Colombia Unfiltered Intro Video

In 2018, the armed groups in this country had about 13,000 fighters between them. By the end of last year, more than 27,000. It doubled. And it didn't double during a war. It doubled during a peace policy. Nobody has to guess what that produced. We're living in it. The question now is whether the man who just took office can undo it and whether he'll be allowed to. This show is free and it stays free whether you back it or not. Nobody's locked out. However, it isn't free to make. If it's worth something to you, the link's on the screen. And everything else is at columbiaunfiltered.live. Now, let's get back to it. I'm Loren Lau. I live in Armenia in Kandio. For 10 years, I hosted Coffee Time Live on Sunday mornings. And it ended in July after a full decade. This is a different show and I'll tell you plainly why. For most of those 10 years, I was careful. I lived here on a visa. And there's a point where a foreigner with a strong opinion becomes a foreigner with a problem. So I pointed at things and I let people work out the rest. I don't have to do that now, so let me be straight about where I stand. Because you deserve to know that before you decide whether you'd listen to this show. I'm not neutral. And I'm not going to perform being neutral either. I think you're owed that up front rather than left to work it out later. I don't really do left against right. That's a football match. And I don't care which shirt anyone's wearing or which red hat they might be wearing. My objection to socialism isn't that it offends me. It's that it doesn't work. It's been tried in a lot of places by a lot of people who meant well. And it produces the same result often enough that at some point you stop calling it a coincidence. I lived in Ecuador when Ecuador was trying it. Ecuadorians today are paying a price. Petro tried it here. And I'll give you my honest read of the man because I said I wouldn't pretend to be neutral. I think he was ruining the country. And I don't believe he came by that office honestly. That's my conclusion. It's not a fact I can hand you. I'll show you what it's built on in its own episode. And you can decide whether that makes sense or not. What I could show you today is what he did once he was there. He didn't get all of it. The institutions held better than he expected. But what he did get through did some real damage. For example, the healthcare system. He couldn't take it over outright. So he used the payments instead. The money the state owes the EPS network became the tool. Slow the transfers, starve the operators, and let the system fail on its own. And then point at the failure and say it proves the system needs to be replaced. That's not a theory. That's what actually happened. And you can watch it working out at any pharmacy counter in this country. Then there's a peace policy. It was sold on ending a war. What it did was hand armed groups room and time and standing while nobody was putting any pressure on them. 13,000 to 27,000. I'll tell you what I think was behind that in the episode where I can lay the evidence out properly. But you don't need to settle what was intended in order to see what happened. And his hostility towards the United States cost this country real money and real cooperation at a time when it needed both. None of this is hidden. It's sitting in plain sight. Most people just haven't had it laid out in one place in order. Now we have a new president. He's pointed in the right direction. He's called the armed groups what they are. He's ordered strikes. He's taking apart the arrangements his predecessor built. But being pointed the right way isn't the same as arriving. So here's the question this show is being built around. And I'll be asking it every week. Can he stay on target? Can he follow through against the pressure that's coming for him? Because it's coming from the courts, the Congress, the groups themselves, parts of the press, international organizations, and from people with a great deal to lose. Hard turns get reversed all the time. And it usually happens slowly without any kind of announcement. Long after people stop paying attention. I intend to keep paying attention. So here's what I'll work through an episode at a time. Why the groups grew and what the policy was actually doing. How bad is it now? The government's version, the news version, and what people in the countryside are telling me. Those are three different countries. What the plan is now and whether anything like it has worked before. Because we've been here before. The early 2000s were a hard turn on security and a lot of it worked. Roads opened, people traveled again. It also came with a cost this country is still arguing about in the courts. So I'll talk about both halves because you don't get to learn from just the part you like and skip the part that you don't. El Salvador, everybody's trying to compare whether Bukele's approach could even be done here. Not the moral argument, the practical one. Columbia's far bigger and most of it's mountains and jungle. And the groups here are funded by an export business and by Mexican cartels. And also ordinary crime, which is what actually decides whether you feel all right walking home at night. Now here's the part that gets left out. None of this is a separate subject from your money. Security decides whether investment comes in. Investment moves the peso and the peso decides what your pension is worth by the time it gets here. And a government spending heavily on security is spending out of a budget that's already in trouble. And budget in trouble gets fixed with taxes. Increasingly, taxes on people like us. So when I spend 20 minutes on a group operating in a province you'll never see, I'm not doing foreign correspondence. I'm telling you why your exchange rate moved and why your costs went up. So that's what this is. It's not tourist content, but it's not doom. Both of those get sold to people constantly and both of them cost somebody some money. One issue a week, about 20 minutes, I'll show you the law, I'll show you the number and where I get both. I'll tell you the date I checked it. When I'm giving you an opinion, I'll say so. And you just heard most of mine. So you can weigh everything I say against it. I'd rather you know my bias and check my facts than believe I haven't got one. So live on Sundays, 11 in the morning, Columbia time. I'll also take questions at the end. Everything I cite will be at columbiaunfiltered.live. So you can check me. I'm Loren Lau. I live in Armenia, Kandio, Columbia.