546: Torah Tropical in Cali: How Far Would You Go to Find God?

There's so much to say about the Latin American Boom in literature, but how can we possibly discuss it at this point in time without mentioning Mario Vargas Llosa and his recent passing. And so, as a Colombia-focused podcast, we take a look at this era and these personalities in the literary world, such as Colombia's inimitable Gabriel Garcia Marquez but through the prism of Mario Vargas Llosa. With very special guest Juan E. De Castro, professor of literary studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School. Author of Writing Revolution in Latin America: From Martí to García Márquez to Bolaño and Bread and Beauty: The Cultural Politics of José Carlos Mariátegui, among other works, we discuss a variety of topics relating to but not restricted to: 1. The Latin American Boom. 2. Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and "that punch." 3. The importance of the Latin American Boom. 4. The end of this literary milestone. 5. One Hundred Years of Solitude - the Netflix version.  And so much more, including the Colombia Briefing with Emily Hart.

29 Apr 1h 2min

This week we speak to Camila Gonzalez Rosas, Director and Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Los Andes University in Bogotá and Researcher at the the Centre for Investigations into Microbiology and tropical parasitology and we discuss tropical diseases in Colombia. Nothing is off the table from chagas, malaria, dengue, leishmaniasis, zika, chikungunya and Covid-19....we cover it all. What are the possibilities of another Zika outbreak? What are the consequences of the loss of biodiversity and climate change in Colombia? We also talk about zoonotic transmission where an infectious disease is transmitted between species from animals to humans (or from humans to animals) The Colombia Briefing is reported by Emily Hart. Subscribe to her Substack here: https://substack.com/@ehart Please consider supporting us on www.patreon.com/colombiacalling

22 Apr 1h 2min

Colombian energy giant Ecopetrol has polluted hundreds of sites with oil, including water sources and biodiverse wetlands, the BBC World Service has found. However, as detailed in a new documentary produced and directed by Owen Pinnell of the BBC: "Exposing the toxic record of Colombia's oil giant | BBC World Service Documentaries,:" there are far more issues involving Colombia's Ecopetrol beyond just pollution the region's water sources such as potential links to paramilitary groups. As quoted in the documentary: "Matthew Smith, an oil analyst and financial journalist based in Colombia, says he does not believe Ecopetrol managers are involved in threats by armed groups. But he says there is an "immense" overlap between former paramilitary groups and the private security sector. Private security firms often employ former members of paramilitary groups and compete for lucrative contracts to protect oil facilities, he says.   Whistleblower and former employee of Ecopetrol, Mr Olarte shared internal Ecopetrol emails (now named "The Iguana Papers") showing that in 2018, the company paid a total of $65m to more than 2,800 private security companies. "There is always that risk of some sort of contagion between the private security companies, the types of people they employ, and their desire to continually maintain their contract," Mr Smith says. He says this could potentially even include kidnapping or murdering community leaders or environmental defenders in order to "ensure that Ecopetrol's operations proceed smoothly". And so, journalists Emily Hart and Richard McColl of the Colombia Calling podcast, have the fantastic opportunity to discuss what it meant to film this documentary, meet the courageous people who were and are willing to speak out about some of the crimes being committed in the region of Barrancabermeja, Santander and how the whole area is being affected by this. BBC Article: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crewlj11jljo Tune in and see the documentary here: https://youtu.be/Grp3YRhSf2o This is a truly incredible episode of the Colombia Calling podcast, please be sure to share, like and spread the word. And as always, tune in to the Colombia Briefing, reported by Emily Hart.

8 Apr 1h 14min

In today’s episode, Emily Hart speaks to archaeologist Daniella Betancourt: the woman decoding the enigma of Colombia’s mummies. Mummification is a practice which has been carried out all over the world, from Chile to China – from the ancient Egyptian pharaohs to Vladimir Lenin and Evita Perón, and - though chronically understudied - right here in Colombia too. These preserved remains are, Daniella tells us, a perfect time capsule: bodies frozen in time, they give us all sorts of clues about the ways people lived, and their beliefs about life and death. With the National University of Colombia, Daniella has been studying a collection of 36 mummies found in various institutions, trying to work out who they were, who mummified them, when - and why. Because until now, there has been so little study of this practice in Colombia, there’s still an awful lot find out, not least because these mummies were created by indigenous communities whose histories and customs were interrupted and erased by the Spanish colonisation of the country: many of Colombia’s mummies were destroyed and even burnt. But there is evidence that indigenous groups in Colombia kept practicing ritual mummification long after the arrival of the Spanish – perhaps a high-stakes act of cultural resistance, a spiritual imperative, or an attempt to create talismans of power – at this point, we can only guess – what the study has revealed, however, is that mummification was practiced much more widely than was previously thought – by more groups and in more regions of Colombia. Though in the historical chronicles of the Spanish invasion and early colonial period, there are some descriptions of mummies, most of the contextual information has been lost – in fact we don’t even know where most of these mummies came from or how they were found, as their burial sites were desecrated by tomb raiders and looters who took anything of value and sometimes even displaced the remains themselves. However, the new study by Daniella and the team has shed new light on these Mummies, able to reach amazing conclusions about diet, geography, and even health from state-of-the-art scientific methods. However, as Daniella will tell us, some of the results actually pose more questions than they answer – we’ll be talking in particular about a mummified two-year-old girl, who surprised Daniella even after years of studying her, and whose strange condition continues to confound researchers. We’ll also be discussing the ethics of studying human remains, and of displaying them in museums. The headlines for this week are also reported by Emily Hart.

1 Apr 1h 5min

Barry Max Wills, author of: "Better than Cocaine: Learning to Grow Coffee, and Live in Colombia," and Richard McColl of: "The Mompos Project: A Tale of Love, Hotels and Madness in Colombia," join editor Dan Cross on this week's Colombia Calling podcast. In a conversation that takes in the topics of culture and identity, immigrants to Colombia, writing about their adopted homeland, their books and the editing process, the triumvirate chats about the recent launch party and conversation event at Bookworm bookshop in Bogota.  Enjoy this fun conversation! The Colombia Briefing is reported by Emily Hart, check out her substack: https://substack.com/@ehart And buy the books please: The Mompos Project: https://a.co/d/49iOsiz  Better than Cocaine: https://a.co/d/7gAtzyR

25 Mars 50min

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.

18 Mars 1h 13min

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

11 Mars 57min

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!

4 Mars 1h 10min