Cali Before The Rise Of The Cartels

Cali Before The Rise Of The Cartels

Cali before the rise of the culture of drugs and raunch was a rather pleasant city; quite provincial, quite parrochial and proud of a lot things; its climate, its women, its sugar cane fields and and the still rather new industrial zone in Yumbo producing cement and paper and other stuff for all Colombia, its proximity to the Pacific coast and the main port of exportation of the country, Buenaventura, its fertile valley where you could throw a clothes pin of wood and a tree would grow, its afternoon breeze that cooled the homes and streets after the past noon heat peaking at about 2 p.m.; the festival of the kites inthe Panamerican park in breezy August days, the new sports installations built for the Panamerican Games held in Cali in 1971; this event gave the city a total facelift and made everybody very proud of their lovely city.

Cali was founded early on, in 1536 by a Spanish conquistador Sebastian de Belalázar coming from the south, the viceroyalty of Peru traveling along the Andes and founding cities and towns. There's a statue of the Spaniard on a hilltop, in the western suburb of Santa Teresita, on the Avenida de Circunvalación where the iron-clad soldier is pointing towards the Pacific. People in Cali used to joke about the statue saying Don Seba is asking where is his gold and pointing to the statue of Cristo Rey (indicating the monks), Cristo Rey says I dunno ask my mum, the Virgin of Yanaconas whose statue is behind him, further away on a mountaintop.

This is agricultural zone, early on planted in sugarcane in the true colonial monocultivation fashion and the wealth of Cali was produced in these ingenios(sugar mills). The town itself languished in provincial stupor until in the turn of the century (1900) it started slowly growing and finally its growth was vastly accelerated with the period of internal conflict called La Violencia in the fifties, when there was a massive migration from the countryside and especially from the coffee-growing area in the north of the Valle to relative safety of the city.