Colombia Calling - The English Voice in Colombia

• 559: Blood Gold in Colombia

  On this week's Colombia Calling podcast, we speak to James Bargent, an investigative journalist for Insight Crime about his work putting together the new podcast: "the Shadow of El Dorado." Along with his colleague Mat Charles, the resulting podcast is a multi-year project which takes the listener into the world of organized crime and how the Gaitanista (Clan del Golfo or AGC) criminal organisation controls the mining economy and its subsidiary interests in the town of Segovia, Antioquia. Their search for Colombia’s blood gold takes us to Segovia and the illegal mines at the very beginning of the global supply chain. But what they find there is a strange mirror world, where conventional narratives fall apart, and the names and labels they try to apply do not make sense.  Tune in to the podcast: https://insightcrime.org/audio-from-the-ground-up/the-shadow-of-el-dorado-p… The Colombia Briefing is reported by Emily Hart. 

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• 558: Back to the (microscopic) Future: Using Palaeontology, Pollen, and AI to predict and protect our futures

  Today, we go back many millennia in order to protect ourselves for the coming centuries: Emily Hart speaks to two Colombian scientists, Carlos Jaramillo and Camila Martínez, time-travellers of the smallest imaginable time machines: fossilised pollen and tree cells.    Climate change has been a constant feature of Planet Earth: at points in history, the planet has been both much cooler and much warmer than it is today - if we know which plants occupied an ecosystem the last time the Earth was a certain temperature or had a certain level of CO2 in the atmosphere, we can predict what our ecosystems will look like in the conditions that we will soon be living in.  Using tiny fossilised clues, Carlos and Camila are doing exactly this.  The climate change we are currently living through is unprecedented in speed – and water and rain cycles are a major concern for humanity’s continued existence on the planet, so one focus of this work is the Amazon rainforest – both Colombia’s slice of it and further afield.  Predictive models currently disagree about where the Amazon is headed as the earth warms – some models predict it will get wetter, others say it will become grasslands or scrub. One way to find out is to work out which plants lived in the area the last time conditions changed in the ways they are currently changing, and look at how that ecosystem and its inhabitants changed and adapted during that time.    Drilling deep into the earth to find fossil records from 12 million years ago, Carlos is now studying the fingerprints left by Amazonian life from that time – particularly pollen. Camila is studying fossilised trees, whose cells – frozen in time – can show us how much water was in the environment.     But pollen and other microscopic clues are in such abundance in places like Colombia that there simply isn’t enough time in a human life to study and identify all of the species being found. Luckily, artificial intelligence is opening up huge possibilities – Carlos has been digitalising massive fossil collections and training AI to identify and catalogue samples.   So today, we travel from the microscopic fingerprints of a distant ecological past resting in rocks and trees deep underground through to the futuristic methods made possible by new machine learning and digital processing. Carlos and Camila span multiple disciplines and vast timeframes, all in the hopes of getting us the information we need to survive the climate crisis which will change the face of the planet within our lifetimes.   They'll be telling us how - and why it's so important. Support the podcast: www.patreon.com/colombiacalling 

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• 557: The Petro Presidency Meltdown?

  President Petro's Disastrous Televised Cabinet Meeting or The Petro Presidency Meltdown. Pause for breath if you can, but we've been experiencing a barrage of negative headlines surrounding Colombia's President Petro. This began with, at first, the online fracas with President Trump over the treatment of Colombian illegal migrants being returned to their homeland to, most recently, a total car crash of a televised cabinet meeting. Did you watch it? If not, the best bits have been put together here by El Pais for your viewing entertainment: COLOMBIA | Los momentos memorables del consejo de ministros de Petro | EL PAÍS Anyway, on this episode of the Colombia Calling podcast, we chat to Adriaan Alsema, director of Colombia Reports, about whether we can call this the "Petro Presidency Meltdown," and what we can expect from the Colombian premier for the remaining year and a bit of his tenure. We look at the cornerstone policy plans of Petro's administration and discuss if whether any will get through Congress before his time is up. What has happened to Total Peace (Paz Total), the Health, Pension and Labour reforms...is the Petro project doomed to failure? And, where does the political chameleon and survivor Armando Benedetti fit into all this? The Colombia Briefing is reported by Emily Hart.  Tune in and subscribe!

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• 556: The Colombia that is Silenced

  This week on the Colombia Calling podcast, we speak to Lorena Estupiñán-Pedraza, a professor of international relations and political science from Boyaca, but resident in the southern city of Cali. In a far-ranging conversation, we discuss Lorena's PhD studies public policy implementation in Boyaca, local problems with global impacts and all about what it means to be from Boyaca and to understand the Boyacense idiosyncrasy and culture. Tune in to this, the Colombia Briefing with Emily Hart and subscribe to the podcast.

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• 555: "The World is Sick," a New Documentary on the Ancient Healing Medicine of Ayahuasca

  A new documentary, in the making, seeks to document the sacred nature of an ancient medicine. We're all familiar with vivid tales of projectile vomiting and the complete loss of bodily functions during an ayuahuasca ceremony but who, amongst us, has really explored the benefits of a ritual? This documentary seeks to educate us, through a carefully curated journey from the lands of the Taitas (shamans) in Putumayo, the process of creating the ayahuasca (also known as Yage), to the preparation of the ceremony, the ritual itself and then a reflection of the ceremony and its outcomes. The documentary maker: Sam Lipman-Stern is an Emmy Nominated Filmmaker with a passion for the visual arts that dates to his early days as a graffiti artist. In August 2023, HBO released Telemarketers, a 3-part limited documentary series created, executive produced and co-directed by Lipman-Stern. Time Magazine called it, "One of the Most Exciting Docuseries in Recent Years!" Sam Believ founded LaWayra retreat together with his wife Estefania in 2021. LaWayra was born as a passion project from the desire to drink medicine from our home and share medicine with some friends and slowly grew to become one of the best Ayahuasca retreats in the world. At the retreat they provide a world class Ayahuasca experience and stays for affordable prices. Check out: https://ayahuascaincolombia.com/ The Colombia Briefing is reported by Emily Hart View her Substack: https://harte.substack.com/ And please consider supporting the Colombia Calling podcast: https://patreon.com/colombiacalling

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