Colombia Calling - The English Voice in Colombia

Colombia Calling is your first stop for everything you ever wanted to know about Colombia. Colombia Calling is hosted by Anglo Canadian transplant to Colombia, Richard McColl and the Colombia Briefing is reported by journalist Emily Hart. Tune in for politics, news, reviews, travel and culture stories, all related to Colombia.

575: The Rise of the Tren de Aragua: A Deep Dive 07/15/2025

574: Andrei Gómez Suárez discusses peace dialogues and writing as he reflects on the Colombian conflict 07/08/2025

573: Richard McColl reads from his book: "The Mompos Project: A Story of Love, Hotels and Madness in Colombia." 07/01/2025

572: Álvaro Uribe: The Early Years and Rise to Power, 1952-1994 06/24/2025

571: Forty Days Lost in the Colombian Amazon 06/17/2025

570: The True Story of how DEA Agents brought down the Cali Cartel 06/10/2025

569: La Escombrera: Colombia's Largest Urban Mass Grave 06/03/2025

568: Coaching collaboration and solidarity in Colombia 05/27/2025

567: Early Onset Alzheimer's Investigated and Revealed in Colombia 05/20/2025

566: Peacebuilding Cannot Happen Without Security: Why the Killings of Social Leaders in Colombia Continues 05/13/2025

565: A Siberian in Colombia: Hearing from the Tabiuna Rusa 05/06/2025

564: The Latin American Boom in Literature and "that punch" 04/29/2025

563: Tropical Diseases and Disease Ecology in Colombia 04/22/2025

562: "Exploring the Toxic Record of Colombia's Oil Giant." The BBC speaks to the Colombia Calling podcast. 04/08/2025

562: "Exploring the Toxic Record of Colombia's Oil Giant." The BBC speaks to the Colombia Calling podcast. Colombian energy giant Ecopetrol has polluted hundreds of sites with oil, including water sources and biodiverse wetlands, the BBC World Service has found. However, as detailed in a new documentary produced and directed by Owen Pinnell of the BBC: "Exposing the toxic record of Colombia's oil giant | BBC World Service Documentaries,:" there are far more issues involving Colombia's Ecopetrol beyond just pollution the region's water sources such as potential links to paramilitary groups. As quoted in the documentary: "Matthew Smith, an oil analyst and financial journalist based in Colombia, says he does not believe Ecopetrol managers are involved in threats by armed groups. But he says there is an "immense" overlap between former paramilitary groups and the private security sector. Private security firms often employ former members of paramilitary groups and compete for lucrative contracts to protect oil facilities, he says. Whistleblower and former employee of Ecopetrol, Mr Olarte shared internal Ecopetrol emails (now named "The Iguana Papers") showing that in 2018, the company paid a total of $65m to more than 2,800 private security companies. "There is always that risk of some sort of contagion between the private security companies, the types of people they employ, and their desire to continually maintain their contract," Mr Smith says. He says this could potentially even include kidnapping or murdering community leaders or environmental defenders in order to "ensure that Ecopetrol's operations proceed smoothly". And so, journalists Emily Hart and Richard McColl of the Colombia Calling podcast, have the fantastic opportunity to discuss what it meant to film this documentary, meet the courageous people who were and are willing to speak out about some of the crimes being committed in the region of Barrancabermeja, Santander and how the whole area is being affected by this. BBC Article: Tune in and see the documentary here: https://youtu.be/Grp3YRhSf2o This is a truly incredible episode of the Colombia Calling podcast, please be sure to share, like and spread the word. And as always, tune in to the Colombia Briefing, reported by Emily Hart. /episode/index/show/colombiacalling/id/36046435

561: “Silent, but so much to tell.” The mystery of Colombia’s Mummies 04/01/2025

561: “Silent, but so much to tell.” The mystery of Colombia’s Mummies In today’s episode, Emily Hart speaks to archaeologist Daniella Betancourt: the woman decoding the enigma of Colombia’s mummies. Mummification is a practice which has been carried out all over the world, from Chile to China – from the ancient Egyptian pharaohs to Vladimir Lenin and Evita Perón, and - though chronically understudied - right here in Colombia too. These preserved remains are, Daniella tells us, a perfect time capsule: bodies frozen in time, they give us all sorts of clues about the ways people lived, and their beliefs about life and death. With the National University of Colombia, Daniella has been studying a collection of 36 mummies found in various institutions, trying to work out who they were, who mummified them, when - and why. Because until now, there has been so little study of this practice in Colombia, there’s still an awful lot find out, not least because these mummies were created by indigenous communities whose histories and customs were interrupted and erased by the Spanish colonisation of the country: many of Colombia’s mummies were destroyed and even burnt. But there is evidence that indigenous groups in Colombia kept practicing ritual mummification long after the arrival of the Spanish – perhaps a high-stakes act of cultural resistance, a spiritual imperative, or an attempt to create talismans of power – at this point, we can only guess – what the study has revealed, however, is that mummification was practiced much more widely than was previously thought – by more groups and in more regions of Colombia. Though in the historical chronicles of the Spanish invasion and early colonial period, there are some descriptions of mummies, most of the contextual information has been lost – in fact we don’t even know where most of these mummies came from or how they were found, as their burial sites were desecrated by tomb raiders and looters who took anything of value and sometimes even displaced the remains themselves. However, the new study by Daniella and the team has shed new light on these Mummies, able to reach amazing conclusions about diet, geography, and even health from state-of-the-art scientific methods. However, as Daniella will tell us, some of the results actually pose more questions than they answer – we’ll be talking in particular about a mummified two-year-old girl, who surprised Daniella even after years of studying her, and whose strange condition continues to confound researchers. We’ll also be discussing the ethics of studying human remains, and of displaying them in museums. The headlines for this week are also reported by Emily Hart. /episode/index/show/colombiacalling/id/35962770

560: Championing English-language books about Colombia 03/25/2025

559: Blood Gold in Colombia 03/18/2025

558: Back to the (microscopic) Future: Using Palaeontology, Pollen, and AI to predict and protect our futures 03/11/2025

558: Back to the (microscopic) Future: Using Palaeontology, Pollen, and AI to predict and protect our futures Today, we go back many millennia in order to protect ourselves for the coming centuries: Emily Hart speaks to two Colombian scientists, Carlos Jaramillo and Camila Martínez, time-travellers of the smallest imaginable time machines: fossilised pollen and tree cells. Climate change has been a constant feature of Planet Earth: at points in history, the planet has been both much cooler and much warmer than it is today - if we know which plants occupied an ecosystem the last time the Earth was a certain temperature or had a certain level of CO2 in the atmosphere, we can predict what our ecosystems will look like in the conditions that we will soon be living in. Using tiny fossilised clues, Carlos and Camila are doing exactly this. The climate change we are currently living through is unprecedented in speed – and water and rain cycles are a major concern for humanity’s continued existence on the planet, so one focus of this work is the Amazon rainforest – both Colombia’s slice of it and further afield. Predictive models currently disagree about where the Amazon is headed as the earth warms – some models predict it will get wetter, others say it will become grasslands or scrub. One way to find out is to work out which plants lived in the area the last time conditions changed in the ways they are currently changing, and look at how that ecosystem and its inhabitants changed and adapted during that time. Drilling deep into the earth to find fossil records from 12 million years ago, Carlos is now studying the fingerprints left by Amazonian life from that time – particularly pollen. Camila is studying fossilised trees, whose cells – frozen in time – can show us how much water was in the environment. But pollen and other microscopic clues are in such abundance in places like Colombia that there simply isn’t enough time in a human life to study and identify all of the species being found. Luckily, artificial intelligence is opening up huge possibilities – Carlos has been digitalising massive fossil collections and training AI to identify and catalogue samples. So today, we travel from the microscopic fingerprints of a distant ecological past resting in rocks and trees deep underground through to the futuristic methods made possible by new machine learning and digital processing. Carlos and Camila span multiple disciplines and vast timeframes, all in the hopes of getting us the information we need to survive the climate crisis which will change the face of the planet within our lifetimes. They'll be telling us how - and why it's so important. Support the podcast: /episode/index/show/colombiacalling/id/35622170