Colombia

A country divided by three ranges of the Andes into valleys that could barely reach each other, which explains both its regionalism and its wars. The Muisca chiefdoms of the highlands were conquered in the 1530s, and the Viceroyalty of New Granada governed from Bogota. Independence was won by Bolivar's campaign and the victory at Boyaca in 1819, and the Gran Colombia he built - covering today's Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama - broke apart within eleven years, which he took as proof that South America was ungovernable. Panama separated in 1903 with American encouragement and a canal at stake. Conflict between Liberals and Conservatives ran through the nineteenth century and became La Violencia after the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan in 1948, killing around two hundred thousand people. The FARC insurgency that grew from it lasted more than fifty years, entangled with paramilitaries and with cocaine money that made Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel briefly a state within the state. A peace agreement in 2016 won a Nobel prize and was narrowly rejected in a referendum before being revised and passed. Coffee and oil are the main legal exports. Colombia is the second most biodiverse country on earth. The country has about fifty-two million people and both Caribbean and Pacific coastlines, unusual in South America. Bogota sits at 2,640 metres. Gabriel Garcia Marquez set Macondo in a version of his Caribbean birthplace. The country produces most of the world's emeralds. Its Amazonian south is nearly empty of people. Cartagena, walled against pirates, is a World Heritage site.

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