're the ones keeping business afire at the city's shopping malls and discotechs. But narcotraffic is not sustainable, and certainly not a foundation for development. What will happen when narcotraffic crashes (if indeed it does crash)? Apparently Colombia is on the verge of signing a free-trade agreement with the United States. Perhaps free-trade will offer enough growth in the labor sector and sustainable manufacturing foundations to regrow the Colombian economy from the ground up. But the broad failures of NAFTA -- particularly for Mexicans -- do not offer much room for hope. Colombians are enjoying this period of growth, and well they should after more than a decade of total stagnation and paralyzing urban violence. But no one is without doubts, and no one will be surprised when dark days return.