Word: colombia
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Gaitan has made little headway in one part of Colombia-the country's roaring industrial frontier and rich coffee-growing uplands...
...Colombia, says a local wag, appears to have suffered a stroke: all its activity is confined to its 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...
...Aburra Valley are the seat of the three major Colombian textile concerns-Coltejer, Fabricate, and Tejicondor. The Medellin tobacco industry is a monopoly. In Medellin, far from the Magdalena, a new skyscraper is going up to house the Antioquian company that dominates Magdalena River shipping. Most of Colombia's investments in gold, all in oil and steel, the bulk of the coffee trade have their homes in Medellin...
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...
...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 (1913-14, 600,000 sacks exported...