Shades of green consume my line of sight ad nauseam. During the harvest, red coffee beans, surely, break up the monotony, but it’s off-season at the Pérez Arrubla coffee farm in Líbano, Colombia, and a wall of foliage overwhelms the eye, exhausting it.

The hot, Andean sun doesn’t help. It beats down without mercy, eliciting a headache and making it hard to focus. Yet focus is vital. The plantation sits on the side of the Nevado de Ruiz, whose steep inclines are unforgiving – a single misstep could send you plummeting down.

Then, there’s the wildlife. The mountains in the department of Tolima are home to over 60 species of snakes, many of them venomous. One of the most common, the aggressive fer-de-lance viper, is responsible for most snakebites in Colombia.

“You can’t survive without your hat and your machete,” Wilder, a farmhand who leads the harvest team at the coffee farm tells us.

Colombians have planted, cultivated, and harvested coffee on the country’s mountains for hundreds years and continue to rely on manual, labor-intensive methods that have remained largely unchanged. But it’s a much more unforgiving experience from the one sold in the tourism brochures.

And now this sector, steeped in tradition, has arrived at a crossroads.

Over decades, Colombia’s rural population has abandoned the countryside, driven out by armed groups and low wages. In 2025, a boom year for coffee production and a 13-year record in prices, the country’s half a million coffee-growing families struggled to contract the manual labor needed to pick the beans, sometimes leaving part of the harvest to rot on the plant.

In our latest piece for the Guardian’s “Coffee Crisis” series – reported from Tolima, Colombia – we try to answer these questions with help from finca owners, their workers, and experts.

Read the Guardian article here

The year started with a bang. On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces kidnapped Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. In the two days after, it seems that everyone has expressed an opinion on how they were able to do this, whether it was justified or legal, and whether Venezuelans are happy or not about it. Writing more on that would feel like beating a dead horse.

I spent the morning chatting with a friend about a different question: what comes next? Specifically – what comes next for Venezuela’s oil fields?

Trump was pretty explicit about his intentions: We are going to run the country,” he said in a January 3 press conference. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”

Again, setting aside the issue of international law, ethics, or global order, Trump hit the nail on the head. Whoever steps into the void here will have to spend a boatload under circumstances that may or may not make sense.

Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt contains an estimated 1.2 trillion barrels of oil resource (not to be confused with proven reserves), but these are hard to produce and require significant capital investment to get out of the ground. These would only “pay off only if oil prices rise,” Robert Rapier, who covers the energy sector for Forbes, wrote in 2019.

They haven’t. The price of crude is about the same today as it was, on average, in 2019. Bent crude is even lower.

In the meantime, what there is of Venezuela’s current oil infrastructure is in shambles. About half is in the state of Zulia, where oil infrastructure lies in ruins, turning Lake Maracaibo into an unfishable natural disaster (see video below).

At the January 3 Press Conference, Pete Hegseth said that President Trump was “deadly serious about getting back the oil that was stolen from us.”

Here are some shots I took while on assignment for InSight Crime in Zulia in 2022 and 2023, of what it is the US will be getting back. The infrastructure has not improved since.

As OffMap Media – which was born with the start of our trip in December 2024 – turns one, we are looking back on a first, successful year.

In the past twelve months, we rode thousands of kilometers through Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. We crossed deserts and jungles, and camped many cold nights high up in the Andes.`

We also interviewed hundreds of people, from coca farmers and social leaders to zoo directors and militiamen. We spent countless hours with bureaucrats in hot, humid offices cramped with piles of documents, and as many hours getting our boots dirty in fields or forests, trying to ask the right questions while under attack by mosquitoes.

When we started this project, we thought that few of our ideas would get picked up by established media outlets and that OffMap Media would be the home for much of our work.

But we’ve been caught off guard (pleasantly) by how often editors said yes to our pitches. Sometimes this happens at the last minute, when the story had been slated for you, meaning we had to pause the trip and write a new piece to meet our self-imposed weekly (later biweekly) deadline.

We also learned that this rigid approach was hard to combine with cycling up a mountain every other day.

Publishing on a fixed schedule put us at the mercy of an internet connection, forcing us to hurry through beautiful wilderness to stay longer in dreadful hotels, recommended only by their slow and unreliable (but essential) WiFi.

Then too, we’ve realized that the kind of article that’s right for Al Jazeera or the Guardian, may not work for you. Over time, we’ve seen an OffMap Media reader emerge: someone who wants a first-person story of adventure that also explores broader themes of politics, security, or culture.

We love writing these. They challenge us to reflect and be vulnerable in a way that our work for traditional media does not. But they take time and, often, lead us down rabbit holes of research and debate that we pursue to ends really only reasonable for writing a book.

In other words, as we like to say, this year we realized we’re the kind of people who “slaughter the pig, to only use the tail.”

It’s a terrible business model. And it often results in our best work. We have no intention of changing it.

We can only work like this because of your support.

This year, we used your contributions to cover upfront costs as we reported and wrote. We also invested in a domain name, a camera lens, photo-editing software, and stickers (lots of stickers). Every dollar we got (and much more) went back into this project.

Going forward, we won’t compromise on the depth of our reporting, but we will make some changes in how we publish.

We’ll continue to bring you “Special Reports” – our takes as political and security analysts in the field on big events in the region (like protests protests in Ecuador and the fall of Peru’s President Dina Boluarte). We won’t react to every big piece of news. Rather, when something significant happens in the region, and we can really add to the conversation, we’ll weigh in.

We will also share articles published elsewhere here when they’re out. Everything else we’ll publish in seasons. One per country or region.

The backbone of these will be The Bicycle Diaries, but we’ll also continue to publish interviews in our “In Their Own Words” category, OffMap’s Guide to Camping Cuisine; and exclusive reporting for The Field Dispatch. We’ll also publish more photo series. We invested a lot of time and resources in our photography and photo-editing, and are excited to share more of the final product with you.

Seasons will allow us to maintain the chronology of our trip in connection to what we think are the most important, interesting, and underreported topics in a region. Publishing in seasons means we can focus on reporting when cycling, and on writing when spending longer periods off the bike.

Many of you supported us from the start one year ago, and we are immensely thankful for that. It made this mad project real.

If your annual subscription is about to expire and you want to keep supporting the project, we are very grateful, but we also understand if you can’t. In that case, make sure to actively downgrade your subscription on the Substack website. If not, the paid subscription will renew automatically.

Our upcoming two seasons will focus on Ecuador and Peru. We hope you’ll join us for the ride!

Happy holidays, Anastasia & Douwe

“In light of the government’s brutal repression,” Marlon Vargas, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), said in a social media post, “we (..) end the 2025 Paro Nacional [national strike], clear the roads, and retreat to our territories to safeguard the lives of our people.”

Vargas’ announcement is unequivocal: The violent deployment of the military against protests worked.

But Noboa’s strategy was two-pronged. Apart from brute force, Noboa also froze bank accounts of indigenous organizations and suspended indigenous-affiliated media.

This approach appears to have been particularly successful given how deep the cracks in the region’s most powerful indigenous movement run.

50 international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, issued a joint statement condemning the excessive use of force, criminalization of protesters, arbitrary detentions, and freezing of bank accounts.

Blockades turn bloody

CONAIE declared the paro, or nationwide strike, on September 18. The immediate trigger was Noboa’s elimination of diesel subsidies, which raised fuel prices from $1.80 to $2.80 per gallon.

The decision ignited widespread opposition from Indigenous communities, transport workers and social organizations, who viewed it as an attack on Ecuador’s poorest populations.

But this trigger was accompanied by a long list of other demands and complaints. These included a halt to the expansion of mining and oil projects on or near Indigenous territory; a demand for more investment in social programs, including public health and education; and a rejection of a proposed referendum to rewrite the country’s constitution.

Indigenous communities, peasant farmers and allied social organizations, especially in the northern and central Andean regions, mobilized.

Demonstrations featured marches, public assemblies and the occupation of key highways and provincial capitals, effectively paralyzing transport and commerce in cities like Quito and the province of Imbabura.

Violence exploded quickly.

On September 28, the military fired live ammunition into a group of people blocking a highway in Cotacachi, in the north of Ecuador.

A verified video of the attack shows four men trying to carry a wounded man, 46-year-old Efraín Fueres, to safety amidst a panicking crowd.

As the military keeps shooting, three of the four men put down Fueres and run. The fourth, a man in a blue hoodie, remains standing and shakes his fist, yelling to the military that they are “killing their own people.”

Two army vehicles pull up, and soldiers in full combat gear beat the man until he falls on the ground. They continue to pummel both the man and his wounded comrade with the butts of their guns. Then, they drive away.

The man in the blue hoodie survived, but Fueres died of his wounds, becoming the first casualty of the protests.

“This was an act of violence,” General Manuel Davila, operational commander of the armed forces, told local media. “This was not a progressive use of force.”

Yet from there, violence and militarization only escalated.

Noboa deployed thousands of troops to break up highway blockades and halt marches in both the provinces and in the capital, Quito.

Before the CONAIE called an end to the paro, two more protesters died, hundreds were injured, and hundreds more arrested, according to local media. An Ecuadorian coalition of human rights groups received 391 reports of human rights violations as of October 23rd.

Protesters also engaged in violence. On two occasions, they threw rocks at the convoy transporting Noboa. Protesters also held 17 soldiers hostage for three days and wounded some of them. In total, 49 military and 24 police officers were injured.

Silencing Dissent

Previous paros in 2019 and 2022 saw more violence, yet did result in partial concessions from the government to the Indigenous movement. Possibly, Noboa’s non-violent actions allowed him to end the paro without compromising.

The government suspended media organizations and targeted the bank accounts of Indigenous and environmental organizations and leaders.

Ecuador’s telecommunications regulatory agency suspended at least three community media outlets on questionable grounds, seemingly to limit protesters’ ability to mobilize.

Human Rights Watch reviewed one case in which the telecommunications regulator suspended UHF Channel 47, operated by the Indigenous and Peasant Movement of Cotopaxi (MICC), for 15 days. The agency justified the move by alleging the station had “harmed national security,” citing a “secret” report.

Ecuador’s Superintendency of Banks, under government directive, also froze bank accounts belonging to CONAIE, the MICC, Yasunidos, Cabildo por el Agua de Cuenca, and dozens of individuals, including presidents of Indigenous federations, anti-mining movement leaders, and representatives of major environmental alliances.

According to CONAIE, the freezes aimed to “To suffocate the social organization, block legitimate political action, and break the right to resistance.”

In many cases, authorities failed to provide any judicial warrant, prior notice, or legal justification, instead linking these freezes to accusations of “terrorism,” “unjust enrichment,” and alleged financing of violent acts.

The government has done little to back up these accusations, which civil society, Indigenous, and environmental defenders dispute.

“They froze our accounts to open your oil fields. Freezing our money is an attempt to silence our resistance,” reads an open letter signed by multiple such organizations addressed to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Last year, Noboa signed a $4 billion IMF loan based on a promise that investment in the mining sector would make Ecuador a “preferred destination for businesses worldwide.”

Noboa may be playing dirty, but the Indigenous movement was not strong to begin with.

Historically, Ecuador’s Indigenous movement has been one of the best-organized and politically influential in Latin America.

But the 2025 presidential elections showed that the movement is far from united. Ahead of the elections, we wrote about how it would have little bargaining power under Noboa if it could not close its ranks.

“If the cracks aren’t fixed, the ability to pressure the government to meet Indigenous demands will wane,” Alexita Imbaquingo, a Kichwa activist who used to belong to CONAIE, told us as we reported for Al Jazeera.

And that appears to have happened. The Indigenous movement mobilized but did not get results.

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Late Thursday night, Peru’s Congress voted to impeach its president, Dina Boluarte.

Friday morning, dressed head-to-toe in dazzling white and surrounded by her cabinet, she gave Peru the presidential version of the “you don’t know what you’re losing” breakup speech.

“At every turn, I called for unity, for working together, for fighting for our country. I have not thought of myself but of the more than 34 million Peruvians,” she said.

But, as Boluarte began listing her achievements, the broadcast cut to images of Peru’s former Congressional Chief, José Jerí. The 38-year-old Christian conservative was already being sworn into office as the country’s new president.

Boluarte’s exit – and the rapid manner in which it was executed – aren’t surprising for Peru. She held a near-zero approval rating in a country that has seen six (now seven) presidents since 2016, only two of whom were elected to office.

But the watershed that triggered her ousting is a litmus test for where the country stands politically. It comes as a direct result of an extortion-related massacre at a concert in Peru’s capital, Lima, last Wednesday, October 8.

That Boluarte’s former allies in the right-wing Congressional coalition chose now to turn on their rubber-stamp president highlights the importance of rising insecurity on the national political stage and says a lot about how the country’s political elite – especially on the right – are positioning themselves ahead of next year’s election.

A rough start

Presidential oustings have become par for the course of Peruvian politics in recent years. Since 2016, the Andean nation has had a revolving door of presidents as Congress made liberal use of the ‘permanent moral incapacity’ clause of the Peruvian Constitution.

“Incapacity is different from impeachment,” constitutional expert Javier Alban told OffMap Media.

“It means something happens, and we are left without a president. Historically, moral incapacity was used for a situation of mental illness. But when Fujimori escaped in 2000, Congress used permanent moral incapacity to sack him. It created a precedent. It was a terrible idea.”

Congress has weaponized the clause half a dozen times in the past decade in attempts to remove presidents.

In some ways, it’s surprising that Boluarte has held on this long.

Her presidency was beset by scandals, corruption investigations, and increasingly authoritarian policy initiatives. She started her tenure with an already low 19 percent approval rating, which by early 2025, had plummeted to just two percent – the lowest in the world.

Boluarte came to power in 2022, when her running mate and former president, Pedro Castillo, staged a failed and ill-advised coup. After announcing that he would dissolve Congress and rule by decree, Castillo attempted to seek asylum at the Mexican embassy. But Lima’s eternal traffic trapped the disgraced president, who is now in preventive detention, facing a 34-year prison sentence.

Vice-President Boluarte condemned her boss, and brokered a behind-the-scenes deal with the right-wing opposition coalition in Congress for their support.

For many in the Southern Andes, who voted Boluarte and Castillo into office in the first place, her actions amounted to a traitorous act against the left. Tens of thousands took to the streets demanding her resignation.

Boluarte responded by sending in the military and authorized security forces to use deadly force to quell the protests. They killed at least 49 people across the country. Thousands more were injured.

“The military was shooting point-blank. They fired from up close like madmen,” Yovana Mendoza, who heads a victims association and whose brother was killed by the army during the protests, told OffMap Media.

Boluarte refused to issue an apology.

Instead, the president and her right-wing allies perpetrated a narrative that the protestors were “terrorists” and pushed through policies that eroded institutional independence, waged war on the judiciary, and undermined civil society’s ability to hold power to account in Peru.

A long time coming

Having alienated her base, Boluarte became entirely dependent on her alliance with the right-wing Congressional coalition to stay in power. Paradoxically, her weakness is what allowed Boluarte to maintain her grip on the presidency for nearly three years, much longer than most others in recent years.

That right-wing coalition is led by Keiko Fujimori, whose father is the 1990s dictator Alberto Fujimori. Fujimori senior oversaw brutal militarization and unprecedented state violence against civilians amidst a war on the national terrorism group, the Sendero Luminoso. Peru’s Supreme Court convicted Alberto Fujimori of human rights violations and corruption in April 2009, sentencing him to 25 years in prison.

Keiko spent years trying to get a pardon for her father, finally succeeding in 2017. Alberto Fujimori spent his last years at home and died in September 2024.

Yet, his legacy has continued to drive his daughter’s – and hence Boluarte’s – political agenda. In one of her most controversial political moves, Boluarte signed a bill into law, granting amnesty to police, military, and self-defense committees for crimes committed during Peru’s internal conflict (1980-2000).

“It was like a bucket of cold water, to see the President in her Palace with those people who violated human rights, all smiling while signing that law. For us, it is a step backward,” Adelina Garcia, who has been searching for the body of her husband since he was abducted by the military in 1983, told OffMap Media.

With Boluarte signing every piece of legislation the Fujimoristas put in front of her, Congress has politicized institutions – including those responsible for checking government budgets and for appointing judges. It has weakened the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and pushed through laws that make it harder to counter crime and corruption.

“We are seeing institutions that were working until just recently, completely failing to support the people,” Mar Perez, a Lima-based human rights lawyer, told OffMap Media.

”The insecurity crisis owes much to the government itself, which has fueled it through laws that favor organized crime,” she added.

In response to government ineptness in the face of this crisis, as well as growing authoritarianism, tens of thousands of Peruvians took to the streets of Lima in mid-September. Since then, the self-proclaimed “Generation Z” protests have only gotten bigger.

Yet none of this – not the killing of protestors in 2022 and 2023, nor the accusations of accepting bribes and up to $500,000 in luxury jewelry, nor the myriad of other corruption investigations, and not even the dismantling of government institutions – were ultimately responsible for forcing Boluarte out of government.

Though lawmakers previously submitted eight impeachment motions over her tenure, the right-wing coalition led by Fujimori, who control roughly one-third of seats in congress, repeatedly blocked them.

That finally changed last Wednesday, when a cumbia concert went horribly wrong.

The Trigger

On October 8, unidentified armed men shot four members of the emblematic Peruvian cumbia ensemble, Agua Marina, during a performance at Círculo Militar, a well-known military social club. Two men on motorbikes managed to infiltrate security and open fire from behind the stage, injuring a vendor as well as the band members, according to authorities.

Band members told the media that they believed the attack was linked to the repeated extortion demands they’d received.

Though no one was killed, the incident caused waves of panic and indignation across the country. The reaction was particularly strong in Lima and other major cities in northern Peru, which have seen a sharp rise in extortion cases and criminal violence.

The ousting

As news of the attack and its alleged links to extortion demands spread, the Generation Z protests swelled and renewed their calls for Boluarte and members of Congress to step down.

Within hours, multiple lawmakers filed motions for Boluarte’s resignation, citing her government’s inability to stem surging violent crime and extortion.

This time, the right-wing coalition voted against the President. Congress gave Boluarte a chance to defend herself, but she declined, calling the procedure unconstitutional. This triggered a vote in which the president was impeached by a majority of 122 of 130 votes.

The fact that the right-wing coalition chose this moment to throw Boluarte under the bus, signals how they see organized crime and insecurity as the issues likely to dominate the April 2026 elections.

And, the new president, Jose Jerí, who is a part of this coalition, outlined their proposed militarized response in his first address to Congress.

“The enemy is out there on the streets: criminal gangs. We must declare war on crime,” he said. “Not only declare, but win it once and for all.”

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Written by Douwe den Held, edited by Anastasia Austin.

Two weeks ago, South America’s cycling scene lost a titan. On September 13, Manuel Velásquez was killed in one of Colombia’s 22 daily traffic accidents.

He was an incredible person and a good friend.

His death hit hard, forcing me to reflect on the challenges, joys, and harsh realities of cycling in South America.

Manuel embodied the grassroots activism I admire in South American cycling culture.

Decades ago, he opened his home on the outskirts of Medellín to bicycle travelers, and over the years, he’s welcomed thousands of people cycling through South America.

The first of them slept on the floor of his garage. Over time, with the help of his guests, he transformed the garage into a real home — with a kitchen, bathroom, living room, and dormitories with bunk beds. Simple, but homey.

In doing so, he joined an informal network of people across South America who run havens for bike travelers, known as Casas de Ciclista. These are places to rest and meet fellow cyclists. For those on tight budgets, they offer a rare chance to sleep under a roof instead of in a tent.

I first arrived at Manuel’s Casa de Ciclista in 2019, after a three-month trip from Peru to Colombia. By that time, both Manuel and his house were already legends.

On first acquaintance, I found Manuel a bit strange. He spoke quickly, almost rambling as he jumped from story to story. But his excitement was infectious. And, by the time I left five days later, I had come to appreciate him, his enthusiasm, and his kindness.

In the five years that followed, I went back often. We became friends.

In South America, class often defines how you cycle. The poor cycle because they have to — pedaling to work because they can’t afford another form of transport. Leisure cycling is largely reserved for the rich, who will load road bikes worth thousands of dollars onto SUVs to escape the city for rides in places without the pollution caused by cars just like theirs

Manuel built his life around changing this dynamic — making the sport accessible to everyone. He organized events, posted road signs urging drivers to be careful, and helped his wife, Marta, run an affordable bike shop.

When I visited, we would talk about routes, bikes, and the never-ending fight to claim space within Colombia’s car-centric infrastructure.

Traffic deaths over the past five years have skyrocketed in Colombia, killing over 8,000 in 2024, in a perfect storm of reckless driving and poor infrastructure.

Car culture dominates in this country. Driving a car is a symbol of status. And, for many young men, masculinity is tangled up in driving – especially reckless driving.

Riding in a taxi, you notice how common it is for drivers to put their own and others’ lives at risk to save a few seconds. This, in a country where appointments rarely start on time. The behavior is rarely questioned or penalized. Even drunk driving is tolerated, as are marathon shifts for truck drivers.

Memorials to the victims of vehicular accidents line the roads of Colombian (and Ecuadorian, and Peruvian) cities. The crosses are dominated by the names and photos of young men, but also bear those of the victims of their recklessness.

That’s partly why, on our ride from Colombia to Argentina, we stick to unpaved roads and paths that see little traffic, which sometimes literally cannot be found on traditional maps (hence, Off Map).

Yet when we get close to major cities, I am forced to reckon with a side of cycling in South America, I like less: the danger, the lack of safe infrastructure, and the classist overtones.

For South America’s clogged cities, building more cycling infrastructure should be a no-brainer. It is cheap to construct, takes little space, and moves people more efficiently and faster than congested highways.

Yet, few cities invest in it – labouring under the misapprehension that, since few people cycle on the dangerous roads now, the demand for bike lanes doesn’t exist.

Cities like Paris, which saw the number of bike users double as it improved its cycling infrastructure in recent years, are a testament to that reality. Once there’s safe infrastructure, people embrace cycling.

Moreover, building cycling lanes improves the commute even for those who don’t cycle, by reducing traffic overall. Moving people on bicycles is far more efficient than moving them in cars (the same is true for public transport and walking). If cities want to move masses, they need to think beyond cars and buses stuck in smoggy traffic.

Medellín proudly boasts Colombia’s only metro system, and, at one time, the city had mayors with ambitious cycling plans. But for years now, they’ve been replaced by conservative politicians whose transport plans begin and end with adding more lanes to the highways. To my endless frustration, the city’s limited cycling paths are now crumbling away.

With little top-down leadership to count on, local activists like Manuel show what South American cities could be like.

Every Wednesday, for example, hundreds to thousands of cyclists get together for the weekly Sicleada, a ride on the main roads of Medellín. They push for better cycling conditions by claiming space, finding safety in numbers as they take over the deadly highway lanes.

But they also make it fun. It’s a motley crew of teenagers on BMX bikes, joint in hand; older folks leisurely cruising; and whole families in sporty leggings and tank tops. Music blasts from boom boxes strapped to racks, and people lean out of their windows to cheer the riders while obnoxious drivers honk angrily as they are forced to slow down by the sheer number of bicycles.

This self-organized protest has now crossed the city over 650 times. Whenever I joined its numbers, I always came home glowing, hopeful that cycling could change the city.

Manuel embodied that hope as, for him, the sport had already been life-changing.

Like so many Colombians, he had been a victim of the conflict at a young age. Later, he fell into addiction and spent time living on the streets. Friends helped him get back on track, he told me, and the structure and community of building his Casa de Ciclista, organizing events, and working for the culture gave him purpose.

And he encouraged me to do the same — to turn my frustrations into something productive.

Last year, I teamed up with my friend Juan José Restrepo to design a series of stickers meant to nudge drivers to behave better.

One sticker warned of the number of traffic deaths in Colombia: 22 a day.

Another showed an image of a flattened child with the text: “Your hurry kills us.”

A third – aimed at the idiots who speed through the narrow streets in any South American city, zooming through stop signs while leaning on the horn – said “Honk less, brake more.”

I gave Manuel a set. The next, and last time I saw him, he had put three of them on the back of his truck.

Two weeks ago, Manuel was driving that truck through the concrete jungle of Medellín when he became one of Colombia’s 22 daily traffic deaths. He left his wife, Marta, and their daughter behind.

Like any traffic accident, it was unexpected, unnecessary, and unfair. I’ll miss him.

But Manuel had always been an optimist.

After Anastasia and I left the Ecuadorian Amazon, we bused through the busy highways leading into Tumbaco, near Quito, to stay at another Casa de Ciclista, an old farmhouse with white walls enclosing a garden.

The place was peaceful, and the owner, Santiago, passionate about cycling culture and eager to teach others.

Manuel is gone, but the work of others like him and those he inspired lives on.

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Written by Anastasia Austin, edited by Douwe den Held. A version of this article was first published in Hidden Compass.

Angela doesn’t look like she has leprosy. As she stands above her seated friend, pleating colorful bands into her hair, she most resembles a girl getting ready for the high school dance.

But they are both patients of a devastating disease that, without effective treatment, wreaks havoc on a person’s skin and peripheral nerves.

Hansen’s disease — commonly known as leprosy — has largely been forgotten. I was one of many who assumed that it had been eradicated long ago before stumbling upon it in the remote town of Contratación.

Here, nestled in the Colombian Andes, the government once exiled the sick far from the rest of society, giving them their own currency, and imprisoning them behind armed guards. Today, the guards are gone, and the town is home to one of only two leprosy treatment centers in the country.

For Angela and many others, it is a refuge but also a place of isolation.

For two days, we battled up off-road mountain passes, seeing nothing but jungle. Below us, the Suárez River cut through the green swells of Colombia’s Eastern Cordillera. The rising sun caressed the water’s surface, sending clouds of condensation into the air.

Our bikes, loaded with gear for a year’s journey, slipped and slid on the clay-covered rocks. By 10 a.m., the merciless heat and humidity made every pedal rotation a slog.

As we turned a corner, the red clay path became cobblestone, opening onto rows of small, red-tile-roofed houses. The scene resembled a medieval European village, save for the shiny orange gas station at the town’s entrance—its parking lot the only paved surface for miles.

The air is fresher here, at 1600 meters in altitude, and the sun less punishing.

People walking the stone streets greeted each other and turned to stare at the mud-covered foreigners cycling past.

This town – Contratación – was meant to be just a brief, lunchtime stopover. But, after the oppressive heat of the morning cycle, we found immense relief in reaching it – and decided to stay a while.

Though I didn’t know it yet, our relief was a faint echo of that felt by the town’s founders.

Nearly two centuries earlier, another group of travelers had made this same journey. They, too, had struggled through the jungle, their bodies weakened not just by the heat but by a disease that marked them as outcasts.

They were “lepers”, driven out of their homes by townspeople who believed their affliction was not only highly contagious but also God’s punishment for sin. At first, the exiles tried to settle on the banks of the Suárez River, but the same heat and humidity that hung over our climb made the pain of their skin sores unbearable.

So, they sent the healthiest among them to seek refuge higher in the mountains. What they found was a forested valley where Contratación, a tiny trade post, stood protected by peaks on all sides. It was a place so remote that even the air felt different—cleaner, cooler, a balm to their ravaged bodies.

They carried the sick on stretchers along the same rough mountain passes we had labored to cross on bikes. Each step must have been a battle, and I imagine that my surge of relief upon reaching Contratación was only a pale echo of theirs when the mountains finally parted.

For these early settlers, Contratación was a sanctuary: a place where they could live free from fear and where the remoteness acted as a barrier to the world that had rejected them.

But it was also a place of misery, where the sick succumbed to death amidst neglect and ruin.

By 1861, the regional government officially recognized the settlement as a leper colony.

In the early 20th century, the national government confined existing residents and forcibly transported others there, transforming Contratación into a de facto open-air prison guarded at all connecting paths. While theoretically responsible for patient care, the support provided was woefully inadequate.

A government administrator who visited in 1864 documented the dire conditions, writing that he found “No beds, no furniture, nor blankets to hide their nakedness. Nothing more than a roof and walls where misery believes to find shelter against the elements.”

Showered and fed, we left our bikes behind and hiked into the surrounding mountains, following stone slabs that form a stairway into the clouds. Thick mist enveloped everything as the steps emerged alongside tall pines.

We followed the winding stairwell for over a mile to the Santuario María Auxiliadora, a shrine to the town’s patron saint — the Virgin Mary — built in grand European style.

The late 19th century brought priests of the Salesian order from Italy who sought out Contratación to care for the sick. A plaque on the monument proclaims gratitude for the church’s work with the community. Their influence created this apex of colonial architecture amid the Colombian Andes.

But alongside European aesthetics came a rigid biblical morality.

At the top of the stairs, a dirt path leads away from the stairwell and the Virgin Mary towards a darker history – El Puente de Suspiros – the Bridge of Sighs.

Wilson Raúl, a local historian whose grandparents were forcibly exiled here, describes Contratación as a living example of magic realism, where contradictory realities clashed.

Official policy mandated strict segregation: lepers couldn't leave, healthy people couldn't enter, and intermarriage was forbidden.

Reality proved far more complex.

Raúl’s father had leprosy while his healthy mother was brought to town to be raised by her sick grandmother. Their forbidden union formed one of many "mixed" families that defied regulations.

Such family arrangements became even more complicated after 1927, when the government prohibited lepers from raising healthy children. Salesian priests built orphanages in neighboring towns, where children born in Contratación were taken—often by force—to prevent "contagion."

The Bridge of Sighs got its name because parents were not allowed beyond that point – it is where they had to say goodbye.

"This town was a place of much pain, much sadness, families separated from their children," Dr. Norma Constanza, a physician whose grandparents were exiled in Contratación, said.

No one knows exactly how many children were abducted, but old black and white photos show hundreds of young boys and girls posing in front of orphanages. Dr. Constanza’s uncles were among them.

Still, those who had leverage fought to keep their kids, and, in Contratación, leverage came in unexpected forms.

Musicians' children rarely ended up in orphanages because their parents' talents were valued at parties hosted by the town's elite.

"If they wanted the musicians to play – they needed to repay the favor,” Raúl explains.

But not everyone had clout.

“Some kids never knew their hometown nor their parents,” Raúl told me. “It destroyed whole families.”

In many cases, that damage was irreparable.

When an earthquake brought the boy’s orphanage crumbling down, the head priest told the children to run down to Contratación and find their families. But their religious education had instilled the boys with an image of a blonde, blue-eyed Virgin Mary as their mother.

“So when they met their real mothers – women with dark skin often deformed by their disease – it was a brutal shock,” Raúl told me.

Stumbling down from our hike to the Virgin Mary, we came across teens roaming the streets in Italian carnival masks. The town square, too, was alive with energy. A man in his 70s hawked homemade ice cream, and families and friends gathered in little clans to stake out spots along the sidewalk for the coming parade.

Contratación is small—about 3,000 people—and it seemed like every living creature was here, either watching or participating in the parade. Even the stray dogs joined in.

The parade itself was impressive, important town figures led the way, decked out as characters from “100 Years of Solitude”, that classic by Marquez that defines Colombian literature both at home and abroad. They were followed by two types of dancers – traditional and modern. Contratación has no dance school, and though self-taught, their choreography was impressive.

The cultural richness I saw around me is no accident.

Even as it was made to be a place of exile and isolation, Contratación became a cultural breeding ground where European art and literature brought by the priests mixed with regional traditions from all over Colombia brought by the exiled lepers.

Resilience took the form of art here, and we had arrived in the middle of the December festivities, called the carnival of Matachita, when both are celebrated.

“Art became a powerful tool of hope in a town closed off and condemned to isolation,” Raúl said, explaining that he grew up at a time when few Colombian cities had theaters, but in Contratación, they had one that put on a different show every month.

“Even today, every other person here is a painter, a musician, a dancer—there’s so much artistic talent.”

But even though Contratación’s cultural traditions are a source of pride, they also carry the weight of history.

The carnival of Matachita is celebrated in other villages, but they refuse to acknowledge that the tradition comes from Contratación. Anything associated with the town is still seen as contaminated by its past as a leper colony.

And Contratación’s residents know the stigma their town carries. Raúl’s parents registered him as having been born in Socorro, a town 30 miles away, to protect him from discrimination. “They didn’t want me to be tainted with the idea of leprosy,” he said, “even though I never had it.”

Yet, as I watched the parade, I couldn’t help but marvel at the town’s resilience and joy, despite ongoing discrimination from the outside. Raúl felt it too.

“It’s like a social experiment. What happens if you take thousands of people, take away their civil rights, forbid them to marry, make them use a different currency, and surround their village with police guards?” he mused.

“And what happened was that people, who were sent here to die, decided to throw a party instead.”

The day after the parade – December 31 – I wandered down to the Contratación Sanatorium in blind hope that anyone, doctor or patient, may be willing to speak to me on New Year’s Eve.

In 1961, the Colombian government officially ended its policy of isolating those with leprosy and separating children from parents. Today, Contratación houses one of the country's two leprosy treatment centers.

The Sanatorium is a refuge for patients who arrive from all over Colombia seeking relief from both the physical and emotional toll of Hansen’s disease. Yet, in many ways, it is a paradox—a place of healing that shouldn’t need to exist.

The atmosphere was festive and, it turns out, my worry was for nothing. I spoke to a dozen patients and a handful of administrators. Angela – the Hansen’s patient getting ready for New Year’s Eve with her friend – is one of them.

We sat down to talk in the women’s wing of the Sanatorium – an airy building in Spanish colonial style – which today houses the overflow of male patients (men are disproportionately affected by Hansen’s disease), as well as women.

Angela’s hands moved quickly, expertly, through her friend’s hair, and she barely looked at me as she recounted her life story.

She was born in Colombia, but at 18, moved to Venezuela where she worked at a jeans factory to make ends meet. It’s there that doctors believe she caught Hansen’s — the disease is more widespread in Venezuela.

Often, the first symptoms of leprosy are hair loss. About five years ago, Angela’s eyelashes and eyebrows fell out.

“I didn’t think anything of it. I mean—I can draw on my eyebrows, and if I want eyelashes, well, I can put on fake ones, can’t I? she told me.

Then, painful ulcers opened on her feet. But they were small and doctors diagnosed them as fungus. The ulcers didn’t respond to any of the prescribed treatments, but they also didn’t grow. Not until Angela tried a “natural” remedy—salicylic acid.

“[The acid] burned the ulcers, opened up wounds—and they became infected,” Angela remembered. “It was hell.”

From there, Angela’s condition only worsened. As the ulcers spread across her whole leg, she began passing as much time in clinics as at home. She was passed around from doctor to doctor and misdiagnosed with a dozen skin conditions before one dermatologist finally thought to run advanced exams that included a test for leprosy.

By the time Angela was diagnosed, treatments for skin conditions she didn’t have had made her ulcers unbearable.

“I had no life, I had no peace—the pain was so intense,” she said. “I was in constant pain.”

Every patient I spoke to at the Sanatorium told some version of this story: misdiagnosis, confusion, delays of crucial treatment, and pain.

Though the World Health Organization declared its elimination as a global public health goal in the year 2000, Hansen’s disease remains “one of the world’s leading causes of preventable disability,” according to the Leprosy Mission International, an NGO. Officially classified as a Neglected Tropical Disease (NTD), around 175,000 new cases are reported each year.

“Doctors in Colombia don’t know anything about leprosy, so they don’t recognize it,” Dr. Constanza told me. “By the time patients are correctly diagnosed, they’ve often suffered for years.”

Early detection is among the Sanatorium’s primary goals. Medical teams travel across Colombia, searching for cases in communities where leprosy is most likely to spread. “We look for people with long-lasting skin rashes that don’t respond to treatment,” Dr. Constanza explained. “If we find the bacteria early, we can treat it before it causes disability.”

But the medical teams’ resources are limited and they can only do so much without better training for doctors around the country.

"In my university, we didn't learn about it at all," Dr. Constanza said. "Leprosy is treated as a distant, almost mythical disease.”

Since coming to the treatment center in Contratación, Angela’s ulcers have diminished, contained again to just her feet. She’s also found community and support. “People here are very approachable, very kind,” she told me, pointing to her friend and laughing a bit.

But when I asked Angela to tell me more about her arrival, a sudden sob escaped her, and the spell was broken. This was not a schoolgirl. This was a heartbroken mother trying to hold it together.

Angela arrived in Contratación right as the holiday season—the most important of the year in Colombia’s religious and family-centered culture—began.

“I agreed to come to this treatment center, but only in the new year,” she said. Tears streamed down her face—her friend’s hair forgotten.

Angela’s doctors decided that she could not wait until the new year. By November, her condition had worsened and, while she was in treatment at a local clinic, her doctors made the decision to move her to the specialized hospital in Contratación—ready or not. She didn’t even have an opportunity to gather clothes or say goodbye to her family, she said.

“I have small kids. Usually, I take them to Christmas prayers and gatherings. We make the house festive together,” Angela told me. “This year, they did nothing.”

She didn’t know when she would see her family again.

I bumped up against this bittersweet mix of emotions in every corner of the Sanatorium.

Many of the patients have experienced brutal rejection by society in their hometowns: once they are diagnosed, friends disappear, lovers leave, and even cafes leave their coffees at the door, refusing them even the smallest bit of human contact.

This dehumanization spurs the progression of their symptoms since leprosy is exacerbated by stress.

In contrast, when they arrive in Contratación, a warm, accepting community greets them, eager to shake hands and give hugs. This, as well as the medication, allows them to begin to heal.

Yet – in a way – they remain isolated not by force but by poverty.

“Leprosy thrives in overcrowded housing, dirt floors, inadequate roofs—these are the environments where the disease spreads most easily,” Dr. Constanza told me. The government subsidizes treatment in the Sanatorium, and some patients even receive disability pay while in treatment. Yet, most remain unable to afford the trip out of remote Contratación to see their loved ones who, in turn, cannot afford to come here.

Universally, when I asked those being treated for leprosy in Contratación what their New Year’s wish is, they say, “to see my family again.”

And so, Contratación cannot escape its contradictions, remaining both a refuge and a prison.

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Recently, The New Humanitarian published our investigation into how the first public university branch in Puerto Asís is trying to make a difference in Putumayo — a department deeply affected by Colombia’s armed conflict.

Read it here

For now, the University is little more than a few classrooms in an old wing of a high school on the outskirts of town. But the University of the Amazonía—headquartered in Caquetá—has ambitious plans, hoping to build a 2,000‑student campus in the coming years.

Still, its first cohort of 26 students, their teacher, and an ambitious administrator are eager to get started. They’re not waiting around for dedicated funding.

They’ve already started studying agro-ecology — the science of farming in a way that works with nature to grow food sustainably while protecting the environment and supporting biodiversity. It’s a bold and visionary choice, in a region that relies on farming and coca-cultivation inside the severely threatened Amazon rainforest.

Even in the shadow of violent armed groups, who continue to hold this region in a stronghold, this cohort is determined to learn sustainable agriculture techniques that may, over time, provide them with alternatives to coca cultivation and allow them to undermine criminal control in this area.

The portraits below highlight their voices.

Jessica Álvarez

Before her first birthday, Jessica Álvarez and her family fled the violent armed groups in Puerto Asís, leaving their farm behind. In 2021, she returned to her hometown to study at a government-funded technical institute, SENA1, and worked in water management. But she always wanted more: “My goal has always been to become a professional,2 something environmental, something tied to caring for nature.”

The University gave her that opening, not only because of its agro-forestry program but also because it allows Jessica to live on her family farm, a few kilometers outside Puerto Asís, saving costs.

“They make their presence known, even without killing anyone” she says of the “invisible” armed groups. She talks about the fear communities have carried for decades, but says her focus in on her education.

“You have to stay on the straight-and-narrow — behave well. We all know they are here, but for now we live in peace.”

Her vision is to turn her family’s land into a model agroecological center: planting sustainably, protecting forests, and cutting back on chemicals.

“First, I want to change our farm, to lead by example and show that it’s possible,” she says. “When people see real change, then they’ll believe.”

Jenny Riascos

Higher education seemed out of reach for Jenny Riascos until the local campus opened in January.

“Many people from here don’t have the financial means to go to a city and study. That was my case,” she said.

There’s also pressure to contribute to the household income, which makes deferring a paycheck to study an impossible choice for many. And for some, she says, it also makes working for criminal groups tempting — many of her schoolmates dropped out to cultivate coca or join an armed group.

“They’re good at the psychological game — playing on your need to bring home money, telling you all the things you can buy,” she explained.

Though Jenny did not hesitate to join the cohort, she says, it’s still a struggle. “Yes, the university is public and you don’t pay much. But you still have to eat, pay rent, etc.”

Yet she’s determined to finish.

“My dream is to have a farm that can sustain my family and be environmentally sustainable,” she says. “I want to apply everything I’m learning here.”

Imer Ortega

At 16, Imer Ortega, is one of the youngest students in the program — originally from a riverside community an hour away, he had to move into his own apartment in “the city” to attend.

“It was a drastic change... going from being at home where my parents helped me with everything to doing everything alone. Laundry piles up, laziness kicks in... now I have to be responsible.”

Raised in a farming family, the agro-forestry program felt like a natural fit for Imer.

“I like everything that has to do with the countryside. I’d like to implement an organic way of life so there is less contamination,” he said.

Of his high-school class, only one other person went on to college — many now work in illicit economies. “They think, ‘I'm not good at studying, I don’t know what to do,' and they turn to armed groups to earn money,” Imer explained

For him, education offers a different path forward, even if he has to take on adult responsibilities.

“When my university acceptance letter came, it was the best news!” he says.

It’s an incredible opportunity for us campesino youth. It helps us achieve our goals and our dreams.”

Diana Patricia Vargas

Diana Patricia Vargas is an industrial engineer who moved to the Putumayo countryside more than 20 years ago. Her mission is clear “Education here is about snatching kids away from that system [of illicit crops and armed groups]. And guiding them toward research instead,” she says.

Before becoming the first full-time professor at the new public university, Diana trained farmers in Amazonian fruit processing at SENA, but was frustrated by how little research there was on and for the region.

“Universities come, conduct studies, and take the results away with them, without sharing them with farmers,” she said.

To have the tools to conduct her own research, Diana left to pursue a master’s degree and then a PhD, before returning to the region. Now, she teaches Introduction to Agroecological Engineering at the new campus. Beyond the classroom, she envisions the university as a hub for research that can support farmers and strengthen local economies.

For her, changing dangerous agricultural practices is as much about protecting the farmers as it is about protecting the Amazon.

“They fumigate in shorts and sandals, then go home and sit with their children still covered in chemicals. They wash chemical containers and reuse them for drinks,” she says. “It’s poison.”

By raising awareness, she hopes students will promote safer, sustainable systems and explore crops such as Amazonian fruits and silvopastoral methods.

She knows the road ahead is long — that organized crime is entrenched in society.

“Many girls drop out to marry into drug trafficking or armed groups... they become second or third wives just for ‘security,’” she says. Yet, seeing students making the sacrifice to study gives her hope.

“The other day, a student asked me, ‘When will you take me for a ride in your truck?’” she tells us. “And I told her, ‘If you study, you’ll buy your own someday.’"

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Written by Anastasia Austin; Edited by Douwe den Held

Four rivers run through Cuenca – an Ecuadorian city of about 600,000 – whose wide boulevards, generous pedestrian pathways, and Spanish-Colonial architecture evoke the charm of a European capital.

Its exceptional beauty and vibrant cultural scene have made Cuenca one of Ecuador’s urban gems, both to foreigners, thousands of whom retire or emigrate here, and Ecuadorians who’ve nicknamed it the country’s “most beautiful city”.

And the four rivers are central to the city’s life: lined with cobblestone and dirt pathways that lead to the museums, bars, cafes, and restaurants from which you can hear the soft soothing rush of water. They are also the source of the city’s drinking water.

All that is now at risk.

Since taking office, Ecuador’s newly re-elected president, Daniel Noboa, has gone all in on his promise that a new era of Ecuadorian mining is dawning.

The frontline of that fight is in the Cajas páramos around Cuenca, where a Canadian multinational has been given the green light to begin exploiting the multi-billion-dollar Loma Larga mining concession. If the project goes forward, scientists, engineers, and scholars say that the effects on Cuenca’s four rivers will be devastating.

“In a few years, there won’t be enough water for the city of Cuenca, nor for the nearby towns. It will be contaminated with arsenic,” Ana Cecilia Salazar, a member of Cuenca’s Water Defense Council, told OffMap Media.

Local opposition includes not just Cuenca’s residents, but also mountain settlers who live side-by-side with the páramo, valley farmers who depend on it to raise cattle and water their crops, and the municipal and provincial governments. In their fight to stop the mining project, they cite multiple constitutionally-mandated referendums which unequivocally rejected mining in the Cajas.

But some expressed exhaustion over a fight that’s been ongoing for over 30 years. There’s a sense among activists that, every time they win, the rules change.

“Administration after administration has colluded with the mining companies to push through exploitation,” reads an unpublished proposed Water Protection Ordinance before Cuenca’s City Council obtained by OffMap Media. “In doing so they intend to defraud the sovereign will.”

The mining company and national authorities say that locals are exaggerating the environmental risks of this mining project. Moreover, representatives of Ecuador’s central government have argued for decades that the potential profits from this mining concession, and others like it, could help the country pull itself out of poverty.

Loma Larga, which has a 12-year lifespan, is estimated to hold over 600,000 ounces of gold and 4.3 million ounces of silver. Over the lifespan of the mine, the state estimates it might bring in almost 670 million USD.

Local scientists, scholars, and activists, however, warn that the potential for catastrophic damage defies calculation.

“We have our [economic] limitations, but we are happy with our ecosystem. There is water, which is fundamental,” Enrique Serrano, an economist who is also a member of Cuenca’s Water Defense Council, told OffMap Media.

“For the government and the international mining companies to come in,destroy our water supply, and poison us… it’s absurd,” he added.

We spent nearly a month in Cuenca, visiting the páramo and mountain communities, and speaking to environmental experts and local civil society leaders. Our deep-dives on the controversial Loma Larga, the Rio Blanco community, and Noboa’s policy shift will run soon — and we’ll share them here.

Read about the controversial Loma Larga project

Go to the Guardian

Read about the Rio Blanco community

Go to Al Jazeera

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The first weeks were spent at altitudes of 2,000 to 4,000 meters – tierra fría, Colombia's (relatively) cold lands. Frank and Fabienne, friends from the Netherlands, joined us for the first 10 days. Both are avid cyclists and we moved quickly through mountains, canyons, and páramos despite some serious climbing. After saying goodbye to them, we descended to Colombia’s biggest river, the Magdalena, and followed its mercifully flat banks to Puerto Triunfo.

We took off from the city of Tunja, two hours north of the capital, Bogotá.

One of our first stops was Lago Tota, which at over 3,000 meters is the second biggest high-altitude lake in South America. On the weekends the lake is overrun by tourists from Bogotá. But we set up camp on a Tuesday and had the photogenic white beach to ourselves.

The next morning, we circled the lake and climbed out of the valley on a steep unpaved road before descending to Monguí, population 5,000.

Founded in 1601, Monguí is a national heritage site that boasts stunning colonial architecture and a unique tradition—hand-crafting footballs. More than 30 factories, mostly mom-and-pop workshops, produce over half a million balls a year.

The tradition goes back to the 1930s when Colombia – then at war with Peru – deployed a young Monguí soldier to the tri-border area between Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. It’s unclear how and where exactly, but the soldier picked up the art of sewing footballs from the Brazilians and brought it back home.

After leaving Monguí, we gradually climbed to the highest pass of the trip so far (4,100 meters) and caught our first glimpse of Sierra Nevada del Cocuy and its majestic glaciers. That high up, there is little wildlife, and the mountains mute surrounding noise, so we rode down to El Cocuy in a cinematic silence, shattered only by our bikes and the rustling of our dusty rain jackets.

In El Cocuy we checked into a once-stately but now rundown hotel on the main square. El Cocuy is a town frozen in time: its colonial houses - all painted white and green - have a serenity seldom seen in Colombia. The streets are quiet, many doors and windows shut, and there’s a notable absence of the cheap speakers blaring loud music so ubiquitous in other parts of the country.

Tourism, mostly from Bogotá, drives the local economy. But visitors don’t come to El Cocuy for the peace or architecture. Instead, they flock here on the weekends to hike the glaciers - for many Colombians their first encounter with snow.

These glaciers are rapidly melting and El Cocuy's tourism industry faces an uncertain future. Without snow, the hikes – and the town – will lose much of their appeal.

We spent our last night with Frank and Fabienne in La Uvita, arriving just as the town celebrated the Aguinaldo Uvitano. In theory, this is a religious Catholic celebration marked by communal prayer, but we found it to be closer to a mix of Saint Patrick’s Day and Halloween.

Townspeople came decked out in their most horrifying costumes - young men dressed as faceless “sexy” nurses padded their butts and stuffed balloons under their shirts. They spoke in high squeaky voices and accosted other men with flirtatious but aggressive demands to be bought drinks. Others dressed as clowns and carried large cuts of meat with which they tried to slap bystanders in the face.

After saying goodbye to Frank and Fabienne, we continued to Barichara where we planned to celebrate Christmas. With its cobblestone streets and beautiful sandstone houses, this storybook village looks like the inspiration for Disney’s “Encanto”.

The historic town is relatively wealthy. That wealth is built on tobacco profits and – more recently – tourism. But tobacco farming depleted the land, and the richness of Barichara’s architecture now falls against a backdrop of forest turning to desert.

Leaving Barichara, we entered “tierra caliente” and rode through scorching heat that would accompany us for weeks to come.

On a rocky, clay road between Socorro and Contratación, a couple on a motorcycle stopped us to chat. They invited us for coffee whenever we reached the town. “Just ask for us when you get there, everyone knows where we live,” they said.

In the end, we stayed with them for two days, fascinated by Contratación’s history as a leper colony and reality as a treatment center (that story coming soon).

We started the new year with some of the roughest roads either of us has ever ridden. Steep hills and boulders, covered in mud deep enough to hold the bikes up, made for slow progress.

Finally on pavement again, we made our way to the Magdalena River, first crossing it by boat and later catching a ride on a cart along a stretch of railway.

Colombia's train system once connected internal trade centers to its ports. Along the Magdalena there are still some cargo trains today, but most of the network has been abandoned – it lays quiet, slowly falling into disrepair.

Locals have developed ingenious low-tech ways to put it to use, mounting bike or motorbike-driven carts onto the rails. As we rode along, sitting in plastic chairs and holding our bikes with one hand, Anastasia’s cap flew off. The driver paused our 5-kilometer ride to Santiago Berrio and casually jogged back to get it — just another day on the job.

From Santiago Berrio, we cycled the final 25 kilometers inland to meet Garcés at the Rio Claro Reserve. Here we also met Jeny, a social leader from nearby Purto Triunfo, making it our final stop on this stretch of the trip.

Jeny’s poignant thoughts on forgiveness will be the topic of next Sunday's "In Their Own Words." Stay tuned.

Thinking of a similar trip? Check out our past rides or reach out! We offer bespoke cycling trip planning sessions and would love to help you organize your adventure.

Written by Douwe den Held; Edited by Anastasia Austin

Few other people take the Amazon route between Colombia and Ecuador. After leaving Puerto Asís, the southern department of Putumayo’s biggest city, we have the road to ourselves, aside from a few oil tankers transporting crude to Ecuadorian refineries.

Soon, a pipeline peeks out from the brush. From then on, it runs along with us, sometimes disappearing into the greenery, but mostly clearly visible from the road, a relic of the oil economy that once boomed in this region.

Underground, a vast oil reserve stretches from Colombia through Ecuador and into northern Peru. This oil field is the Amazon’s biggest and, in the 1960s, Texaco (today Chevron) had big plans to exploit it, breaking ground at drill sites in both Colombia and Ecuador.

But by the 1980s things had changed. Guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, drug traffickers and the state fought each other in many of Colombia’s regions. In Putumayo, guerrilla groups began targeting oil infrastructure as a way to put pressure on the state and squeeze the companies themselves for extortion rent.

Between 1986 and 2015, the guerrillas carried out over 1,000 attacks on Putumayo’s oil pipelines, leading to 160 oil spills. Cycling here, I realize just how easy this must have been: the pipeline runs right next to the road, above ground, in a sparsely populated area.

Understandably, the attacks scared away big business. And, though oil exploitation never fully ceased, Colombia only saw a fraction of the investments compared to its safer next-door neighbor, Ecuador.

Colombia’s conflict didn’t just deter big oil in Putumayo; it stifled public and private investment in general. Meanwhile, on the Ecuadorian side of the border, oil money fueled the construction of roads and whole towns, deforesting virgin Amazon rainforest.

The infrastructure attracted other industries, like palm oil and banana plantations, as well as ranches, creating jobs and driving the local economy. But it also came at a price, speeding up the deforestation of a globally vital ecosystem already under threat.

The road running along the pipeline becomes progressively livelier as we approach La Hormiga, the last town before the border. It’s bustling: the main street lined with brothels, car mechanics, liquor stores, and more brothels. People fill the bars and restaurants.

For decades, the notorious guerrilla movement, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), maintained a southern base here. And when they demobilized in 2017, La Hormiga became the headquarters for one of the biggest dissident factions to reject peace: the Border Command.

The Border Command controls drug trafficking routes in both Colombia and Ecuador, making its money primarily from the cocaine trade. Putumayo is one of Colombia's main coca cultivation regions. The Border Command buys much of the half-processed coca base and refines it into cocaine, which they smuggle into Ecuador for shipment to Europe and the United States.

Coca cultivation, too, spurs deforestation, as swaths of jungle are cleared to grow the crop. But its destruction is relatively small compared to big oil, mining, ranching, and timber -- all industries scared off by the extortion, violence, and instability that accompany the presence of armed groups, like the Border Command.

From La Hormiga, we continue to follow the pipeline, which eventually brings us to the border crossing. A narrow yellow bridge spans the San Miguel River, connecting the two countries. It is quiet, just a few day-trippers taking selfies. The bustle of bigger border crossings – vendors hawking SIM cards, offering currency exchanges, or rushing you into a taxi – is unimaginable here.

Just into Sucombíos province, the Ecuadorian Amazon seems more alive. The road becomes a hallway leading between walls of green and the noise of the jungle – crickets, frogs, other creatures – envelops you. It’s impressive.

It turns out, it’s also deceptive. The corridor lasts just a few kilometers and then opens up. Soon, I see a patch of recently deforested land on the edge of a virgin rainforest. A man gets out of a beat-up pickup truck to inspect the first rows of banana plants that will soon erase any traces of the jungle.

Some parts of the Ecuadorian Amazon are better protected. But along our road through Sucombíos, the absence of conflict, paired with a long succession of extractivist presidents, has meant that economic reality overrides regard for nature.

Indigenous groups inhabited Sucumbíos before Texaco moved in. But as the company and its successors drilled thousands of wells, they unleashed rapid, unchecked development across the region. The Ecuadorian government approved and invested in an extensive road network to facilitate oil production.

These roads became a powerful driver of deforestation in their own right. Once the government opened access routes for oil operations, migration surged, and colonists cleared hectare after hectare of virgin rainforest for agriculture, ranching, and timber extraction.

This is the law of the jungle: New roads inevitably lead to skyrocketing deforestation.

Riding into the industrial heartland of the Amazon, we reach the first Ecuadorian city, which epitomizes the importance of oil to this region. Oil wells, pipes, and flow stations surround Lago Agrio.

Officially, it’s called Nueva Loja, but few use that name. On billboards, road signs, and buses the city is “Lago Agrio” – Bitter Lake – a playful take on Salt Lake City (Utah), from which the American oil workers who came here in the 1970s hailed. Statues of oil drilling rigs adorn its main square.

As we cycle deeper into the Amazon, oil pipes run parallel to pretty much every road, too. They differ from the ones we saw in Colombia in that they are bigger, more imposing, and actively in use.

This is the Amazon you don’t see in nature magazines. Yet, signs for tourism destinations hug signs for oil deposits -- the paradox unacknowledged.

We stop for coffee in a small town: little more than a single road lined with houses. The Amazon’s untamed green expanse is nowhere to be found, replaced by cattle farms. A large statue of a cow decorates the main street.

Economic incentives dominate this part of the Amazon.

While many Ecuadorian communities, especially indigenous ones, are on the frontlines of nature protection, the bitter irony is that locals here celebrate the extractive economies that will likely make their home less livable.

Nature does not pay their rent. Petrol does. Palm oil does. Cattle do.

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Written by Anastasia Austin; edited by Douwe den Held

“We won’t be eating like this,” Douwe told me at least once a week as we prepared dinner in the months leading up to our trip South. A year before we set out, he’d made the mistake of gifting me Yotam Ottolenghi’s “Flavour: A Cookbook” for my birthday – a decision he regretted as it doubled the time I took to cook most dishes.

He was kind of right. In “Flavour” Ottolenghi calls for hours in the kitchen, carefully baking, sauteing, charring, or browning vegetables with patience and without crowding the pan. That’s not practical at camp: where fuel shortages or quickly dropping temperatures limit time spent outside the tent and at the camping stove.

And Douwe was kind of wrong too. So far, food has played an important role in our trip – both in the meals we have at camp and those we splurge on when particularly good food is available. It’s also one of the three main topics among the other cyclists we’ve met. Along with gear choices and … ehrm bowl health … cyclists spend a lot of time swapping recipes and restaurant tips.

In fact, one concept from Ottolenghi’s book has become central to our camp cooking: “flavour-bombs.” Flavour bombs are ingredients that pack a wallop – ones that can be added to a variety of dishes to bring a burst of flavor to the simplest dishes. They are a shortcut to adding depth and complexity to cooking with minimal effort.

For Ottolenghi, these are often exotic ingredients – miso, nut oils, black garlic – that are impossible to find cycling through South America, at least outside of its capitals.

So I’ve adapted the concept for cycle-touring: largely limiting the list of ingredients to those that can be found in each country’s most basic grocery stores (re-supply) and which can be used in recipes possible within the limits of camp cooking.

Finally, for when camp cooking inevitably gets boring, there are foodie’s paradises: towns or cities in each country where good restaurants and ingredients are particularly abundant.

Colombia

Colombians rave about Colombian food. Few others do.

But the truth is that almost everything grows here, and the hearty lunches found anywhere are a cyclist’s dream come true. The cuisine is meat-heavy, bean-heavy, and often deep-fried. Not for you? Try the excellent fruit juices or the soups. They make up for the carton-tasting corn arepas they come with.

Some dishes I will never understand: the intestine-filled mondongo, for instance. Others, like sancocho or cazuela de frijoles, I miss every day.

And then there is the coffee. While cheap tinto is nothing to write home about, there’s also an abundance of high-quality, specialized brews in some of the smallest towns.

Re-supply: D1

D1 is Colombia’s answer to Europe or the US’s Aldi or Lidl: no frills, but lots of good products and good prices. Not only can you find many of the same basics at much better prices than expensive supermarket chains like Carulla, Euro, Exito, you can also find ingredients that just aren’t sold in those stores (see below).

And D1 is so ubiquitous that, cycling through Colombia, it became a shorthand for a town of a decent size. The smallest towns in Colombia won’t have a D1 – these will be the same ones where finding fresh produce is hard. But beyond that, most towns – whether in the jungle or high in the mountains – will have a D1.

Aside from the flavour-bombs listed below, D1 carries nut mixes, frozen desserts, ok cheeses (the asaro is by far the best), and a decent selection of inexpensive wines (they’ll go at half the price of any other store in the country).

The catch is that many products are seasonal and can disappear without warning or increase exponentially in price. When I first moved to Colombia, D1 carried Rattlers (the German beer/lemonade mix) which first became hard to find and then impossible with no explanation. Another of my favorites, an Iberian cheese, first doubled, then tripled in price.

Still, it's often the only place to find great products and even as some products disappear, others appear. Just as we were leaving Colombia, a large, well-priced unsweetened greek yogurt appeared on D1’s shelves: something most health-conscious gringos living long-term in Colombia have spent years dreaming of.

“Flavour-bombs”

• Sun-dried tomatoes (D1)

• Capers (D1)

• Queso para asar (D1) - “frying” cheese

• Chocolate covered almonds (D1) – great for a treat or in your morning oats

• Olives (D1)

• Dry Adobe peppers (Envigado market only)

• Good “artisanal” mayonnaise (La Vaquita, Carulla)

• Textured vegetable “meat” (Carulla; Euro, Exito)

• Coffee - compared to countries south, good coffee is easy to find and cheap (D1, local coffee plantations).

Recipes

Quinoa Salad:

1. Boil 300 ml of quinoa, set aside to cool

2. Chop red onion, tomato, sweet peppers, cucumber, avocado, and parsley. Mix into quinoa.

3. Cut a package of frying cheese into cubes and saute (in pan or pot) (note: oil is not necessary if your pan is non-stick and, in fact, can cause the cheese to burn. If your pan is not non-stick, use minimum fat). Mix into the rest of salad.

4. Dress with the juice of 1-2 limes or lemons and 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil. Salt to taste.

Tuna wraps

1. Chop 1 red onion; 1 green apple; 1-2 small fresh tomatoes (or, if you can get them 10-15 cherry tomatoes); 2-3 of the sundried tomatoes (from D1). Mix in a bowl (or camp cooking pot).

2. Add a can of tuna in oil

3. Add 1-2 spoonfuls of capers. Bonus: If there’s a descent vegetable stall around, you can also add a few basil leaves to the mix

4. Dress with mayonnaise and fill tortilla wraps (should make 4-5 large wraps)

Pasta with tuna and capers

1. Boil pasta to taste

2. Chop and saute red or white onion, garlic, zucchini or broccoli. Mix in with pasta

3. Add a can of tuna, two spoonfuls of capers, D1 sun-dried tomatoes, and parmesan cheese (available at most grocery stores, including D1)

Foodies’ Paradise : Medellin and Envigado

I’m sure I’m going to get flack for this from those who will say that Bogotá has a much better variety of food. Let me explain. Colombians are deeply patriotic to their region and I don’t know of any town or city around which all of my Colombian friends will rally as having “the best” cuisine.

To be honest, I struggle to believe that Medellín is the third best city for food in the world. Yet, while I’m sure the capital has better restaurants and the coast (Cartagena, for instance) better seafood, and Cali better bakeries, I don’t personally know where the gems are located in these places. In Medellín (and Envigado), I can be specific.

Most of Medellín’s high-cuisine restaurants are located in the posh El Poblado borough. There’s plenty of guides to identify the best of those. For more limited budgets we recommend:

For great Colombian food, including the paisa classics, sancocho and cazuela de frijoles; coastal fish dishes; and rolo Ajíaco, head over to Mezzón 55 with locations in Envigado and Moravia (and check out this interview with the founder and owner, Esperanza). For the meat-heavy bandeja paisa, a paisa specialty which includes beans cooked with pork, blood sausage, ground beef, crispy fried pork belly, and a fried egg, line up outside La gloria de Gloria in Envigado. Finally for Colombian fusion, check out La Casa del Alimento, in the borough of Laureles.

If you’re missing baked goods and good bread, I recommend Tres Trigos, which has locations all over town, delivers, and has great masa madre (sour dough) and dark, heavy, Germanic bread. For a bang-on curry, try Mekong in Poblado. For the best burger in a town that holds yearly competitions, head over to BGR Hamburgers (also Envigado). For a true, Italian slice give Pizzeria Antica Italia in Envigado a shot. And, if you’re looking for vegan options in a region that breathes and lives meat, make your way to Bianco Pizza in Envigado, where vegan and vegetarian pizzas are on offer and the “espinaca pizza” is to die for.

Finally, there are the markets. For a comprehensive education on the unique ingredients Colombia has to offer, a tour of the Mercado Mayorista is a must. Here you’ll taste and learn how to cook the country’s abundant fruits and veggies, including the uchuva, mamoncillo, feijoa, and chantadura.

And, for a less overwhelming experience, head over to the Envigado market. It’s smaller but still offers some hard-to-find ingredients to spice up your camping cuisine (beyond what you can find at D1). There you’ll find stalls that sell dry fruit, bulk grains like quinoa, and one – a big one in the middle of the market – that sells four types of dry peppers from giant burlap sacks, including jalapeño and adobe that bring another level of flavor to many dishes.

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Words by Anastasia Austin; Edited by Douwe den Held

The sounds of good-natured competition ring through the air at the community court. At one end, a couple of pre-teen girls shoot hoops; at the other, even younger boys volley a soccer ball. I take a seat on the edge of one of the long concrete stands, which is warm with the Amazon sun.

Mostly the kids are unsupervised, though I share the stands with a few straggling grandparents watching the games, a canoodling couple, and a group of black-clad “goth” teenagers crowded around a phone. Beautiful late afternoon light radiates off all of them. A kid of about ten rides his bike around the perimeter of the field, practicing his wheelies, as if to complete the picture of community bliss.

It’s hard to believe we’re in Puerto Asis – the biggest city in the Colombian department of Putumayo, known primarily for being overrun by armed groups and producing a large chunk of the coca and cocaine in a country that exports most of the world’s supply.

The Border Command (Commando Frontera), the infamous armed group that dominates this area, imposes curfews, restricts civilian movement, recruits children, and generally makes life miserable for the local population. But criminal governance is a weird animal. Dozens of people who live and work here told us the Border Command also imposes order on day-to-day life, banning violence and petty crime from the city streets.

Everyone we speak to in Puerto Asís assures us that it’s safe to walk around in any neighborhood and at any hour of the day. This is a stark departure from most places in Colombia, where you’re bound to hear some variation on: “its dangerous, don’t go there, be careful, stay in at night.”

The city’s infrastructure reflects this ease. Though Puerto Asís is literally dirt-poor — with almost no paved streets — there is a park or cancha on nearly every block. In contrast, locals in many larger Colombian cities, like Medellín, opt for cars, gated communities, and concrete, closed-off shopping centers. Puerto Asís’s dirt roads force motos and cars to slow, allowing kids to safely race around, while adults socialize on their front porches. At night the sound of crickets drowns out the little traffic noise.

At golden hour, that moment before sunset when the light is soft, a photo of the kid doing wheelies around the cancha would capture this nuanced aspect of life here perfectly: communal bliss and playfulness in gang-dominated territory.

So I perch on the edge of the stands, holding my camera bag without taking out the camera. No one gives me a second look, but I am tense, hyper-aware of the threshold crossed the moment the lens appears.

Before leaving on our trip south, I thought of myself exclusively as a writer – a print journalist. But one of our first paid jobs saw me as the photographer on a piece for a glossy English cycling magazine. I had to learn fast.

I soon realized that one of the persistent struggles of photography is just getting up the nerve to take a photo.

The lesson came on only the second day of our trip, near the city of Tunja, Boyacá. Excited to begin capturing rural Colombia on film, I asked a local farmer if I could take his picture. He glowered for a moment, before mumbling “what for?” and walking off.

It’s a fair question—one that’s stayed with me ever since.

As a writer, you can often avoid it, slipping into a place unnoticed. After all, taking notes -- mental or physical -- is less intrusive and less likely to change your subjects’ behavior.

But pointing a lens risks shattering the moment. People get self-conscious or downright suspicious. They stop what they’re doing and either pose or leave. And sometimes, they ask for money.

It is common to see women in traditional dress dragging an alpaca through South America’s most touristy town squares. Travel guides will discourage you from paying them to pose for photos. But, even as such books wane poetic about how doing so would commodify local identity, they acknowledge that photos can be an important source of income for locals. The reality is that these brightly-dressed women are there because other employment options are scarce. They expect to be paid and rightly so.

Being a journalist complicates the decision-making around photography even more. On one hand, you might profit financially from your photos – should the subject not as well? On the other hand, paying for a photo can undermine the integrity of your work. Work that (at least in theory) serves the public in a way a vacation photo doesn’t.

When we reported on security and organized crime, there were clear rules: don’t photograph children, don’t photograph victims’ or witnesses’ faces, never make violence or exploitation appear attractive. And never pay for information or an interview – a rule that extended to photos.

But there are a growing number of photographers who reject this ethical norm. They argue that paying for photographs, even—and perhaps especially—in circumstances of extreme poverty, war, and exploitation can be justified and even morally necessary

Thankfully, Douwe and I have not come up against this dilemma. In our experience so far, people become more tolerant of the lens once we identify ourselves as journalists.

But that raises another question: what is your responsibility to a subject who gives you access? On a trip like ours, are you really a journalist before a publication picks up your pitch?

Moreover, while capturing unfiltered reality is critical in journalistic photography, how many of us want a camera lens sticking into our most unfiltered moments?

As we cycled from the colonial city of Popayán to the archeological site Tierradentro, we got plenty of photos of competing ELN and FARC-EP graffiti. But the SD card is eerily devoid of any people from this part of the trip. Pulling out a camera in such a tense area raises suspicion.

In Tierradentro, we got myriad shots of the pre-Columbian tombs but failed to capture the flavor of small-town drama in San Andrés de Pisimbalá, the small but safe settlement which serves as its main access point.

On our first morning there – a Tuesday – we saw multiple men, not just tipsy or drunk, but wasted around town. One had passed out by the side of the road, another on a bench in town, and a third stood swaying as kids in uniform, let out of school for the afternoon, rushed around him as if he were a bus stop or a pole rather than a person.

These men dominated our conversation as we wandered Tierradentro. Later, while watching a funeral procession for a 49-year-old-man who’d been killed in a car accident, we learned that they were mourning their friend. The whole village turned out to walk the man to his final resting place, leaving us temporarily in charge of the restaurant in which we’d been having lunch.

The loss hit the tiny settlement hard. While many of the men coped by drinking, women united in naked displays of grief: sobbing and holding each other in the church square or gathering to cry in one of its two restaurants.

A more experienced photographer might have attempted to capture these touching scenes of small-town grief – a far more authentic piece of Colombia than our shots of the Tierradentro tombs. But in this small community built around a tourist attraction, whose many hospedajes stand empty because of the surrounding insecurity, people seemed uncomfortable and unnerved by our presence, and I felt too self-conscious and voyeuristic to even try.

Puerto Asís has a completely different energy, though it probably sees even fewer visitors than San Andrés de Pisimbalá. Sitting among its at-ease residents in the afternoon sun, I consider trying to chat one of them up and offering to send them the picture—increasingly my strategy for taking ethical portraits. But everyone around me is so engrossed in their own conversations and activities that approaching them seems disruptive rather than friendly.

This internal debate ends abruptly when the kid doing wheelies on his bike brakes sharply in front of me. “¿Por qué estás aquí?—Why are you here?” he asks. His question holds no animosity, just naked curiosity. I tell him I’m just visiting and he considers this for a moment, before saying “Wanna see me do a wheelie?”

“Sure,” I say. “Can I take a picture?”

This week marks six months since we launched OffMap Media. From our original idea to publish multiple stories once a month in our Field Dispatches, we have moved to publish stories one at the time, more frequently. We are reorganizing OffMap so stories from the first Field Dispatches are easier to find. Today we are republishing our very first story.

A peaceful town is slowly dying. The population of Armenia has dropped in the past decades, showing that even towns spared direct violence have not escaped the secondary effects of the Colombian drug trade and conflict.

Armenia is located in the department of Antioquia. It stands as a fortress on top of a mountain towering over the Rio Cauca, Colombia’s second biggest river. The mountain’s slopes are mostly covered with large swats of grassland, habituated by cows grazing or escaping the heat under the few trees dotting the landscape.

It is this cattle that changed a prosperous town into a shadow of its former self. In the 1980s and 1990s, investors bought farms producing labor-intensive crops like coffee, beans, sugarcane, and corn, and turned them into cattle ranches. Consequently, the need for workers diminished.

"Farms that once employed 40 to 60 workers now require only one or two” Didier Herrera, a baker and amateur historian, told us. “Armenia has died," he said.

Of the 8,000 people who once lived here, only about 5,000 remained in 2018 according to Colombia’s latest census data. That number is now closer to 4,000, according to residents.

Colombia urbanized at a dizzying speed as armed conflict displaced whole communities from the countryside to the cities throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. Armenia was one of the lucky towns that mostly escaped this brutal violence yet its population has collapsed.

Residents point to drug traffickers and their frontmen, who they say acquired much of the land for cattle ranching. In general, these deals require no violence. Farmers take the cash offers and leave, though many soon realize they have sold their land too cheap. 

We could not find records or court cases on illicit funds used to purchase land in Armenia. Nor could we speak to the public prosecutor as the person who held that position had recently passed away and had not been replaced when we visited.

However, Colombian criminals often use cattle ranching for money laundering, paying for the land in cash and betting that its value will grow over time. The cattle ranching enterprise itself is usually a placeholder: one that requires minimal investment in labor while the criminals wait for the land to appreciate so they can realize their (now legal) profit.

In Armenia, the human cost of this shift from farming to ranching is undeniable. As agricultural jobs disappeared, so did its people.

“Today we have little coffee production and few workers, we’ve become a town of old people,” Rigoberto, a retired coffee farmer, said.

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My name is Gabrielle Vail Gorder. I’m originally from Boston, Massachusetts, and I moved to Colombia in 2018. Last year, I won at the Salsa World Championships.

It all started with a breakup. When you go through a breakup, you have a life change, and that's when new doors open.

I met these two Salvadorians at a street party who invited me to go salsa dancing. And I felt that it was a way to reclaim happiness. It was healing to dance.

And it helped me make new friends. One of the hardest things when you go through a breakup is that you have a lot of shared friendships. You have to kind of find your new identity, who you are as an individual, without that other person.

Dancing allowed me to meet new people and a version of myself that I didn't know before.

At this time, I was working in Washington, D.C., but I didn’t feel fulfilled in my day-to-day life. I wanted to live abroad for a while, so I applied for a Fulbright Grant to Colombia.1

And, because I loved dancing, I wanted to be in Cali. I wrote, "anywhere except Bogotá." They placed me in Cali.

I didn’t like Cali right away. But over time, the city grew on me.

Cali is not the only city in the world that loves salsa, but here it's very much a lifestyle.

It's everywhere you go: in the grocery store, in the gym, in the taxi. Salsa is what they put on when they're cleaning their home.

And it’s not just a dance. People know the lyrics, they know the artist, and they know the stories of the artist. It is a part of their identity. They're passionate about it in the way that maybe an American would be passionate about a football game. People have arguments about why one choreography is more caleña than another.2

And I could see why it was so well-received here. Because it is such a warm climate, and the people reflect that. People here are very social, and there's much more of an emphasis on enjoying life and on being present.

But salsa really began in New York.

The style from there, salsa en línea, is slower and focuses on turn patterns. But salsa caleña is very fast: fast footwork, a lot of hip movement, a lot of knee movements.

The story behind this is that they would have these parties in Cali, where there was no alcohol. This was for young people back in the 60s, 70s. And they would go to dance, and they would dance salsa.

The myth goes that music albums played at these parties would often arrive at Buenaventura, the closest port to Cali, scratched.

And since they were scratched, people played the songs faster. They sped them up to mask the scratching. And that's why the caleña style is very fast – the movements had to be faster than the style that you would see in New York or Puerto Rico.

I fell in love with the caleña style.

Another thing I have really enjoyed about dancing in Cali is la Vieja Guardia, the Old Guard.

In the U.S. I would go out dancing, and it was not common to see old people. Whereas here, there are nightclubs – called viejotecas – completely dedicated to older people. And in the viejotecas you see people of sixty and up. They still go out.

And The Old Guard, La Vieja Guardia: well, they tend to go out every night.

They dress up, wear clothes from the 70s and 80s. It is so endearing to see someone dressing up like that, going out and practising all the traditional styles. They're maintaining the culture. Where younger generations may not know how to dance all the rhythms, they do.

And they love the dancing… but also the music. There's this appreciation for the music and this community feel that I really enjoy.

When I first arrived in Cali, I would go out to dance socially and learn. I always said, well, one day I would like to dance at Swing Latino.3

Swing Latino is one of the better-known dance academies in Cali, but also worldwide. It is the academy that sent the dancers who performed in the Super Bowl with Jennifer Lopez and Shakira.

But I always found a reason not to try: ‘I can’t because I'm doing the Fulbright. Or because of my thesis. Or because I'm working.’

In life, it's really easy to come up with an excuse not to do something.And you get to a point where you realise, if not today, when?

Finally, one day – on my birthday in 2021 – I decided: I'm gonna go to Swing Latino today. Maybe the factors in my life aren't perfect, but I'm going to do a casting and see which group they let me dance with.4

And that is when I started in a group of bailadores at Swing Latino.

Here in Cali, there's a big difference between bailadores and bailarines.

Bailadores are the ones who dance socially. They interpret all the different rhythms, and they're good at freestyling. They'll have a bunch of different styles that they're able to dance like boogaloo, son, and chacha.

Bailarines focus more on stage performances. They’re more professional.

I started with a group of bailadores at Swing Latino who also perform on stage, but their choreography tends to be less focused on acrobatics and it looks a little more traditional.

I started there and I loved it. And I did well. But I kept moving into the style of bailarines.

So I joined the first level of training at Swing Latino to become a bailarina, I was already in my 30s, and all of my teammates were teens. Obviously, it was not the typical route.

The dynamic at first was a little odd, because my friends from practice were all about quinceañeras5 and they'd never had a boyfriend. And then I would be there. Very different, you know.

But they did become my friends. I had to humble myself a little bit as well, to have like a 14-year-old outshine me in a choreography. But I liked the challenge, and from there I moved up.

You always have moments where you feel stagnant. You get worse before you get better.

I have this injury, the doctors aren't sure if it's the spinal cord or an illness like Guillain-Barre,6 but the nerves don’t communicate well with the muscles in the calves.

And in dancing, you need to have strong calves. You need to be able to be up on your toes. You need to lift your heels. It's probably the most important thing to be able to dance well, and I lost that.

So I am not wearing the highest heels. And to compensate, I have to make sure that my arm positions are good, that I have a lot of stage expression, that my hip movement is good. I have to do everything else ten times better to kind of cover up my weakness.

There have been moments where I have felt like giving up, moments that I felt like I was looked over because of that. I think I’ve definitely had to prove myself.

There have also been moments where younger girls passed up to the higher levels, and I was left behind. And that's something that can be a bitter pill to swallow. I've had some little girls say, you know, ‘Gabi, why haven't they moved you up? Is it because of your age?’

I doubted myself. Doubted what I could do. That's hard, I've felt like quitting at those moments. And I've had to realize that everyone's journey to getting to the same goal is different.

And it took time to feel accepted within the community. At first, even within Swing Latin, I don’t think that they thought I would want to try the bailarines approach – it’s not something that’s been done by a foreigner, really.

Even recently, at a practice for the Salsa World Championship, I heard the director laughing and saying, “What will they say at Worlds when we have a gringuita dancing front and centre?”

But we ended up winning, against all odds. We won Worlds and I was in a very front row – in one of the central positions.

And after, people started to recognize me. I would be out, and people would come up to me and say, “Congratulations on Worlds!” And not just the week after, like months later, in December during the Feria[de salsa], people would come up and congratulate me.

I realized, wow, I'm being accepted more.

But the best thing about dancing, and this goes to say for salsa, bachata, whatever the style is: it's a language.

Dance is a language. You don't have to be able to speak to be able to dance because your language is the rules behind the dance steps. The lead, knowing how to follow the lead, knowing the musicality.

I've danced with people who don't speak the same language as I do, but we're able to communicate through dance, and we're able to enjoy the song and interpret it.

I go out and have friends of all ages. In the dance community here, I have friends as young as 14 who dance with me, and friends in their 70s and 80s from the Old Guard.

And you learn a lot from that, and you appreciate the different stages of people’s journey with dance. And I like to see that it's something that you can do your whole life.

When I see the older couples who dance all the rhythms, I think that's who I want to be someday.

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In his own words:

My name is Gerardo Criales. I was born in Armero, Colombia, in 1965 and today, I am the director of the Armero Historic Center, a project founded two decades ago to preserve the memory of those who died on that tragic night in 1985.

Armero wasn’t buried, it was erased. Around 30,000 people perished,1 my mother among them. I was 19 years old.

We interviewed Gerardo in January, as part of an article for Rouleur Magazine where we told the stories of the mountain and those who built their life on its slopes.

Out now!

First off, you need to understand that Armero wasn't some small town as one might imagine. It was a prosperous, cosmopolitan city with five banks, two movie theaters, and a regional hospital.

That November 13, 1985, in the early hours of the afternoon ash began to fall. It’s a pretty normal phenomenon for volcanoes. But for us, it wasn’t normal.

On the news, they told us that this sort of thing happened with volcanoes and that the important thing was to avoid breathing in the ash – they told us to put on face masks and glasses, to make sure the ash didn’t get into our eyes. That’s it.

Then, at around 9:30 PM, there was an eruption. A big one.

Nobody heard it. We didn’t realize because that night it had started to rain. That was one of the factors – one of the things that contributed to “the perfect storm.” The other was the priest, who held mass and told everyone not to leave their houses unless they had to.

As I said, it was raining hard. I’d been out visiting my girlfriend and walking home from her house, I listened to the radio.

That’s another thing – supposedly that night there’d been warnings [on the radio]. Well, I fell asleep listening to a football match and at no moment was there any sort of interruption, any sort of transmission.

I came back to this world to my father shouting for me to wake up. “Gerardo, the river! it's coming for us!”

I reached for the light switch. Nothing. The first thing the avalanche destroyed was the power station. There was no light.

I grabbed keys and headed for the door. That’s when I felt the floor begin to tremble. It felt like being on an airport runway right as a huge passenger plane, like a 747, takes off. A shocking, deafening noise.

The black mud had already come down and started to fill the calles. It had formed hills blocking the main streets but, [thankfully], we lived on a carrera.2

Then, I suddenly remembered, “my grandfather!”

My grandfather slept in a room in the back of the house, so I had to go to the back patio and practically knock down the door. This lost us precious minutes.

The avalanche suddenly surrounded us and it carried us up. The mud stream took us to a height of about 7 meters.

My mom had been with my dad. One moment she was holding his hand. And the next moment, she was gone. My father turned to me and said, ‘your mom, I don’t know what happened to her.’ We think that maybe she thought we’d lost our grandfather – who was her father – and went back to help him. We just don’t know.

At this point, we had nowhere to run, so we stayed put. The night was long, filled with moans, people calling for help, but it was dark and we were unable to move.

The next day, we began the process of helping get the wounded out and getting out ourselves. To our tremendous surprise, we found my mother just meters away, trapped under the power cables that had come crashing down in the avalanche.

She’d gotten tangled in the electricity cables when the poles fell. They threw her backwards and – I believe – she died from a blow to the skull. I looked for a tool, anything, to get her out. I cut the cables, I freed her. Then, I saw my grandfather who had also been trapped up to his waist by the same cables. But he was still alive!

“Mijo, I can’t feel my legs,” he moaned.

I freed him and started pinching and massaging his legs to get the circulation going.

The whole time, thinking: “He’s going to be disabled. This happened at 11 at night. It’s now 8 in the morning. He’s spent practically 12 hours without blood circulating in his lower body!”

But I’d gotten him out and he was alive. To do that, however, I had to leave my mother, as if she weren’t a human being, as if she didn’t have a family.

That Thursday, we did the impossible. We got out.

First, a small helicopter, which only really fit two people, picked my grandfather, my dad, and me up. I had my feet hanging out. To get us picked up, I had to make a kind of helipad so the pilot could try to get as low as possible and we could jump on.

I threw down planks and roof tiles. While collecting these materials, I saw a woman with her belly exposed, she’d been cut open. I covered her with a plank of wood and laid down other planks – it was the only way for us to get over her and out of the rubble. Later, speaking to my family about our missing aunt Raquel, I realized that it was her – that we’d stepped on top of my Aunt Raquel to escape, to get my grandfather to a hospital in Bogotá.

My dad and I weren’t hurt, but we left with just the shirt on our backs.

The helicopter dropped us off on a hill and we made our way to [the town of] Honda. From there, a kind stranger picked us up.

“Armero survivors?” he said. “I’ll take you to Bogotá. Don’t worry about food, I’ll take care of you.”

The whole ride, it was raining non-stop. At some point, his truck got stuck, and we had to get out and push. Imagine being in just a t-shirt, shorts in the brutal cold and rain, we got soaked. But, not for nothing, we made it despite the rain.

After a month [in Bogotá], my dad went back to help friends look for their belongings in the rubble. When he returned from the trip, I asked him what he’d seen.

“They took your mother’s body,” he said, adding that all of our belongings – the area where we’d left her – had turned into a sinkhole.

Three months later, in February, I went myself.

I was about to start my studies in Bogotá and I felt that I had to go back. I told a cousin and he said, “Why? Why would we go there to bring back bad memories? But if you want to see what’s left, it is up to you.”

And I went, and I found my mother’s body.

She was still there! I was in shock. My father had told me she had been collected, but here she was. [Later I learned] that my dad had confused the location of our house.

I told an aunt. “My mom, your sister, is still there. I left her the day of the disaster, and she is still there, waiting for me to come to give her a Christian funeral.”

The following week I came back with two uncles – her brothers. I went to a classmate, a friend who now worked in the police station, and asked her to help me get a death certificate.

“No, Gerardo,” she told me. “That’s difficult. That’s become a business.”

Remember that we had five banks. [After the tragedy], many people tried to get death certificates [for Armero victims] so they could get at their savings – take over their bank accounts. They would claim that whatever body was their mother, their aunt, whatever.

So I went to the notary’s office, to the registrar’s office, to the mayor’s office, but nobody would help me.

In the end, my dad got a permiso ligero to bury her, but I wasn’t going to bring my mom’s remains to Bogotá.

So, my mom remained there, where she was loved, where she was the mistress and lady of her house. We buried her on the patio and put up a commemorative plaque. She’s been there for 39, going on 40, years now.

The State was negligent, negligent with the municipality of Armero. The State knew what could happen in Armero, they knew it. They had already been talking to volcanologists – from Italy, North America and, I think, Japan.

That night, the mayor got the warning about the eruption at 9:30 — just after it happened.

He tried calling the governor. He called and called, but the governor was at the club — at a party. The story goes that the governor finally told him to stop being so alarmist, that nothing was going to happen. The mayor told the governor that an avalanche was heading down the Lagunilla riverbed, which – you know – posed a serious risk. The governor never paid him any attention.

That man died by the phone at City Hall, waiting for the governor to get on the line and give the order to evacuate.

Can you imagine what would have happened if the governor had ordered an evacuation at 9:30 when he got the first call? It took two hours for the avalanche to descend. We could have had two hours [to evacuate].

Moreover, Armero had already been destroyed by avalanches twice before 1985 – once in 1565 and again in 1845. The history had already been written but they never told us. In school, we learned about colonization, about the fight against the Spanish … they should have taught us about this.

The fact that a month before [the eruption], they made a risk map, but they never distributed it… the state knew what could happen, but the people were left completely in the dark.

And that is why we preserve the history here, at the Center. Because those who don’t know their history are bound to repeat it.

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Recommended listening: Authorities made many mistakes in finding children’s parents or giving children a new home after the disaster. Radio Ambulante made an excellent episode about that (in Spanish).

I am riding my mountain bike on smooth pavement that runs over a plateau along a meandering river. I am trying to keep up with the Rigoberto Uran Cycling Club: a dozen teenagers on much lighter road bikes.

Almost every day, these boys from the town of Urrao gather to ride, train, and race in Colombia’s Western Andes. The vibe is relaxed, amicable. While most are here for fun, one kid is dead serious. Jhohan, inspired by the club’s namesake, wants to become Colombia's next best cyclist.

The odds are against him. While his fellow riders wear cycling shoes, he wears sneakers. While they ride on aluminum bikes, he barely keeps up on a much heavier, rusty steel hand-me-down from his uncle. While the rest of the team has just come from school, Jhohan -- who’s 17 -- has just finished a grueling day working in construction.

Yet, he wouldn’t be the first cyclist from Urrao to beat the odds. Colombian cyclists have always punched above their weight.

To succeed, the country’s cycling talent has had to navigate a landscape of poverty, armed conflict, road dangers, and a systemic lack of professionalism in local, regional, and national cycling infrastructure.

Nevertheless, a golden generation of Colombians conquered the sport's greatest heights, culminating in Nairo Quintana’s wins of the Giro d’Italia in 2014 and the Vuelta a España in 2016, and Egan Bernal's historic victory at the 2019 Tour de France—cycling's most prestigious race. In a sport dominated by Western countries, Colombia is the only non-Western nation to break into the top ten.

But in recent years, the country has rolled past its peak. Its wins on the WorldTour, cycling’s highest level, have steadily declined from 50 in 2018 to only 12 in 2024.

What’s more, few new riders have joined the ranks. On average, Colombia’s riders are almost 28 years old -- the age at which most cyclists peak. Of its 13 WorldTour cyclists, only two are under 25 -- not enough new blood.

I went to Urrao, a cradle for cycling champions, to understand what’s driving Colombia’s decline – and what made its cyclists so successful in the first place, despite the odds.

The Cycling Cradle

In many ways, Urrao is a bustling town like so many in Colombia. Its central square is bordered by little coffee shops and restaurants on all sides, and it fills up on weekends when people from the countryside come to buy, sell, meet friends, and drink.

It’s here that I meet Jorge Flores and Enrique Serna in a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop. We take a table outside to people-watch while we talk and sip our tintos. Both are part of the cycling “old guard.” They’ve witnessed some of the world’s best cyclists come up through the local club while they were on the board.

Cycling culture is strong in Urrao: aside from the club, the town has multiple bike shops and weekly group rides. Though home to just 17,000, it has had an outsized impact on the sport.

Part of the reason is geography. Unlike nearby towns surrounded exclusively by steep, grueling climbs, Urrao’s terrain is relatively flat, sitting as it does on a plateau at 1,800 meters. This landscape makes cycling accessible – it's a practical form of transportation for locals. Yet, the town’s high altitude and surroundings also make it an ideal training ground for those seeking a challenge.

Urrao is also a frontier town. To the east lies an immense, impassable jungle stretching to the Pacific Ocean. This isolation means the town’s main road -- though paved -- sees little traffic, a rarity in a country where most roads are unpaved and poorly maintained.

Flores and Serna start by telling me about the rich cycling history.

Oscar Jesús de Vargas was the first cyclist from Urrao to break through to the highest level. He finished third in the 1989 Vuelta a España. Others followed, like Luis Felipe Laverde, who won two stages at the Giro d’Italia between 2002 and 2008.

Rigoberto ‘Rigo’ Uran definitively put Urrao on the map. Not only because of his achievements -- during his near 20-year career, he has claimed second place in the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, and the 2012 Olympic Games in London -- but also for his irreverent personality. In a sport that sometimes takes itself too seriously, Rigo is famous for dancing, making jokes, and swearing on live TV to lighten the mood.

Rigo’s Rise

Rigo’s road to the top was far from easy.

For decades, Colombia’s armed conflict cast a long shadow over Urrao. From the 1980s onwards, left-wing guerrillas controlled its rural areas. Violence escalated when right-wing paramilitaries arrived in 1997.

Rigo’s father registered him with Urrao’s cycling club in 2001, at a time when the town was caught in the middle of the war.

Shortly after, Urrao started making global headlines – and not in a good way. Guerillas kidnapped Guillermo Gaviria, governor of the department of Antioquia, while he was leading a peace march near Urrao. They brought Gaviria to a camp in rural Urrao, held him prisoner for over a year, and executed him when the army dared to send in a rescue mission.

Travel in and out of the town – or cycling for that matter – was dangerous during this dark period. Flores remembers being stopped at four checkpoints on a single trip to the next town over: by the army, police, paramilitaries, and guerrillas, each accusing him of collaborating with the enemy.

“You didn’t know who to obey,” he told me about the armed groups, looking out over the square. “Both sides could kill you.”

Just months after young Rigo first picked up a bike, paramilitaries killed his father at a checkpoint on baseless accusations of collaboration with the guerillas.

The brutal act not only left Rigo fatherless at 14 years old, it also made him the family’s breadwinner, taking over his father’s job of selling lottery tickets. Overnight, cycling became more than a passion – it became a potential lifeline from poverty.

The cards were stacked against him. Aside from having just lost his father and having to work, Rigo started on poor equipment. “He had a monareta—a basic bike with a little basket on the front,” Alexander Pino, a childhood friend and neighbor, tells me. “ That’s what he started training on.”

Yet, Rigo’s talent shone through. “Every Saturday, we held informal races, and Rigo won his first one right away,” Flores recalls.

Just two years later, Rigo joined Orgullo Paisa, a pro-team in Medellín, Colombia’s second biggest city. Within three years, the Italian team, Tenax, signed 19-year-old Rigo. He went on to ride on the highest level for almost two decades, winning stages in all three Grand Tours.

“People know Urrao because of Rigo,” Flores says.

In Colombia, people don’t just know Rigo. He is a demi-god. People recognize themselves in him, the eternal number two.

The 2023 telenovela “Rigo” -- which has a run time of about 75 hours -- eternalized the cyclist, telling his story in 99 episodes.

Even before retiring from the WorldTour level, he parlayed his well-known persona into one of the best recognized brands in Colombia – “go-rigo-go” – which sells everything from bikes and parts, to clothes, to a special line of candy.

He’s also an advertising mainstay. Look at a billboard or commercial in Colombia, and there is a big chance Rigo appears promoting anything, from telecom providers to mattresses.

Since retiring at the end of last year, he has focused even more on expanding his empire which also includes “Rigo” restaurants, luxury boutique hotels, and the biggest annual amateur cycling race on the continent.

No wonder that for youths like Jhohan, Rigo personifies the Colombian dream of success. But the old guard has doubts that the new generation can reach the same heights.

“Rigo worked incredibly hard,” says Serna. “Nowadays the younger generation…They don’t have the discipline that Rigo had.”

Breaking Down the Myth

It wasn’t just discipline and talent though. Many of those who came up with Rigo had equal raw talent, according to Urrao’s veterans who watched the cyclist shoot to stardom. Yet, few made it out of Urrao, let alone to the Grand Tours in Europe.

Over the days I spend in Urrao, Flores and others of the town’s cycling old guard tell me countless tragic stories. There was one kid, even more talented than Rigo, who got killed after getting involved in drug sales in Medellín. Another – Luis Felipe’s brother Juan David – joined Orgullo Paisa with Rigo and had a promising career that ended when he was hit by a truck. There were scores more, forced to put away the bike by the harsh realities of growing up in rural Colombia.

“At 16 or 17, kids here have to start earning money. They can’t live off cycling, so they abandon it to work. After a day on the farm, they’re too exhausted to ride,” bikeshop owner, Fernando Pino tells me.

Comparing their stories to Rigo’s demonstrates a core truth: to have made it in Colombian cycling, you also needed plenty of luck and a community’s support.

Rigo had both in spades.

He benefited from the small kindnesses of neighbors. “For instance, at the shop where cyclists gathered to train, they’d give Rigo his breakfast, his coffee,” Alexander Pino tells me.

He was also lucky to come up when the local government supported cycling.

“When Rigo was in the club, we had a mayor who invested in us,” Flores explains.

“The municipality paid for a technician, covered race travel costs, and enabled us to organize departmental races.”

And he benefited from the experience of those who came before him. Marlon Pérez, who had already raced for European teams, helped Rigo to secure his first spot with a team in Italy.

A Widening Gap

Since Rigo, Urrao has not produced a new WorldTour cyclist. Beyond discipline and strength, the new generation does not have the support that helped Rigo succeed.

Jhohan, the kid I met during the training with the Rigoberto Uran cycling club, surely has the determination. And he may have the talent – that will become clearer as he starts racing.

But his dream – the Colombian cycling dream, which says that you can make it on a rusty bicycle if you work hard enough – is less likely to come true than ever.

In Urrao, the municipality contributes less to cycling than it did in Rigo’s days.

Currently, municipal support is limited to paying a trainer for the cycling club, Mauricio Montoya, the town’s Sports Secretary, tells me. He says that the smaller investment is in line with the administration’s goal of broad participation which sees a limited budget spread across 16 sports.

“We want as many kids as possible to participate. While it’s great if some reach the highest level, our goal is not so much to create great cyclists, but great people,” he says.

This less cycling-focused approach means that if young cyclists want to participate in the races crucial for their development, their parents need to chip in.

This lack of government investment exists at all levels, not just locally. Colombian riders have long criticized the national cycling federation for its minimal support of young talents. This problem, already present during Rigo's rise, has worsened as Colombia's national government continues to cut cycling funding.

This year, the federation cancelled the Tour de Colombia, one of the country's few professional races—eliminating a valuable opportunity for the new generation to showcase their abilities to the world.

The lack of support widens the gap between Colombian talent and their peers in Western countries, for whom access to sophisticated training and nutrition programs, as well as technology, is a given. These trickle down to small, isolated Colombian towns much later, if at all.

Nairo Quintana and Egan Bernal recently echoed this in a podcast, emphasizing the need for better preparation and training to compete with Western nations.

Without significant investment in infrastructure, training, and youth development, the next golden generation may never emerge.

Back on Urrao’s central square, Flores tells me, “we had a theory here in Urrao, that great cyclists are harvested every 3 to 4 years.”

That harvest has, for now, dried up.

Recommended further reading: Matt Rendell’s Colombia es Pasión!

Today, Ecuador elects its next president in a tight race between incumbent Daniel Noboa and leftist challenger Luisa González.

Noboa, who leads the neoliberal National Democratic Action (ADN) party, oversaw acute militarization and a litany of human rights scandals over the last year. González heads the Citizens' Revolution (RC) – commonly known as “correísmo” – a populist political movement whose long-time leader, former president Rafael Correa, fled the country amidst an outstanding arrest warrant for bribery charges.

They’re running against a backdrop of a sky-high homicide rate, a flagging “war” on gangs, dismal economic indicators, and an energy crisis, including blackouts that ground the country to a halt at the end of last year.

Over the past months, OffMap Media has interviewed dozens of political analysts, party representatives, voters, and election observers. Throughout these conversations, four important takeaways emerged:

1. Two candidates, no concrete plans

In April, Noboa and Gonzalez presented the final policy platforms to Ecuador’s electoral body. However, these plans largely lacked concrete details or financial mechanisms, continuing a pattern of hollow promises characterizing a campaign heavy on one-liners and light on policy to address the country’s urgent, overlapping crises.

In February, we reported that most voters see security and economic growth as the most important issue. Polls reflect this.

Ecuador is living through an unprecedented security crisis, fueled by gang-related violence. In January 2024, Noboa declared war on the gangs, militarizing the streets, the prisons, and the political discourse.

Initially, these hard-line policies appeared effective as homicide rates declined. However, as we previously reported:

Cases of extortion and kidnapping continued to rise unabated, and the modest security gains eventually evaporated as criminal organizations adapted. The national murder rate remained well above pre-pandemic levels, with January 2024 becoming Ecuador's most violent January on record.

The country faces multiple additional crises.

Since 2017, Ecuador has had the worst-performing economy in South America, according to a 2023 CEPR study, which found that poverty and inequality reached their highest levels in more than a decade even before the COVID pandemic pummeled the nation.

In 2024, unseasonable dry spells and a decade of infrastructural neglect collided, throwing the country into literal and metaphorical darkness with rolling blackouts that lasted up to 14 hours a day. Noboa’s administration has been caught unprepared and was slow to respond. Many small and medium-sized businesses shut down, further depressing an already reeling economy.

Despite these urgent challenges, neither Gonzáles nor Noboa has offered any concrete, financially viable solutions.

“Neither candidate has presented [concrete plans]. Not in the debates, not in interviews, not in meetings with stakeholders or academics,” Melania Carrión, an Ecuadorian security consultant and former government official, told OffMap Media. “No one knows how they’re going to pay for any of it.”

Both candidates spent their two presidential debates discrediting each other rather than explaining their policy proposals.

"I expected a candidate who could lead," Quito street vendor, Jaqueline Sanchez, told OffMap Media in February. "But none of them could explain their plan for the country. They just threw cheap shots at each other."

2. A disillusioned electorate

Sanchez is not alone in her disappointment. Voter fatigue runs deep and many Ecuadorians told OffMap Media they are choosing between two evils.

Many admitted they wouldn't participate if voting weren't mandatory.

"No, I'm not excited to vote. We've gone to the polls more than five times in four years," an economist from the energy sector told us in February. He requested anonymity fearing professional repercussions.

Among those who were eager to vote, almost all felt strongly about voting against one candidate rather than about supporting the other.

Noboa, though a relative political newcomer, represents a business and political dynasty. His father, Álvaro Noboa, is Ecuador's richest man and five-time failed presidential candidate himself.

Recently, Daniel Noboa has had to defend the family empire – Noboa Trading – against accusations of complicity in drug trafficking after police seized multiple cocaine shipments totaling about 700 kilogram from the company’s containers. This is on top of criticisms that during his 18-month term, the sitting president has failed to deliver substantial security or economic improvements, undermined constitutional norms, and overseen human rights violations.

Those supporting Noboa frequently told OffMap Media that their vote was primarily against "correísmo" – the political movement founded by Rafael Correa, who ruled from 2007 to 2017. Though González has tried to distance herself from her former mentor, many voters view them as inseparable.

Across much of Ecuador, Correa's name remains associated with authoritarianism and corruption. A persistent fear among Noboa supporters is that a González victory would enable Correa's return from self-imposed Belgian exile to govern from behind the scenes.

3. From key voting bloc to disintegrating movement

The choice between Noboa and Gonzalez is so polarizing that it has managed to split Ecuador’s biggest undecided voting block in this election – the Indigenous movement, meaning that today’s election could still be anyone’s game, despite the endorsement of the highest Indigenous leader in the country.

Leonidas Iza, candidate for Indigenous party Pachakutik (PK) came in third in the first electoral round, miles ahead of any of the other candidates. His five percent – approximately 536,000 votes – could have made him a kingmaker in this second round.

But his attempts to build consensus around the leftist candidate, Gonzalez, failed. In the weeks leading up to the runoff, cracks within the Indigenous movement first became visible then overwhelming.

On March 30, PK endorsed Gonzalez. But it's unclear how much that endorsement will matter at the polls.

Even before the full endorsement, Indigenous leaders on the regional, local, and grassroots levels publicly bickered about the decision, exchanging accusations of betrayal in the process. Some leaders even co-opted the PK flag to publicly support Noboa.

4. A democratic process under attack?

Even in the first round of elections in February, some voters expressed their concern that Noboa’s anti-constitutional tendencies could turn into a refusal to give up power.

“We hope that they respect the people’s choice … whoever wins,” Ricardo Almagro and Daisy Cordero, a Quito couple who both work in security, told OffMap Media. “But this administration hasn’t respected the laws.The vice-president was supposed to take over, but they didn’t let her.The couple referenced Noboa’s highly controversial decision not to take a temporary leave of absence while campaigning for re-election. Ecuador’s constitution dictates that a sitting president running for re-election must take such leave and cede power to their vice-president during the campaign period. But, amidst legal challenges and condemnation from experts, officials, and civil society, Noboa refused to do so.

The refusal was one of a series of constitutionally dubious decisions made by the president, including trying to remove vice-president Verónica Abad from office (twice), signing an IMF loan without the approval of the legislature, and declaring a state of internal armed conflict against the country’s gangs.

After the first round of elections on February 9, Noboa cast doubt on the legitimacy of the results after coming in unexpectedly close to Gonzalez – claims contradicted by international election observers. Then, on the eve of the runoff, Noboa passed a decree declaring a state of exception in 7 provinces – all of them ones where Luisa Gonzalez won the first round.

Analysts who spoke to OffMap Media expressed grave concern that the decree could be a step towards impeding the peaceful transfer of power.

“His statements have raised questions about whether he would accept a loss in the second round,” Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) told OffMap Media. “The latest emergency decree allows for further restriction of people’s civil rights and liberties in the event of a disputed election; it is another sign of the probability of bad faith if he were to lose.”

Ecuadorian analysts echoed these concerns.

“We’re worried that whether he wins or loses, Noboa won’t accept defeat,” Carrión said. “We believe that the state of emergency shows the national government’s desperation. We are worried about what will happen on [election day].

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Words by Douwe den Held; Edited by Anastasia Austin

"This is the most beautiful road I've ever cycled," I decide, as we ride away from Murillo, a town just down the hill from the majestic Nevado del Ruiz volcano.

I have this thought roughly every two days in Colombia: so many of the secondary roads we take through the Andes are rich in landscapes that change before your eyes every time you climb or descend a couple hundred meters.

But the route we're riding today stands out for its 60-meter tall palmas de cera, the Quindío Wax palm — Colombia's national tree.

Busloads of tourists arrive on the other side of this mountain to see the palms in the Valle de Cocorá, near Salento. But here we are alone, surrounded by hundreds, thousands of them, rising above the jungles and slowly weaving in the wind. There is something prehistoric about them.

At night, we set up camp at a thermal bath with what would be a million-dollar view of the palms on the other side of the mountain. Here, we have it all to ourselves.

We’ve been told repeatedly that this is a safe region, but an interview we did in Murillo days before keeps me up.

We spoke to Rubi, a woman who had been displaced from this area not long ago after an armed group showed up at her farm. The army drove the group out and everyone in town assured me they were gone for good.

I can’t help but think that insecurity, or the perception thereof, is what keeps visitors away from our camping spot.

The next day, we see a billboard with a photo of those same palms welcoming visitors to the town of Santa Isabel. In black paint, someone has written "disidencias FARC-EP" across it.

The Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) made peace with the Colombian government in 2016. But almost a decade later, many dissident groups still fight each other in Colombia’s hinterland.

Some never bought into the idea of peace; others grew disillusioned with the peace process, for most the earnings from cocaine, gold mining, and other criminal businesses were simply too lucrative to abandon. I’ve never met anyone who still believes these groups can take over Bogotá or turn Colombia into a socialist state. Their ideological raison d’etre is bankrupt.

For these groups, spraying graffiti is like planting a flag—a claim on territory, putting civilians, government officials, and other armed groups on notice that they are in control here.

Elsewhere in Colombia, we had seen how this “game” plays out as dissident factions of the FARC and the National Liberation Army (ELN) compete with each other and the army, frantically covering every traffic sign with graffiti and erasing the other group's name wherever possible. Meanwhile, the military takes a different approach – foregoing spray paint in favor of armored vehicles – to make their presence known.

⁠“They are all here,” a lady running a little shop on one of these roads told us. “The military comes through during the day, and when they go home in the evening, the others come out. I serve everyone - what else can I do?”

As we cycle past the billboard with the FARC graffiti and towards Santa Isabela, I reflect on how the presence of armed groups doesn't necessarily spell danger for travelers.1 Many of Colombia's most touristic places have a strong presence of armed groups. Seven hundred thousand people visit the coastal city of Santa Marta each year, most unaware of the silent war fought between two armed groups there.

Besides, the paint used to write “FARC-EP” on the billboard looked to be at least a few months old – likely written before the military dismantled the group here.

Yet the thought lingers: "Why hadn’t anyone tried to remove the paint if the group is gone?”

I ride into Santa Isabela on alert.

Over lunch, we ask locals about security on the road ahead and are assured, once more, that all is well.

After an uneventful afternoon of cycling past slopes planted with coffee and banana trees, we stop at an eco-finca that rents out rooms. Its freshly painted walls, wooden finishing, and general abundance contrast with the other houses we have seen over the past two days. The couple who owns the place lets us camp on their terrace.

"They don't like me in town," Marta,2 the wife, tells us, bitterness seeping into her voice. After spending decades running a small restaurant to save for her dream house, she now feels cast out by the town.

"They think that because we have a fincita that we're snooty or have lots of money."

I feel for her. She comes off as angry, scared, and paranoid, in turn. Marta tells us, for instance, that she hadn’t seen our Instagram message, sent earlier that day, asking to make a reservation. But if she had, she would have said no because she doesn't know us. She also warns against part of the route we have planned. Unable to put words to her fear, she simply shrugs: "bad people."

It makes me think back to a few weeks earlier when we cycled through Cachipay — a settlement so isolated that a muddy mountain road serves as its only connection to the outside world. In nearby towns we’d heard vague warnings about Cachipay (“they’re bad apples”), but found only a two-street hamlet with a tiny square, a covered sports field, and a single shop selling everything from boots to soap, doubling as a makeshift bar with empty beer crates piled high.

Passing through around noon, we found a group of locals already having a drunk debate, the noise of which carried onto the square. It created a sad atmosphere — the kind of place ambitious youth try to escape.

But dangerous? No. The people were friendly and invited us to the village party. When Anastasia's bike broke down after leaving, several locals stopped to offer help. When we realized we lost a water bottle and Anastasia went back to search for it, someone gave her a ride. Poverty does not equal danger.

Still, I heed Marta’s warnings and change our route, keeping an eye out for signs of anything abnormal. Soon, we pass more FARC graffiti.

About 20 kilometers before a hamlet called San Juan, a woman flags us down and asks where we’re headed. When we mention Ibagué, she makes shooting gestures, warning, "Be careful around San Juan... if you know what I mean."

We don’t know what she means, and she does not elaborate. Is this paranoia? fear of the unknow or of poverty? or a real threat?

Again, I consider the possible risks.

One, the woman is referring to the FARC dissidents. Maybe they still roam the area, but if so they pose little risk to us. Armed groups rarely target travelers at random.

Two, petty crime instead of an armed group. Petty criminals almost certainly exist in the towns, as they do everywhere, and they pose a threat if you’re not careful. But we’re careful and, besides, far from the population centers where they tend to strike.

Three, an unorganized splinter group that formed after the army “dismantled” the local FARC dissident faction, made up of now leaderless, but still armed, youth terrorizing the locals.

It’s a familiar pattern of "recycling violence” that I have seen across Colombia, including in Medellín, where we lived for nearly half a decade. There, the government allowed guerrilla groups to settle in poor neighborhoods to reintegrate during peace negotiations in the 1980s.

They came armed. When peace talks collapsed, the guerrillas departed but left weapons behind. Without ideological leadership, youth formed gangs — sometimes to protect neighborhoods against outside threats. The state's absence in these areas allowed the problem to fester. Despite multiple peace processes and a fall in general violence, over 300 gangs still roam Medellín today.

Groups like that – undisciplined and unpredictable – would pose the highest risk to us here. But surely, if it was that kind of threat we should, would have heard about.

This worst-case scenario, however unlikely, casts a shadow over the otherwise peaceful mountain landscape.

Suddenly, everything seems suspicious. Is the 12-year-old boy leaning against an electricity pole marked with "FARC-EP" graffiti a lookout? What about the 15-year-old who follows us on his bicycle for a kilometer before vanishing? And the man on the bridge, his gaze sharp and unreadable—is he watching us with ill intent or simply people watching, intrigued by a couple of foreigners?

The last climb to San Juan is nearly deserted and I’m on alert, but not panicking. I reason that the real risks here – as in most Colombian towns on a Sunday afternoon – are the drunk campesinos3 driving home after too many shots of aguardiente.4

Exhausted from racing through the heat, we stop at a small shop for cold sodas about five kilometers from town.

We ask about security, and the friendly young woman behind the counter can’t help grinning: "Some tourist from Ibague got robbed a couple of weeks ago," she says while handing us ice-filled glasses for our room-temperature Gatorades. “It never happens, so people get excited.”

All the tension melts from my body. Coming from someone who lives close to town, her assessment of San Juan’s safety carries far more weight than the vague warnings from people who live on the other side of the hill.

We finish the climb to San Juan at a leisurely pace. The town sits like a pirate's nest atop the mountain. Its two streets are lively – packed with crowded bars – but not dangerous. Everything is suddenly sunnier, friendlier, and more beautiful.

The balance – between navigating real danger in Colombia’s countryside and not getting sucked into the prejudices and anxieties that have accumulated over decades of civil conflict – is a tricky one. This time, my paranoia had been just that.

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Special Reports:

Field Dispatches:

On the ground reporting on local stories linked global developments.

The Bicycle Diaries

We’re cycling the Andes, taking the road less traveled. In The Bicycle Diaries we share each month’s highlights, route details, and insights. Note that the first two of these were published together with the Field Dispatch.

In their own words:

Interviews with people we’ve met on our journey. They have been translated and edited for clarity and readability - nothing else.