Scenes from the Coffee Farmers' Protest

Coffee farmers in front of the Ministry of Agriculture today.

 Today, hundreds of coffee farmers gathered in front of the Ministry of Agriculture to demand government subsidies, cheaper supplies such as fertilizers and an end to free trade agreements, which they blame for flooding Colombia with cheap imported coffee and other agricultural products.

The protesters perhaps did not reflect that those trade agreements also bring their fertilizers and other supplies in more cheaply, or that the same agreements which bring in competing agricultural goods also open the doors to selling Colombian coffee overseas.

Colombia has produced big harvests in recent years - which have not helped boost low international prices. The huge influx of Venezuelan refugees, some of whom have gone to work picking coffee, has helped the industry a little. In some traditional coffee-growing regions, farmers are switching to the new darling of Colombian arquitecture - avocadoes, which Colombia only recently began exporting to the United States.

A poster depicts Juan Valdez, the iconic Colombian offee farmer, as half naked from the waist down.

A protesters' placard portrays a struggling coffee farmer as half-nude from the waist down.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A New Life for Narco Properties

El Mexicano's old walled property near La Zona Rosa,will soon host the Chinese embassy.

During past decades, Bogotá was home to numerous properties which everybody knew belonged to narcos, altho few people were likely to say so out loud. Today, with the cocaine trade booming once again, Bogotá is likely newly awash in drug money, altho much less conspicuously.

Villa Adelaida, as seen from the street,
will soon house a restaurant.

Meanwhile, some of those narcoproperties of decades past are finding new lives. The 'Mexicano's' old high-walled estate located just north of the Zona Rosa was recently purchased by the Chinese government and is to be their new embassy site. The Mexicano's old wall could be useful for keeping out anybody inclined to protest against China's many human rights violations.

El Mexicano, whose birth name was José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, was actually Colombian, but liked Mexican music and Mexican money, earning him the nickname. He started out as a hired assassin for emerald kingpins, but decided that drug trafficking was more profitable and became a member of the Medellin Cartel, along with Pablo Escobar. El Mexicano may have been even more brutal than Escobar, and eventually unleashed a brutal battle for control against his old friends in the emerald business. He was killed by Colombian police in 1989.

Not far away, on Calle 70 and Carrera 7a, La Quinta Villa Adelaida has stood rotting away for decades. Built in 1914 by Agustín Nieto Caballero, founder of the nearby Gimnasio Moderno, a high school for children of the traditional conservative elite, the huge house later became the Baron Club,  the site of expensive carousing. However, the club's owner, Manuel Abajo Abajo, a Spanish citizen, was arrested in 1987 for narcotrafficking and sentenced to nearly a decade in prison.
s.

Villa Adelaida in its glory days.

The house passed to control of the government, and has been under renovation the last several years. Plans for the property have included a hotel and shopping mall - but ran into opposition from neighbors, who feared more traffic jams. Next year, if all goes according to plan, an expensive restaurant will open in Villa Adelaida.

Do more narco properties remain in Bogotá? Undoubtedly, many do. However, today's narcos have learned to live less conspicuously to not make themselves targets of authorities and rival cartels. At the same time, the Mexican cartels have taken the most profitable retail trade away from the Colombians, and the Colombian drug traffickers which remain have shifted their centers of operations the big cities to rural areas near the coasts and borders.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

May Day March 2018

'Freedom Now! No more frame-ups!' Supporters of jailed FARC leader Jesús Santrich carry signs demanded his freedom.

Members of the FARC's political party -
also known as the FARC - march thru downown.

Surprise, surprise: this year's May Day paraders denounced Trump and called for Santrich's freedom. They were right on one count - Donald Trump has no place is decent society. But evidence against Santrich - a one-time FARC guerrilla leader who is now in prison on drug trafficking charges and may be extradited to the United States - looks quite strong. Perhaps the strongest evidence against Santrich is the fact that the Santos administration, which made the peace deal with the FARC the centerpiece of its reelection campaign - appears to agree that santrich is guilty - despite the huge embarrasment to the peace deal.

I was shaken - emotionally - by a group of mixed martial arts fighters, who labeled themselves anti-fascists, but appeared thoroughly fascist to me. When I took their photos - as I did of all the groups which passed me - they very obnoxiously stuck their own cameras into my face and took my photo, to attempto to intimidate.

Che Guevara: everpresent.

A phalanx of police protects a government building.

FARC supporters show off the flower symbol.

Despite all the evidence, a faile dream never dies.

¡Revolución ahora!

These 'antifascist' marchers looked pretty fasist to me.

A cause I can believe in: marijuana depenalization.

An 'anti-fascist'demonstrator photographs me to intimidate me from photographing them.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Sad Stupid End of the Huertalaria

The garden, back when you could go inside.

For years, children from local foundations and adults with down syndrome from a neighborhood home did productive work and got exercise - as well as learning healthy eating habits - in La Huertolaria, an unused lot in La Candelaria which residents converted into a public garden. Not only that, but neighborhood restaurants donated their organic waste to be composted.

A garden resident, now homeless.

However, about two months ago, city officials, in all their wisdom, decided to take the land away and that it made more sense for it to sit vacant and unused - like the empty city land behind barbed wire on 26th Street.

Now, the kids are on the street and the people with Downs are sitting at home. The property is empty and unused. And some bureaucrat feel satisfied that he did something.

Today, the garden is shut.

A peek under the door, to the prohibited garden.

See also:

Cheating Children of their Green Space

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Innumerable Oxxos

An Oxxo about to open in Las Aguas, beside the Plaza del Periodista.

Get your junk food fix here: An Oxxo
window on 19th street.

Beside La Plaza del Periodista, a new Oxxo appears. There's already one on the other side of the plaza, as well as another down 19th St., as well as a half-dozen more around La Candelaria.

Is there no limit to the market for the sort of refined, high-fat, high-salt and alchoholic fare which Oxxo specializes in?

Buy doritos!

Most likely, Oxxo's plan is to take away from the neighborhood stores this vice segment of the industry  - which I imagine is also the most profitable segment. Once they've lost their most profitable sales, the family-run stores will die, depriving the neighborhood of the healthy fruits and vegetables they sell, but which are too troublesome for Oxxo to bother with. This produces what in the U.S. is called a 'healthy food desert.'

But taking sales from the traditional stores can't be the whole story. The market for things which ruin

A family-run neighborhood shop, featuring
fruits and vegetables.

our health, like sugar, salt and fat-packed foods, tobacco and etc., must be pretty elastic. Push fat, salt, sweets and alchohol in people's (and particularly children's) faces and - surprise, surprise - they'll buy more of them.

Who wins? Oxxo and the junk food industry, and Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionare who owns the chain.

Who loses? Our health.

Across the plaza, another Oxxo.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The World's Tallest Shopping Mall?

The 19th Street entrance to the Bacatá's shopping mall.

The BD Bacatá was supposed to be a Bogotá landmark - and it is turning out to be, just not in the way its builders and the city had hoped.

At 67 stories and 217 stories, it is the tallest building in Colombia, the second tallest in South America and the world's first crowd-funded high-rise - and may be close to going broke.

Huawei, one of the mall's tenants.

According to news reports, the builders haven't paid contractors, and investors are asking where their money is. Even the building's name has been seized as an asset, according to one report.

The builders insist that they will finish the building - but it's already years overdue.

Meanwhile, some of the apartments in the shorter northern tower have been occupied, and the ground floor mall is functioning, altho some of the stores have yet to open.

Fashionable bags, coming soon.

Building a mega-project in a run-down section of downtown Bogotá always looked like a challenge. And the project ran into various challenges, including a huge rock at the site, and legal complications stemming from the building's wide variety of tenants: the shopping mall, offices, restaurants, apartments and a luxury hotel.

The Bacatá seen from Plaza Las Nieves,
a run-down district a few blocks away.

The project was perhaps a bad idea for non-economic reasons as well. Its adjoining streets are already congested and chaotic, and the surrounding blocks have little public space and no green space at all.

For the good of Bogotá, and especially downtown, let's hope that the Bacatá limps to completion. The blocks to the project's north are full of apartment blocks and university buildings under construction. It would be a pity to have an unfinished eyesore standing between the university district and the historical center.

If the Bacatá's owners cannot round up the resources to complete their project, hopefully the bank or a big investor (Donald Trump?) will step in a do so.

Until then, call the Bacatá's south tower the world's tallest shopping mall.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Gaitán Revisionism

Gaitán supporters at the site of his assassination during the 70th anniversary, April 9 last week.

Gaitán DVDs on sale
on the anniversary of his
assassination last week.

Seventy years ago last week, on April 9, 1948 on Carrera 7's sidewalk Juan Roa Sierra gunned down a leftist, firebrand politician, Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, triggering the Bogotazo riots and creating a popular saint. With all the attention given to the martyr Gaitán around his asssassination's 70th anniversary, it's worth taking a closer look at the man - and his imperfections.

I'm not disputing Gaitan's passion and sincerity. And there's no questioning the courage with which as
congressman he denounced the 1928 massacre, by Colombian soldiers backed by the United States, of banana workers employed by the United Fruit Company.

However, if Gaitán was sincere in his motives, some of his methods and actions can be questioned. And that makes one wonder what he would have done if he'd been elected president.

A monument to Gaitán on Calle 26 near the Central Cemetery.

Gaitán had, after all, already served as senator, minister of labor and of education and mayor of Bogotá. His term as mayor had been most polemical, as he tried to impose draconian - some would say almost fascist - policies, such as dictating to residents what colors to paint their houses, requiring shoeshiners and taxidrivers to wear uniforms - and, most notoriously of all, prohibiting the ruana from the streets of Bogotá. The ruana, a sort of overcoat, is used by Colombia's poor, particularly country people, so banning it was tantamount to expelling the poor from Bogotá. The measures were intended to 'cleanse' and 'beautify' the city for its anniversary, but they got Gaitán ousted prematurely from office.

Just imagine if a right-wing politician like Alvaro Uribe were to try something like that. We'd never hear the end of it. But because it was Gaitán who did it, the episode gets forgotten.

It's perhaps not surprising that Gaitán had fascist tendencies. After all, he studied law in Rome in the 1920s, under Mussolini. Gaitán's populist, angry speaking style was undoubtedly also influenced by Mussolini. So, it's perhaps significant that, as far as I've heard, Gaitán never denounced the European fascists' hatemongering, mass murder and warmaking.

Gaitán was a succesful lawyer. But evidently not a crusading, moralistic one. After all, the very day he was assassinated Gaitán and his friends were celebrating the previous night's court victory - the freeing of a military officer who had murdered a journalist.

If Gaitán was unprincipled enough to defend a journalist's killer, what could the nation have expected

Gaitán's old house, now a museum, in the Teusaquillo
neighborhood. During his life, Gaitán was criticized
for his expensive lifestyle while rallying the poor
against the wealthy.

from him as president, in terms of rule of law? Of respect for a free press? Of civilian control of the military? Some speculate that a president Gaitán would have refused to relinquish power and become yet another Latin American strongman.

Part of the idolization and martyrization of Gaitán is the belief that if he had survived he would surely have been elected president. But that itself is far from certain. Gaitán was on the left edge of the Liberal Party, which was badly divided internally. And Gaitán was a very polarizing candidate, loved by many and hated by many. He might not have won the Liberals' nomination, or might have lost to a Conservative candidate. (A Conservative in fact was elected Colombia's next president.)

A strong parallel can be made to Robert F. Kennedy, assassinated in 1968 while campaigning for the Democratic Party's nomination for U.S. president. Like Colombia's Liberals, the Democratic Party was badly divided at the time, particularly over the war in Vietnam and ultimately lost the presidency to Richard Nixon.

Another aspect of Gaitán's matyrization are the conspiracy theories around his assassination: some claim that he was killed by the Conservative Party, by the Russians, by the Cubans, or - most of all - by the CIA.

These are interesting theories, but they all lack evidence. Yes, Gaitán had lots of enemies inside and outside of Colombia, many of whom would have loved to see him dead. But I've read a lot about Gaitán's assassination and never found a single piece of concrete evidence of a conspiracy.

Gaitán's apparent assassin, Juan Roa Sierra, was seized and lynched by a furious crowd immediately after the shooting, making it impossible to be definitively prove that he was the assassin or to know whether there was a conspiracy behind him. (Gaitán's killing triggered the horrific riots remembered as the Bogotazo, and the following low-grade civil war known as La Violencia.) But the crowd must have had a reason for attacking Roa. And, afterwards, Colombia hired Scotland Yard to investigate the assassination, who also concluded that Roa had done it.

And if the CIA had been behind Gaitán's killing, we'd know about it. After all, the CIA backed coups in Chile, Guatemala, Iran and other places, all of which is well documented from released CIA files. And the CIA tried many times to assassinate Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, and that is also well-documented. (Castro, coincidentally, was in Bogotá at the time of Gaitán's assassination and had a meeting scheduled with Gaitán that very afternoon.) If the CIA were behind Gaitán's killing, we'd know it by now.

We don't want to hear about the imperfections and failings of the 'great man' many believe Gaitan to have been. And that's amplified when the man is martyred. But John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert were cold warriors, and Robert worked for red-baiter and hatemonger Joseph McCarthy. Abraham Lincoln was racist and made a fortune as a lawyer by representing railroad companies when he might have been defending escaped slaves who being hunted down by southerners who claimed to own them.. The Rev. Martin Luther King was a womanizer. Winston Churchill was an unabashed imperialist and held backwards, racist beliefs which would make him a pariah by today's progressive standards. After the Cuban revolution, Che Guevara managed a prison where inmates, including young boys, were executed without trial just for having been part of the old regime.

None of these defects prevent these men from being 'great' because they stood for or accomplished important things - even if they had big flaws.

It is uncomfortable to think that a 'great man' who changed history, or might have, was killed by a maladjusted nobody. But that seems to have been the case over and over again. It's much more interesting and satisfying to believe in a conspiracy or great dark forces. But, to do that, one needs proof.

Who knows why Gaitán chose to represent a murderous military man - particularly when the military was murdering Liberals? Were the rest of his cases more idealistic, or similar?

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours