Colombia

With dramatically beautiful rainforests, mountains and beaches, lovely cities and enchanting people, Colombia should be among the world's most attractive and intoxicating destinations.

Unfortunately, the current guerrilla war, combined with ongoing activities of cocaine cartels, has made much of Colombia – dubbed »Locombia« (the mad country) by the press – off limits to all but the most foolhardy travelers.

Colombia's government has mobilized its soldiers and helicopters in the hunt for Roman Catholic Bishop Jorge Enrique Jimenez, one of Colombia's leading clergymen, who was kidnapped along with another priest while traveling north of Bogota, the Colombian capital, last Monday.

»One Hundred Years of Solitude« by GabrielGarciaMarquez – the perennial all-time classic masterpiece about love, magic realism and macondo!

A 40-year insurgent campaign to overthrow the Colombian Government escalated during the 1990s, undergirded in part by funds from the drug trade. Although the violence is deadly and large swaths of the countryside are under guerrilla influence, the movement lacks the military strength or popular support necessary to overthrow the government.

An anti-insurgent army of paramilitaries has grown to be several thousand strong in recent years, challenging the insurgents for control of territory and illicit industries such as the drug trade and the government's ability to exert its dominion over rural areas. While Bogota continues to try to negotiate a settlement, neighboring countries worry about the violence spilling over their borders.

Colombia has gone from bad to worse since February 2002, when President Andres Pastrana cut off peace negotiations with the Marxist rebel organization FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).