Salon.com > Colombia

Colombian coffee at the crossroads

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:48:00 +0000

“You should be getting red fruits with flower notes and, of course, some acidity,” says Jaime Duque, the owner of E&D Cafe, a specialty roaster and “coffee lab” in Bogotá, Colombia. “See if you taste that.”

I’m about to drink from a cup of black coffee made with beans grown at 5,000 feet above sea level in Huila, a province in southwestern Colombia. Huila is not exactly a tourist hotspot. Much of it still mountainous backcountry where leftist guerrillas still roam — the Colombian army and FARC forces regularly clash in the steep passes and heavy jungle.

Back in Bogotá, however, coffee snobbery is on full display. Duque prepares the beans with with triple-filtered water through an Aeropress, a method akin to the French press that uses a disposable paper filter. The coffee is exceptional.

America’s drug war of attrition

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 23:05:00 +0000

BOSTON — The global drug war is arguably America’s longest armed conflict, declared 42 years ago and still raging at a pace that would startle many citizens.

It is waged daily, on farmland and streets from Colombia to Mexico to Detroit. It has put millions of people behind bars, and has dramatically influenced our culture and worldview.

By some estimates, it has cost the nation more than $2 trillion dollars.

Ironically, the drug war was nearly stillborn.

Less than a year after he fired the first salvos, Nixon's Republican-led Shafer commission sought to calm Americans and temper the president’s claims.

Thank the War on Drugs for your Valentine’s Day roses

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 23:18:00 +0000

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

When your love hands you a gorgeous bouquet of large, red, long-stemmed roses this Valentine’s Day, as any botanist will tell you, you’re getting a bunch of sex organs. Although the roses are more beautiful, fragrant and socially acceptable than other methods that might get the same point across (just ask former Congressman Anthony Weiner), there’s a lot more to those roses than meets the eye.

Unfortunately, the romancing of women in the United States often means the exploitation of women in countries like Colombia and Ecuador.

The preference the U.S. gives Colombian and Ecuadorian flower exports has a lot to do with another export from those nations: cocaine. By 1990, South American imports already accounted for more than 40 percent of roses sold in the United States. Then, in 1991, Congress passed the Andean Trade Preference Act. The idea was simple: maybe if we help cocaine-producing nations sell us other things, like roses, they’ll be less interested in selling us cocaine.

The Pentagon: The global NRA

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 14:38:00 +0000

Given these last weeks, who doesn’t know what an AR-15 is? Who hasn’t seen the mind-boggling stats on the way assault rifles have flooded this country, or tabulations of accumulating Newtown-style mass killings, or noted that there are barely more gas stations nationwide than federally licensed firearms dealers, or heard the renewed debates over the Second Amendment, or been struck by the rapid shifts in public opinion on gun control, or checked out the disputes over how effective an assault-rifle ban was the last time around? Who doesn’t know about the NRA’s suggestion to weaponize schools, or about the price poor neighborhoods may be paying in gun deaths for the present expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment? Who hasn’t seen the legions of stories about how, in the wake of the Newtown slaughter, sales of guns, especially AR-15 assault rifles, have soared, ammunition sales have surged, background checks for future gun purchases have risen sharply, and gun shows have been besieged with customers?

Colombia’s “end of the world” bunker

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 22:16:00 +0000

BOGOTA, Colombia — Whether or not the winding down of the ancient Mayan long-count calendar brings the end of the world on Friday, one Colombian man is taking no chances.

A reporter for the Bogota daily El Tiempo recently toured an elaborate underground bunker built by a businessman in the South American country's central Antioquia department.

The structure features iron and concrete walls 20 inches thick that are coated with copper (to protect those inside from radiation). Inside are bunk-beds, a kitchen and a pantry filled with gas masks, tanks of oxygen and water, and a two-year stock of instant and canned food. Other supplies include winter clothes and seeds to reforest a barren, post-apocalypse planet.

Missing Lichtenstein painting found 42 years later

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 22:54:00 +0000

Famed Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s “Electric Cord” may have been painted in 1961 but no one who wasn’t alive in the 1960s has ever seen it. Why? Because in January 1970, when art dealer Leo Castelli sent it to art restorer Daniel Goldreyer for cleaning, it mysteriously disappeared.

"Electric Cord"

Fast forward to December 2006, when the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the artist’s legacy, published an image of the black and white work on the front of its holiday card and appealed to its community for help locate the work. It kind of worked.