Word: antioquia
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...left side; the right is paralyzed. About 80% of the country's coffee, the bulk of its industry and gold mining, and Buenaventura, now Colombia's No. 1 port, are all west of the Magdalena River. The keys to the western development are the states of Antioquia and Caldas (see map), where in less than a century coffee bushes have sprouted from the wilderness, and factories from the coffee bushes...
Wealthy from Lava. In Colombia's heartland, enterprise is the key word. Unlike most of South America, Antioquia has never been feudal. Topography was against a feudal land economy. Poor but independent peasants scratched for a living in the pinched valleys and on the mountainsides...
...along the Cauca River and the valleys of the Cordillera Central. The department of Caldas, colonized a few decades ago, produces more coffee than any other department today. The Antioquian peasant transplanted his democratic land system wherever he went: Caldas coffee farms are even smaller than those of southern Antioquia; the owners' families themselves pick the crop. Like the U.S., Colombia thus had a homesteading frontier. Social pressures had an escape; the free peasantry of the Cauca Valley counterbalanced the backward feudal areas around Bogota. To this free frontier is due the sensational increase in coffee production...