Building Colombia with trade initiatives and peace

Bogota

IN MEDELLIN, Colombia's second largest city, you can listen to an impressive presentation by the mayor's office about emerging industrial parks and new technology firms. Then, a glance at your smartphone reveals that guerrillas have kidnapped an army general, and that negotiations to end a decades-long civil war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), Latin America's oldest guerrilla group, are at a standstill.

Colombia is the only country in Latin America where you can attend seminars at world-class universities, learn about mushrooming multinationals and chat with supremely competent policymakers, all the while knowing that citizens are confronting one another with machetes and bazookas just a few dozen miles away. In this sense, Colombia is two countries, which have been at war with each other for far too long.