Colombian cool and good football edges Narcos aside

WHAT do we know of the country England face in Moscow tomorrow? Clichés about Colombia flow easily enough: drugs, guns and a Narcos vibe; men with mirror sunglasses and gold in their teeth. A country where an own goal by defender Andrés Escobar which helped eliminate Colombia from the 1994 World Cup is said to have led to his murder.

That’s what I expected Colombia to be like too, before I first visited 15 years ago. Worse, I’d made the mistake of looking at a DVD given to me by a war photographer, full of artistic black-and-white images of the bloody victims of Right-wing paramilitaries, the sort too brutal for any newspaper ever to print.

But moments after my battered American Airlines A300 landed at Bogota I realised almost everything I had feared was wrong. Colombia has deep troubles, even now. But more than anything the country is erudite, educated, artistic, beautiful and — despite its years of extremes — economically successful and largely democratic. It’s the only Latin American country which has never defaulted on its debt.

True, it’s a place of great economic and social differences, but it is also one of authors and poetry, stylish hotels, stunning biodiversity and hammocks under forest trees. Colombians speak some of the purest and most formal Spanish in the world. “The only danger is wanting to stay”, ran the slogan invented by a tourist board desperate to overcome talk of narco-terrorism and kidnappings, and I found it to be true.

Or almost true. Atrocities were committed by all sides — FARC drug lords, state security forces and extreme paramilitaries — in the long years of violence, which have now slowed down, one hopes for good, after a peace deal which is still controversial with some Colombians. I’ve travelled to places not long vacated by FARC and there was an edge which could scare you. Thousands of people died horribly. Many were kidnapped.

No one comes out of the story well but it is a story which involves more than drugs. I once saw the bombedout ruins of one of Pablo Escobar’s hideaways, on the shores of a lake — and he was not the only one to grow a fortune from cocaine. But Medellin, Colombia’s second city, which sits in a deep valley like an Andean Innsbruck, is no longer under the grip of men like him. Now there’s street art and a modern metro. Even the rich think it’s safe enough to dine outside.

And of course everyone will be gripped by the football: from the Caribbean coast to the presidential palace, where Colombia’s newlyelected leader Iván Duque Márquez has just taken office. Politics still haunts the place. But tomorrow Colombians will be united: the only win they want is one against England.