Jim Todd, Colombia XII

Last June I traveled to Colombia to work with the U.S. delegation

to the annual General Assembly of the Organization of American States. Then-Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte headed the U.S. delegation (Secretary Rice was in Stockholm trying to drum up financial support for Iraq). We were about 25 people in all, plus 40-odd drivers, guards, and support staff from the U.S. embassy in Bogotá. Here are some impressions.

The OAS meetings themselves took place in a huge convention center downtown called Plaza Mayor, the equivalent of any modern convention center in a large U.S. city.

Medellín has grown tremen-dously. The most pleasant area (where most of our hotels were) is called Poblado. The women delegates were disappointed with the shopping, saying the malls everyone recommended were too much like American ones, too youth-oriented, and too expensive. Although Colombia still has huge numbers of very poor people, there’s obviously a huge middle class there, with lots of car ownership and the ubiquitous small two-rider motorcycles whose riders’ vests, by law, bear their license plate numbers.

I found that a lot of my Spanish came back, although it was still difficult to understand people on the phone, especially those darn little cell phones. I told the Colombians that they had to let me practice my Spanish, because I learned it there 40-some years ago, and that usually surprised them so much that they went along. I also enjoyed reading the local newspapers and remembering the names of familiar places and prominent families. I read in El Tiempo about some festivals in Boyacá. Of all things, the town of Sutamarchán now has an annual festival in which they throw tomatoes at each other! It’s called the Gran Tomatina Colombiana, and is patterned after a similar festival in Spain. In Boyacá’s capital, Tunja (my Peace Corps site), they had just celebrated the Virgen del Milagro, the patron saint of Tunja, with a procession from El Topo Sanctuary to Plaza Bolívar. I had forgotten about all the religious holidays in Colombia, especially around this time of the year. June 2 was San Pedro Day, the previous Monday was another saint’s day, and so on. I remember that the first year we were there as PCVs, sometimes we took the bus in Bogotá out to visit our assigned schools, and discovered they were all closed because of a religious holiday. Of course, no one had told us!

The U.S. once had a consulate in Medellín but closed it down because of all the narcotics trafficking and threats of kidnapping. This was a loss for American foreign service officers because the local women had a well-deserved reputation as being the most beautiful in all Colombia, and I have met many vice-consuls who as single young men were assigned there and married local girls. Security was tight but not overwhelming, and the citizens of Medellín appeared quite comfortable with the situation. Sidewalks were crowded with people, market areas were bustling, buses and taxis were constantly on the move. The Colombian government had banned public demonstrations during the OAS meeting, and the only group that appeared affected was one planning to protest on behalf of persons displaced by violence in the countryside, and this group blamed the right-wing AUC (self-defense groups financed by large landowners) rather than the left-wing FARC for their plight.

After the conference, just before we boarded our aircraft, passengers were divided into separate lines of men and women and thoroughly "patted down" by two police officers just outside the door of the airplane. It was reassuring to know they take security seriously.