Accidental Blogger

On CNN: Travel today I read a story about how Columbia is rapidly becoming a top tourist destination.

[A]fter decades of being shunned as too dangerous for travelers, the country is riding an unprecedented tourist boom.

Spurred
by news of the country’s dramatically improved security situation and
healthy economy, nearly a million foreigners visited last year, a 21
percent jump over 2004 and the largest influx since 1982, according to
Colombia’s Commerce, Industry and Tourism Ministry. Their goal for 2006
is to double that again, to 2 million foreign visitors.

"The buzz
about Colombia is spreading faster than we ever hoped for or can maybe
even handle," said the country’s tourism director, Carlos Vives.

Credit
goes to the country’s popular right-wing president, Alvaro Uribe, whose
firm-handed pursuit of the rebels has restored relative safety to once
perilous roadways. Kidnappings have dropped 78 percent during Uribe’s
four years in office, to 371 last year according to the government.
That may even be below Haiti and the tourist haven of Mexico, where
kidnappings-for-cash have boomed.

I wanted to see if the New York Times had a write-up, because they tend to have the best writers and thus the best stories; so I ran a Google News search for "Colombia."  Here’s what I came up with:

Hostage handover fails in Colombia (AP)

The promised release of two hostages held for six months by leftist
rebels failed to take place Saturday – with the government blaming
jungle rains and relatives saying the state sabotaged the handover by
sending troops to the region.

In a surprise gesture, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia,
or FARC, said March 15 that it would free a police officer and an
18-year old cadet seized last year.

The rebels gave an exact time and place for their handover –
Saturday at noon in the Amazon basin hamlet of Afilador, 340 miles
south of the capital.

The handover never occurred.

Colombia’s government blamed lashing rains, but relatives of the
hostages faulted the government for sending troops to the region.

"It wasn’t the weather, it was the government’s fault," Alba Patron,
mother of captive officer Luis Almanza, told Colombian television, and
wept.

The International Red Cross, overseeing the release, said guerrillas and the army had clashed.

Colombia makes $800m cocaine haul (BBC)

The Colombian authorities have seized a shipment of
cocaine with a street value of $800m (£455m) on board a ship in the
Caribbean port of Cartagena.

They found the cocaine, weighing 2.7 tons (2,700kg), in a disinfectant container during a routine inspection.

Colombian journalist faces terror at home (Mercury News)

How would I sleep at night if I were a well-respected professional,
tops in my field — and living in exile because of death threats my
family received for doing my work? Indeed, how would I regard my
country when I had to return in a few months?

That’s the position [Daniel] Coronell, 41, a senior research fellow at
Stanford, finds himself in. And his unease is not exactly soothed by
President Alvaro Uribe Vélez of Colombia, who on Wednesday responded to
international pressure from the Committee to Protect Journalists by
expressing support for the importance of journalists’ work.

It’s the least a president running for re-election can do in a democracy.

“I live a little sad here,” said Coronell, an award-winning
investigative journalist and founder of an independent television news
program. “From this distance, I see my country in the worst part of
its history.”

The affable Coronell was already traveling in armored cars when
successive death threats were made last spring. One came in the
chilling form of a funeral wreath bearing the name of his 6-year-old
daughter.

There’s an old colloquialism that goes, "two out of three ain’t bad."  Only in this case, the two are bad, so I suppose that means that two out of three ain’t good.  And the (nonsequential) third, the drug bust, isn’t necessarily promising in any way–perhaps I’m jaded because of the failed "war on drugs" here in the U.S., but I don’t see how the authorities grabbing a shipload of cocaine is in any way indicative of less future drug-related violence (the argument can probably be made that this will just increase the violence, in destination countries and probably in Colombia as well–supply goes down, demand goes up?).  Now if they nabbed a kingpin, that might be a different story, but I think a minor detail like that would have been mentioned.

Sorry CNN, but I don’t see myself going to Colombia anytime soon.  Maybe I’ll start with Panama (and from there a side-trip to Cuba so I can spend my American dollars without getting caught–take that, harmful American policymakers!) and work my way up to Colombia over the years, giving the new administration a bit more time to figure things out.