Colombia: what everyone needs to know

"Colombia is easily the most confounding country in the Americas. Its democratic tradition is among the most long-standing in the hemisphere, with only eleven years of military rule otherwise marring its 208 years of independence. With Latin America's third-largest population and third-largest economy, Colombia has achieved stellar rates of export growth during the last 75 years, but it has also suffered from one of the worst levels of income distribution in the Americas. The richest 10% of Colombians earn 53 times as much as the poorest 10%. On paper, the country has one of the most progressive constitutions on the planet (with no less than 99 specifically-enumerated human, social and environmental rights), but since that constitution's enactment in 1991 no fewer than 10 million Colombians have either left the country or become internally-displaced - the result of, what Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez has termed, a "biblical holocaust" of human savagery in which 400,000 people have lost their lives over the past 70 years. "--