Colombia has a great selection of business hotels, and many opportunities for ecotourism, but despite thousands of miles of coastline on both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, there have been no large high-end resorts of the type found in Caribbean destinations like Jamaica, The Bahamas, or even The Dominican Republic. There are small resorts, and there are some low-end mass market all-inclusives targeted towards domestic consumers with moderate incomes, but until now, there has been no large, luxury all-inclusive resort option.

This has changed with the May reopening of the Karibana property as the Dreams Karibana Cartagena Golf & Spa Resort. Located on the northeastern outskirts of Cartagena, the hotel has 268 guest rooms and 21 suites in addition to its 2,300 square meters (25,000 square feet) of indoor meeting and events space and 1,000 square meters (11,000 square feet) of lawn area suitable for events.

Finance Colombia’s Executive Editor Loren Moss was able to speak with Apple Leisure Group’s Group President for Global Business Development Javier Coll about not just the Karibana’s renaissance as a Dreams all-inclusive resort, but the company’s strategy more broadly. Now a subsidiary of Hyatt Hotels Corporation, Apple Leisure Group is aggressively seeking additional development opportunities in Colombia and throughout the Americas.

Finance Colombia: We’re here to talk today about the new Karibana property that’s joining the AMR collection. Now even though Colombia has a strong tourism industry overall, it’s continuing to grow. I was at an event earlier today where they just announced a new non-stop route between Medellin and Buenos Aires, but Colombia only has a few resorts and even fewer that market the all-inclusive modality; especially Colombia has a couple of resorts but they’re kind of focused on the domestic market. Why is that? why is the resort sector and the all-inclusive sector underdeveloped here in Colombia and why is the time right now for Karibana to join the AMR collection, your group of properties?

Javier Coll: Well, sometimes it’s the chicken or the egg, right? I mean you don’t have the right product, therefore there’s no real culture in certain countries to do this type of vacation, right? in this case, my wife is from Colombia and used to tell me that their way to go out of the city was basically like renting a house, or driving, or going to different places but not necessarily thinking about a resort vacation, resort-like we usually do in other places, so every year we take one week, two weeks’ vacation depending on our kids’ holidays and we always do that, we always go to an all-inclusive resort, we know that we’re going to be fine, we’re going to have a great vacation but we’re talking about places where you have options, great options, right?

Javier Coll is Group President for Global Business Development, Apple Leisure Group.

When you don’t have those options it’s not part of your yearly schedule if you will, right? you won’t do that, you will do all the things but not that, so I guess in my opinion part of it is that the chicken of the egg you don’t have the product. Lately, I know that a better product is coming to Colombia, different brands open, different hotels in Colombia and that means several groups working on the marketing and commercial departments like bringing people.

Now it’s not just national tourism, it’s also an international one, so you have to keep building up, I mean, it’s not going to be just us, it’s not going to be just other hotel chains, it’s going to be all of us so, I think we’re going to be able to help just because as you know, we have two operators, right? Especially the United States, but we also have agreements with other operators in Latin America and that was our core business, from the beginning, 50 years ago we started as an operator, so we tend to develop destinations, we help develop in Cancun, we help develop in Punta Cana, hopefully, we can help develop in Cartagena on that sense increasing the number of passengers, the moment you increase the number of passengers, you see more projects coming to the destination, if you see more projects coming to the destination, more national guests also will keep coming to this destination, so it’s a process, I think that is the reason, but I think it’s going to happen, I mean, that is one of the main reasons going back to your second question, that’s one of the main reasons we chose Colombia.

First of all, we wanted to grow in Latin America and South America, especially Colombia. It’s the door to South America, but also is one of the most important destinations for leisure, which is what we do, so when you think about options, leisure options, beach, sun, right now you have Brazil, you have Colombia, and then you have very limited places within Latin America, so those two places are two of the most important ones in Latin America, of course Colombia is closer to the United States, so for us it is a no-brainer to start in Colombia, we want to grow in Colombia, we don’t want to stay in Cartagena, we’re going to keep growing, but eventually we’ll get into other countries in South America.

Finance Colombia: So what can you tell me about the expected guest profile, who is the property targeting and who do you expect to visit?

Javier Coll: Well our product is Caribbean five-star, and I say Caribbean because you don’t really have stars in the Caribbean, right? I mean, it’s not like a city that is very well defined what a five star is. In this case, it’s Caribbean five-star, and that means that the rates are going to be kind of high versus other products that you may find in Colombia, so we expect like a bit middle high-class type of customer with a high capacity of expenditure within the resort.

It’s not just the all-inclusive that you pay, but then once in destination, we offer an array of different options: spa, any wines, we usually have agreements with suppliers where we are able to have some of the best wines you can find. Whatever it is we usually have it and that means that we are catering for the high-end spectrum of the customer and that’s the goal. The goal is to have a very high-quality product catered to the high-end market that we believe that is present in Colombia and in other countries, of course.

Finance Colombia: I know the property well, I’ve been to the property, it’s a fairly new property, it’s only a few years old but I knew the property when it was operated by a previous operator. The ownership group, the developers, the real estate people brought you guys in, if I were to visit now, how much will it have changed? I know that you go in and you put your own touches in there; there’s a building there that’s kind of raw infrastructure to use, but how much of a remodel, a refresh or update or complete change, because I know that now it’s operating under a different concept. How much would I see the property have changed from how it was originally?

Javier Coll: Well, as you know, the previous brand was a high-quality brand, I mean it was a good brand, I think the problem was not in the brand or the attributes, or the quality of the asset, so we’ve been focusing on software, right? Hardware is pretty decent, pretty good, we, of course, did some work on the asset decoration, some things that on the back of the house that didn’t work actually. that’s one of the reasons why we opened in May, we thought we would be opening earlier but now it’s difficult to find some parts because of the supply chain [issues]  and all those things, all those problems, everything was delayed, so… yes, so that we invested or we asked the owner to invest some money there, on the back of the house, some in decorations, but the most important change is going to be the software, the way we run the property, the operational attributes, the service that’s where we’re going to focus most of our efforts, because again, the asset was fine. I mean, if you were there you probably concur with us that you know it was a pretty good hotel, it was a pretty good asset, [excepting] maybe a couple of details, maybe maintenance things like that.

“The goal is to have a very high-quality product catered to the high-end market that we believe that is present in Colombia.”-Javier Coll

I mean, it’s more software than anything else, that why the way we run our hotels, the essence of our brands—in this case it’s going to be a Dreams, which is very well known, one of our most successful brands, and we have a very particular way to do things. So that is the software that I’m talking about, that is the way to do things that I’m talking about, so most of the change that you’re going to see is going to be on the operations, not necessarily on the asset.

Finance Colombia: I know that there is an adjacent, really kind of they’re attached to the property, but it’s shared. I know there’s the Karibana real estate development and everything there but there’s a golf club and there’s a PGA…I’m from Columbus, Ohio, and one of our hometown favorites is Jack Nicholas, and he designed, or his firm designed the golf course there. What’s the resort relationship with the golf club? I know that there are local people and there are people who live in the real estate development that use the golf club, but in an all-inclusive property is that like it’s a separate tier, is it completely separate, not included, what’s the relationship? Because I know a lot of readers are going to be interested in that.

Javier Coll: Well, what we usually do in other destinations is that we cut deals with any golf course around our property that is close by, as you know, if you’re a golfer, you know that when you go for a golf trip you don’t want to play just in one golf course, you want to play in two or three different golf courses, so in this case, we’re going to try to do the same. We’re going to try to cut deals with golf courses that are close by to the property, make sure that what we usually do is we include the golf, so it’s part of the rate actually, however, many times the golf course tells you, okay, yes, we can cut a deal on the tee time but they have to use the cart and they have to rent out clubs if they don’t have clubs, right? So you may end up paying something just because of that, and that is something that we’re working on, but I’m telling you the way we work in other destinations because we want to try to replicate the same thing in Cartagena, so the answer is yes, there will be some kind of agreement, we’re just still defining that to be part of the offer of the all-inclusive.

Finance Colombia: Marvelous. When is the hotel open and what’s the best channel for either guests or—I know that property even before it was popular with event organizers, with weddings and that property has really flexible meeting space for corporate events. I remember the last time I was there, it was completely full. I showed up and I even called the people who I knew there and they’re like “there are no rooms, we’re full” because they had the corporate events that were just booming before the pandemic, so I would imagine that even though it’s an all-inclusive resort there are corporate incentive events and companies are always, whether they’re in Latin America or in the US, companies, I know are always looking for new destinations, where they want to treat their top salespeople or things like that

What’s the best channel for finding out about booking, whether that might be the simple kind of retail consumer booking or people that are interested in organizing, maybe doing a package or something like that, whether it’s a wedding or like a corporate incentive type of an event? What’s the best way to contact the Apple, the AMR collection or the Hyatt or the Apple Leisure Group?

Javier Coll: Our most important website, which is the one that includes all the collection of brands and resorts is AMResorts, so you can find all our brands, all our locations, everything and you can book any of our hotels there. So one of the things that I believe is part of our success is that we are present in most of the channels that you mentioned and the most important ones are owned by us, so it’s not like we depend on third party operators. For the hotels that we manage, we have our own distribution and even though we sell other brands and other hotels, owning distribution makes a big difference as a management company. So at some point we were at 5 million Americans going to the Caribbean and through our distribution channels to other tour operators that, just to give you an idea, that could represent up to more than 30% of all the Americans thrown into the Caribbean.

So we had that type of control and we have our own two operators filling the hotel, then we have our direct channels through the website, AMResorts that we were talking about, but also the hotel website, so you can go to AMResorts.com, or you can go to in this case will be https://www.dreamsresorts.com.co/resorts/colombia/karibana-cartagena-beach-golf-resort . You can do it through Hyatt as well. If you go to Hyatt, you can do through Hyatt. We have the Hyatt loyalty program, we have our loyalty program, which is called UVC Unlimited Vacation Club, which is a vacation club but we consider it to be a loyalty program and the more than 100,000 members that we currently have. They book directly through the UVC websites to their limited vacation website, so at some point we may have 50-60% of all the customers in our hotels coming through our own distribution channels.

So that is one of the secrets of our success: financial success and operational success in a big percentage of our revenue is coming from groups and weddings, so at some point, we have more than one wedding per day, per property. And we have 117 properties right now open, that means 117 times, 365, probably a little bit more weddings, so it’s unbelievable the business that we have coming from weddings but also corporate business, you were talking about the corporate business, we have a group sales force that is solely focused on selling groups, but part of them are in Miami, part of them are local,

We have a local office in Bogota to sell our resorts, and now of course to sell the Karibana, so many ways going back to your original question, many ways to book our resorts, but the easy ones are a resort and the same dreams Karibana website, which is the website of the hotel, so those are the easy ways to contact the hotel, try to book a room, or try to organize a group.

• • • Consumers and travel agents interested in learning more about the resort should click here.
    • Investors or executives interested in developing a resort with AMR brands should click here.

The Dreams Karibana features beaches, swimming pools, golf, tennis, restaurants, meeting and wedding facilities. Photo © Loren Moss

The report touches on everything from the COVID-19 Pandemic, the implementation (or lack thereof) of the historic 2016 peace accords, political corruption, and who might run for president in the next election.

The report’s co-author Cameron Wilson took time to speak with Finance Colombia executive editor Loren Moss about the many points covered by the report, including what to expect in the second half of Colombian President Ivan Duque’s term.

Finance Colombia: I’m here with Cameron Wilson, who along with Sergio Guzman, just completed an in-depth report on Colombian president Iván Duque’s midterm performance, his challenges and opportunities for the remainder of his administration. Cameron, thank you for joining us.

Cameron Wilson: Thanks for having me with you.

Finance Colombia: Let’s get into this fascinating in-depth report, obviously guys you spent a lot of time on it. First tell me a little about your background and how you came to be affiliated with Sergio and Colombia Risk Analysis.

Cameron Wilson: I grew up on the US east coast in Connecticut, and at the moment I’m a student at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, which is one of the handful of policy schools that people go to study international relations, economics, do some language training, it’s called SITES for short, it’s in DC, and it’s part of the community of Georgetown, Columbia, Harvard Kennedy School, and I wound up with Sergio because I was looking for something to do over the summer, like a work experience. This pandemic has upended all of our lives, I was going to be in Bogota for 12 weeks or so, basically helping this company with the product they put out on a monthly, sometimes a weekly basis, then I did some translation work as well, and that’s how I ended up with Sergio, looking for that opportunity over the summer.

Finance Colombia: Good, well it’s obviously a first-class report, let’s start into it. Colombia is a politically polarized country, you have a group of hard-left politicians and their supporters, you have a group of hard-right politicians and their supporters, and then you have a large maybe non-aligned electorate that seems to largely be fed up with both camps. So, can Duque get reelected in short and how? If he can.

Cameron Wilson: Well, to clarify, I think you’re probably asking more if a right-wing candidate can get reelected given that now presidents cannot be in consecutive terms, which is sort of an interesting wrinkle. In Colombian politics he could run again in the future, but not in 2022. He’d have to sit out and run again in 2026, I guess would be the earliest possible opportunity. But that seems very unlikely at the moment, given his approval ratings are at historically low levels and over the next two years it’s hard to view a scenario in which he will be able to attract more favorable public opinion, even if he somehow reaches out towards the middle from his sort of hard-right party, the Centro Democrático (political party established by former President Alvaro Uribe) so at this point it seems like a long shot that even if he would stand to reelection in 2026, or frankly that even his party would have even the successful side in the next presidential election.

Finance Colombia: We already saw one Centro Democrático senator announce that she was going to run, is there a chance? Could Uribe conceivably run? (Editor’s note: This interview was conducted shortly before Uribe was detained under house arrest on witness tampering charges)

Cameron Wilson: Well, I think that at the end of the second term back in 2010, there was a little legal wrangling over his ability to run again, and popular as he might have been at that moment, I think by and large Colombians were glad that he couldn’t stand for a third term, so he cannot run for a third term and also, the days of, like even president Juan Manuel Santos having two consecutive terms, those days are over as well, now for presidents to stand for a second term it has to be a non-consecutive term.

Finance Colombia: You know, I am here in Medellín and Uribe still has quite a considerable base of supporters.

Cameron Wilson: Yeah, it seems like his supporter base, for the most part, is socially conservative, a little bit older and probably had more experience with the massive disruption that was long-standing in the insurgency, on the lives of Colombians everywhere, and I’m sure you and most people that have seen this episode are sort of familiar with his biography, but that played a big role in his early life, and for better or worse the Colombian electorate now is sort of younger, the average age is around 30, and  so as we move on, one thing that sort of emerges is that the new population has less and less experience of the hardship that was caused, and that might be one reason why Uribe and his party’s demand for  retribution, there may be a little bit more discomfort with a transitional justice scheme for FARC dissidents, all of that makes them more uncomfortable in a way that’s less common for the people of my age I must say, and it’s only going to continue to be that way.

Finance Colombia: It sounds almost like you’re mirroring like the situation with Cuban-Americans in Miami, where there’s a generational divide between the older generation of Cuban people, who escaped, suffered first, and then maybe their children, the older generation had more of an emotional attachment, I think there’s a younger generation that seems to be more flexible, but they’re not necessarily pro Castro, but they don’t have the emotional role in his response, and are open to at least some kind of dialogue, even though that doesn’t mean they’re normalizing relationships or anything like that.

Cameron Wilson: You know, I don’t have any experience with that community, I haven’t been to Cuba in the way I’ve been to Colombia, but it sounds very similar, that’s interesting.

Finance Colombia: Yes, I think there’s a difference because I think you have people here, and I talk to people, even neighbors and if they’re older, let’s say older than 50, and they lived in those troubled times, then they have maybe especially—it also depends on if they were put in a rural area as well, because maybe Uribe, or the military or the government of that time came in cleaned up where you lived…or maybe they came and cleaned OUT where you lived, right? And so you can have a completely opposite perspective on things, if you look at the still unresolved case of a false positive and things like that, and even, really right now this week is the Supreme Court where he is under a legal cloud, and potentially facing charges, it’s hard to imagine where that might go, but it’s not like the view of him as a hero or savior is universal, even though there are some that definitively strongly believe that the base of the Centro Democrático party is made up of those supporters I would think.

Cameron Wilson: Yes, and I think that his approval ratings upon leaving office were 75-80% something like that, and now they’re down the 30%, and he might not care, people in this party might not be that bothered by his slide and approval ratings but I think part of that goes back to what you’re saying is experience of condensing the 80’s and the 90’s and even before that, is sort of fading into memory for people who are my age or college students, you know, and as long as the average age of the electorate for the country stays around 30, that’s not going to get reversed.

Finance Colombia: How is President Duque handling the coronavirus pandemic? He seems to be butting heads with Bogota’s Mayor Claudia López.

Cameron Wilson: In comparison to his counterparts in my country and  other parts of Latin America  You might say it is a admirable job in the sense that president Bolsonaro in Brazil  is being willfully ignorant of the science, and some people would say that AMLO (Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador) in Mexico has been the same way, and other people would say that president Trump is also adhered to that: “let’s not listen to experts or the science and also not recommend social distancing.” But at the same token, most of the earliest and strongest calls for lockdowns, for social distancing, for masks, were from Colombia’s mayors and not from president Duque, so in comparison to them it looks like he’s a little bit slow, and a little bit reckless even, but compared to his counterparts out of the country you might say “oh wow he’s sort of responsible, he’s been advocating for wearing masks, he puts his hand sanitizer out on his desk every night. So, he’s doing an okay job I suppose, to mention the crisis for the managing the health effects if you will, you know that people would argue about his economic response but that’s a separate question.

Finance Colombia: It’s an interesting phrase, “sort of responsible.” I don’t know if they want to make it a campaign phrase, but it’s interesting, I think that was seen doing an OK job until the COVID Fridays, as they were calling the “Dias Sin IVA” down here, the day without sales tax, especially the first one that turned into a fiasco, and stores were being shut down for overcrowding and then a resultant spike in the cases and now we see that we’ve gone from and a thousand deaths in over ten thousand deaths in the space of a month.

Cameron Wilson: I saw the images were from that, I guess there was that day and another one two weeks later and the footage was shocking, you know?

Finance Colombia: It was. It left an impression, economically obviously he’s under a lot of pressure, the economy is contracting, Colombia being a tourist country, tourism is completely shut down, the restaurants are closed except for carryout or delivery, the airlines, Avianca is obviously in bankruptcy as is LATAM, there are with two small exceptions there is no passenger air traffic, so he is under a lot of pressure I think, but a lot of people are saying the Claudia Lopez is already campaigning for president based on her response, and I don’t know if that’s honest, or cynical, or both, but she does seem to be a lot less conciliatory than she was during her campaign, and as the Mayor of Bogota she certainly does have a considerable megaphone. The Vice President, Martha Lucia Ramirez is not having so good of a year, is she?

Cameron Wilson: Well you said, I used an interesting phrase, “sort of responsible?” Well, “not having such a good year” is an interesting phrase in that context, yeah! On one hand, one thing that sort of dragged her down a few months ago was this revelation that she paid bail for her brother in Miami back in the 90’s. Her brother was convicted of some drug trafficking, I think it was heroin, and it was sort of a small amount, I want to say that there was like $150, (Editor’s note: She paid $150,000 bail for her brother) so it wasn’t—it didn’t rise to the scale of some corruption, but on the other hand, nobody knew it, it wasn’t in the public sphere until this time, and she’s had sort of a long career, right? She’s a little bit older than Duque, she’s been in the public eye for quite a while, and another thing that happened, sort of recently that if her very close followers of the country would have noticed, she threatened to file a lawsuit against Insight Crime.

Finance Colombia: She did bother, she filed not just a civil lawsuit, she filed criminal charges against Insight Crime in June, but Jeremy McDermott instead of going quietly, went public with the charges, which were widely condemned by journalists and human rights organizations, and I would imagine the many foreign governments that fund Insight Crime as well to be completely honest.

Cameron Wilson: And she’s backed down since then, right?

Finance Colombia: She’s retracted, but the thing that’s amazing is that even though she filed charges, her husband admitted the facts of McDermott’s story, which was interesting. That seemed to be a dumb move politically, because, it’s not that he published anything false. That’s not even a judgment call, her husband confirmed that they did the deal with this Memo Fantasma, you know this paramilitary narcotrafficker guy, and the interesting thing is that…Now, the Insight Crime reporting never accused the vice president or her husband of doing anything illegal or even unethical, they bought a lot from some guy, and you know, if you buy a house, you don’t necessarily know much about the people who sell you the house, right? It’s kind of surprising that they handled that so badly politically, but I think that what came to light is the kind of pressure and bullying that can take place when people are used operating in impunity, and don’t expect that scrutiny, right?

Cameron Wilson: Yes.

Finance Colombia: I notice that you guys listed as a potential candidate Pacho (Francisco) Santos, you think he might actually run?

Cameron Wilson: I think before the trouble that he found himself in last fall, I think you would have said that for sure, he would have run. To be clear he found himself in hot water when a recorded conversation from a restaurant in DC was made public by a Colombian newspaper, and he said some unflattering things about the US State Department, which might compromise his role as the main go-between Colombia’s government and the US, and so, to clarify, before that, which was last fall you would have said “yeah, he’ll for sure run” and he’s had an ambition to that for a while, and he’s been involved in Colombian politics for a while, and he lives in the right circles, you know, it’s quite a small group of people.

Finance Colombia: Yes.

Cameron Wilson: At the top of Colombian politics to begin with, and then, you know, amongst the different segments: Right, Center-left, Center, Center-right, you know the circles are even smaller and part of it is that there’s so few families and that the men go to the same high school in Bogota. So, you know, so he sort of checks all the boxes, and he for sure has still an amount of ambition, and I think that to a lot of observers, the question would be: “well what does Uribe want?” Basically who does Uribe think are the most attractive candidates for his party the next go round…the party has a history of pushing forward a few candidates, and sort of seeing which one happens to capture the imagination of the electorate that year, and for sure Pacho Santos would be in that conversation, if you will, but it’s a little bit hard to say that he, for sure, isn’t the guy.

Finance Colombia: You know, another possibility that you guys floated that really intrigued me was at Mauricio Cardenas, the former Finance Minister, who is very well respected and even liked, but he hasn’t—and maybe that this is by design, or by his personality—but he’s never really come across as a politician and that’s not to say he’s not a political operator, but he, as far as I know, he’s never held political office, he’s more of a technocrat, isn’t he?

Cameron Wilson: He’s an economist basically. There is one argument, or one school of thought that a technocrat might be able to steer clear let’s say of some of this, like tug-of-war politically back and forth, and some of that might be why a candidate like (Sergio) Fajardo is like “oh, I’m just a professor” you know, “I’m not cut from that same sort of cloth,” and so there’s an argument that perhaps would be able to navigate that dynamic a little bit better, and since he hasn’t really played that game to this point, he hasn’t spent his career criticizing the opposition that if the party, if the sort of conservative side of Colombian politics wanted to nominate a candidate, one that wasn’t so hard line one that might capture the middle of the electorate, he may be a worthwhile person for them to put forward.

Finance Colombia: I think that the hard part for him, not being a politician, is you can run into the same dangers of inexperience: Look at Daniel Quintero, here in Medellín, the mayor who seems like a nice enough guy but he’s already gotten himself in some hot water, making some politically inept moves.

Cameron Wilson: There’s some truth to that in the hard choices that they might advocate, you know, and I think that debate you’re talking about, there is a little bit playing out right now within mainstream economics. There’s a lot of what would be formerly like radically left economic ideas that are being connected in the policy right now, universal basic income, you know, debt levels that scare people, maybe less than they would have been in  the past, but certainly it’s like unknown territory and it’s kind of frightening  for some people who have a hard time looking past what they were taught if they were going to University of Chicago 30 years ago. And yes, that tug of war is going on within economic trade now. I mean, is it irresponsible for governments to keep subsidizing wages, implementing layoffs, even if it runs up the national debt? Some economists would say “just do it, press the button and go for it,” you know, “what are we so scared of, the only thing worse would be not doing anything.”

Finance Colombia: Everybody loves (John Maynard) Keynes and nobody loves (Herbert) Hoover in a recession, right? 

Cameron Wilson: Right, yes, so that debate of whether economists are always bringing bad news or not is sort of like what’s playing out right now in the news every day.

Finance Colombia: Good point, good point, so, where go from here? We’re a little bit past, I think halfway in Duque’s term or in the middle of a covid-19 coronavirus pandemic that’s hitting Colombia hard, other countries worse, but it still is significant here. The economy is contracting because of this and the economic contraction exacerbated by the collapse and demand for petroleum, well below Columbia’s lift cost, that’s to say the price to get out the ground into the refinery or into the pipelines is higher than the actual cost of petroleum right now, and we don’t see that bouncing back anytime in the short term, and that’s an important source of revenue for the Colombian government, so it leaves the president with fewer levers to pull.

Do you see him in the second half of his term distancing himself from his political patron Alvaro Uribe or will he cement a legacy as a faithful acolyte and beneficiary of his patron?

Cameron Wilson: Yes, well, the fundamental question is to sort of steer the country through this crisis, it is going to require him leaving behind some of the main policies of the Centro Democrático and a big part of that is the sort of commitment to fiscal responsibility, that I sort of alluded to just now, in the way the economists might be fighting with each other about what to do, so if he’s to adhere to this, you know, sort of more orthodox fiscal management, that is a tenure of his party and his finance minister adheres to, and that’ll be him, you know, being loyal to Uribe, to Uribismo, but also letting the country flounder a little bit longer, and people might think it is ideal, and if he is to continue to lift public spending and extend subsidies that have been given to people, extend the subsidies that have been given to businesses, that’ll be him moving towards the center and shepherding the country, towards what most observers would say is a more responsible way, and our expectation is that he’s probably not going to do that. So far in his presidency he’s been largely loyal to Uribismo. Part of that has been close ties to the business community, closer than some people might feel good about, and you can see that in how he opened the economy for two days for everybody go shopping in the middle of this pandemic, and part of that commitment has also been in this idea to sort of drag your feet, slow down the progress of the peace accord, so he’s been loyal to this point and therefore we don’t have a lot of reason to expect he’s going to move towards the middle.

Finance Colombia: Interesting, and I think that that might be the biggest danger to his legacy, is the post peace accord implementation, and whether you like it or not, whether you agree with it or not if you look at the increase in danger for social leaders for indigenous Colombians and people that are not even necessarily political actors or not even necessarily natural political opponents. I think it would be hard to argue anything other than negligence on the part of the government to protect non-combatants and even if you’re: Let’s suppose you’re anti-FARC, or which, I think a lot of people except for the FARC are anti-FARC, let’s suppose you’re anti-peace accords but then you have members of the FARC who say “Ok, we’re going to leave the FARC or we’re going to not be combatants anymore, we’re going to stop,”  and the government says “okay, we’re going to put you in this place and get you reintegrated in society, but then they go and get massacred, that doesn’t really—even if you don’t like the peace accords, if you don’t like the FARC, the last thing you want is people to go back and rearm themselves, so I think it’s kind of beyond comprehension other than just incompetence, or are there some kind of designs behind purposefully letting these people get slaughtered? I mean it would seem that the only reason behind not protecting people is to drive them back into arms.

Is it just negligence or is there a political motivation behind the foot dragging, not necessarily to implement faithfully every little bit of the peace accords because that might even be too much to expect politically, but in the negligence, or the apparent negligence and the lack of production in the increase in danger to even non-political non-combatants, indigenous leaders, social rights, people who are advocating non-political things?

Cameron Wilson: I think it is both of these things, I think with regards to the FARC, there’s no willingness to follow through on the provisions to provide them with the successful reintegration, and so it that looks like in the short-term is to build resettlement camps that have, schools and reasonable health care, and it took them a long time to get running water in a couple places and also put the camps in places that are safe, that aren’t close to still violent groups of people, and to provide them with protection, so there’s clear negligence to not follow through on all those promises.

With regards to the violence, the insecurity that’s confronting people, that’s affecting people who are not part of the FARC but who are in rural areas, who are agitating for clean water, roads, schools, electricity, basically an extended, expanded state presence. Part of the problem there is, I think, a bit of negligence, a little bit of, well, I think this is going to start to benefit participants in some kind of ways, but also another part of it too is this is the sort of long and hard and boring and challenging work that it’s going to take 10 to 15 years even in the best-case, because these areas are so remote that to expand the state presence requires a tremendous amount of patience, and if there’s one thing Colombia is lacking, even between a lot of the larger cities is good transportation, it’s sort of a weak spot of the country if you like.

Finance Colombia: True.

Cameron Wilson: That’s sort of like the long and hard and dirty work that’s going to take a long time no matter what but they’re not helping, they’re not sort of pushing that as aggressively as they could be, and in the meantime, while the state presence is sort of lacking in these areas, you’re talking about how social leaders, broadly speaking, people agitating for improvement in their security and economic conditions in all these areas, they’re sort of out in the wind so to speak without any help from government or without any protection and 100% it’s negligence.

There’s nothing else than negligence, that’s sort of leaving them so vulnerable, and in some cases more vulnerable during the lockdown because if they were targets before but maybe they were evading their attackers or evading pressure, this lockdown made it frighteningly easy to know where people were, and that’s just to say that they’re putting up with all kinds of threats and pressure and violence that they shouldn’t have to and I think that the government has no good reason to allow that to continue or not to make more efforts to prevent it.

Finance Colombia: Insightful. One last question, you were a professional PGA golfer. Is there any good golf in Colombia?

Cameron Wilson: I didn’t expect to get asked that! Yes, there is. One of the sort of unfortunate parts of golf in Latin America is that it happens to be confined to the very highest strata of society, and golf is sort of an affluent game all over the place but there’s public golf all over the U.S., it’s accessible, maybe not accessible enough but it’s accessible and in Colombia there are just private golf courses, and so as nice as they might be, and I’ve been to a few of them in Bogota, Medellin, and as beautiful as they might be, one of the things that I wish was different about golf in Latin America is that it was accessible to everyone. But you know, maybe that will change someday, I’m not hopeful about it but maybe it’ll change.

There are some beautiful clubs, and I think the consensus would be that the best one in Bogota would be called Los Lagartos, which has two golf courses in the middle of the city, and then another popular spot is called Country Club de Bogota, and that’s a cool place with a couple of nice golf courses and some cool amenities as well: bowling alleys, squash courts, clay tennis courts, a soccer field. That’s kind of an interesting spot with lot of other fun activities, but yeah, I wasn’t expecting to get asked that, so thanks for digging up my past!

Finance Colombia: No, I’m a tennis person myself, I’m not a golf person, but being born and raised in the same hometown of Jack Nicklaus, he’s just a giant and actually his firm designed the Karibana Golf Course up in Cartagena. I’m not really a golf player so I haven’t played the course, but I’ve been to Conrad Karibana by Hilton Resort and it’s a really lovely facility. I was there right before the pandemic started and I hope to go back reasonably soon, as soon as it’s safe to maybe play some tennis, but I was really impressed with their facilities, I don’t know if you played that course but it looked really nice.

Cameron Wilson: In my prior life, when I was playing golf professionally I wound up going to Colombia four times and I played an event at TPC Karibana, when it was brand new, in the spring of 2015, I think it was maybe like March of 2015, and it was beautiful, it’s an amazing spot and hopefully it’s a place where Colombians can go to enjoy some of their time, well they already go to Cartagena all the time, but hopefully it sort of adds one more thing to the city that will attract people and also it’s a really easy place to get to for Americans, it’s a couple hours from Florida, and you know, if anybody has hesitations or some concerns about going to Latin America and going to Colombia, which they shouldn’t by and large, but that’s a really great introduction to what can be so great about spending some time in the region.

Part of the Karibana Cartagena development, the hotel opened in December of 2017 but has already become one of Cartagena’s preferred wedding and corporate events destinations, due to the ample ballrooms and open spaces—something very scarce in the city’s historical center.

A typical wedding or event would see a ceremony in the lawn area, with the attendees then moving indoors to the ballroom for seating or dancing. There is also a buffet hall where attendees can take meal service. For smaller weddings, the beach club is available, right on the water with a view of the Cartagena Skyline off to the left.

The hotel has 268 guest rooms and 21 suites in addition to its 2,300 square meters (25,000 square feet) of indoor meeting and events space and 1,000 square meters (11,000 square feet) of lawn area suitable for events.

What really sets the Conrad Cartagena apart is its world-class 18-hole golf course, designed by Jack Nicklaus and operated by TPC. The only golf course fronting the Caribbean Sea and open year-round, it was named by Golf Digest as the best golf course in Colombia.

The hotel features several retail shops such as high-end Colombian fashion designer Jon Sonen, fitness facilities, recreation options such as a table tennis salon—and real tennis courts outside; and ample dining options:

1. 1. Seasalt Grill – informal and outdoors setting which serves typical foods like fried fish, coconut rice, fried plantains but also burgers and steaks.
   2. Adesso Tu – Italian restaurant located indoors with a pizza oven. Also, the breakfast buffet is offered here, featuring fresh gourmet pastries made directly at the hotel.
   3. Café Market – informal café for morning coffee as well as pastries and simple sandwiches.
   4. Son & Ron – The informal lobby bar which offers cocktails as well as small dishes to be shared.
   5. Biblioteka – formal restaurant offering dinner and the hotel’s signature restaurant offering traditional Colombian Caribbean cuisine as well as various dishes from other countries such as Spain.
   6. Beach Club – informal setting right in front of the kilometer of the resort’s beachfront offering traditional food as well as ceviches, steaks and appetizers.

The Conrad Cartagena is part of the Karibana Cartagena residential development, which Finance Colombia hopes to tour once the Coronavirus Pandemic permits travel and activity. The first phase consists of luxury 3-bedroom single family homes with 114 square meters (1,227 square feet) of living space, and membership to the Karibana golf club.