Category: Business
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The Last Time FARC Tried to Break into Politics
Knowing that he would be killed one day, Colombian presidential candidate Jaime Pardo Leal took out a handful of life insurance policies, opened a bank account in his wife’s name and deposited enough money to cover his family’s groceries for a year. Continue reading on OZY…
She’s the Governor with the Hardest Job in Latin America
She wears a rose gold Apple watch on her left wrist, while her black Madeline shoes and horn-rimmed glasses have a nerdy-schoolgirl vibe. But then there are the indigenous beads and feather earrings, signifying the Andean respect for pachamama — Mother Earth. This is the 39-year-old governor who is supposed to transform one of Colombia’s most war-torn regions — lands rich in cocaine’s base ingredient, the coca plant? Who is supposed to make Colombia’s promise of peace a reality? Continue reading on OZY…
Bolivia’s Socialist King: The Beginning of The End
Many Americans may consider Barack Obama a socialist, but to one dyed-in-the-wool socialist in the Americas, the U.S. president is nothing less than a ruthless capitalist, imperialist and war criminal. In fact, Obama’s alleged (and rather unsuccessful) “hidden agenda,” according to some – wealth redistribution, nationalization of industry, ihgher taxes and greater government control – reads like President Evo Morales’ list of accomplishments in Bolivia. Continue reading on OZY…
photo credit: elciudadanoweb.com
An Israeli’s Escape From Colombian Justice
As he passed his bag through the metal detector, ready to climb aboard his flight out of Bogotá with a ticket to Lima in hand, Yair Klein looked over toward the flight gate and froze. Colombian authorities were checking passports. “Without a doubt they were looking for me,” he would later recount. Continue reading on OZY…
How Cannabis Is Making a Comeback in Colombia
Back when Juan Pablo Guzman started his cannabis cultivation business nearly two decades ago, the Colombian says he had to get permission from the country’s FARC rebels, the military and the police to bring his crops down from a small, 2-hectare plot up in the subtropical forests in the department of Cauca. But Guzman doesn’t consider himself a drug trafficker. Over the past decade, the 48-year-old balding man, who’s full of charm and speaks with a springy cadence, has transitioned to making medicinal products out of marijuana to help people in pain. “This,” he says as he pulls out a vial and drips a black, viscous glob on his finger, “is my medicine.” Continue reading on OZY…
Colombia’s Bomba Estereo and the Decline of the Frontman
Vocalist Li Saumet was born in 1980 in Colombia’s Caribbean coast city of Santa Marta. If she had been born a few decades earlier, machismo and Vallenato, Colombia’s traditional folk music, might have eaten her alive. Colombia’s dude-with-a-microphone and his pal-with-an-accordion music rules the Caribbean coast. But Saumet’s band, Bomba Estéreo, swapped out the accordion for a synthesizer, and they became part of a twist in the plot of Latin America’s music scene. Continue reading on OZY…
photo: www.ozy.com
Bonnie and Clyde, Bolivia-Style
Álvaro García Linera left his native Bolivia in the early 1980s to study mathematics at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, where he met a young Mexican woman named Raquel Gutiérrez. They fell in love — with each other and Marxism — and through math and romance discovered they shared something else that would change their lives: a desire to join Bolivia’s indigenous revolutionary movement.
García Linera is now the right-hand man to Evo Morales — set to become Latin America’s longest-serving democratically elected president. After two decades of revolutionary struggle, jail and torture, García Linera may now have less idealistic views. But they’ve helped guide Bolivia’s transformation under Morales’ presidency. Continue reading on OZY…
photo: www.ozy.com
Prog rocks Los Andes
What do you get when you mix Andean riffs, rock ’n’ roll and a coup d’état? Los Jaivas, a globe-trotting folk group that fled the bloody, political turmoil of Chile in the ’70s only to eventually come back and redefine the meaning of progressive rock. The group married traditional Andean folk with symphonic rock so seamlessly that world-famous poet Pablo Neruda even lent them some lines from one of his epic poems for a song. Continue reading on OZY…
Benvenuto, Vino Naturale
Wes Michael Tomaselli 
