Columbia latelyThanks to Agora
OnFriday, a gun battle in southwest Colombia ended with the death ofAlfonso Cano, leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia —better known by its Spanish acronym, FARC:
Retro revolutionary: Alfonso Cano, bearded and fatigued
At 63, Cano, a grizzled old-style revolutionary, was nearly the lastof a breed. He’d spent much of the 1970s in the Soviet Union. At onepoint, led a revolutionary force of some 20,000 guerillas in the junglesto the north and west of Bogata.
Perhaps Cano knew the military was onto him. The army reports he’d shaved the bushy beard that had become his trademark.
“With the collaboration of people within the FARC,” President JuanManuel Santos confirmed, “our armed forces slowly planned the operationthey carried out [Friday].
“It is the most devastating blow this group has suffered in its history,” he went on to declare.
Santos was defense minister for much of the previous decade,orchestrating a fight that diminished the FARC’s numbers from itshigh-water mark to something under 8,000 men today (with no small amountof U.S. and Israeli training and aid, we learned when we were in country in March).
Many former FARC revolutionaries have given up the fight and decided to work within the system.
Eight days ago, Gustavo Petro was elected mayor of Bogota, widelyregarded as the second-most-important political office in the country.Petro used to belong to the rebel group known as M-19.
Still,along with last month’s passage of a trade agreement with the UnitedStates, we can’t help but see Colombia emerging as a new hide-out forcapitalists in the Western Hemisphere.
The details of the trade agreement were first settled five years agobetween Santos’ predecessor and then President George W. Bush. But thedeal became a political football, held up by unions in the U.S. untilthe need for jobs became more politically expedient to the Obamare-election team.
The United States-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement passed a littleless than a month ago. It will be a good deal, for example, for theowner of the textile mill we met outside Medellin. The cotton he buysfrom the U.S. won’t be subject to a 15% import tariff as it entersColombia. Nor will his jeans be subject to the 18% increase he used topay when shipping them back to Estados Unidos.
Let’s try something that would have seemed outrageous a few years ago. Let’s count Colombia’s blessings:
- 40 years of guerrilla war are winding down...
- Having already faced a financial crisis in the late 1990s, the Colombian banking system weathered the 2008 panic with relative ease...
- $24.4 billion in new infrastructure spending was initiated in 2010 alone...
- Half the population is 27 or younger; that’s a skilled labor pool, and social charges are a fraction of those in the “developed” world
- And... Sofia Vergara is still burning up the charts on the ABC comedy Modern Family:
Colombia’s No. 1 Export