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.