Exhausted from endless violence and the world's highest kidnap rate, Medellín's citizens staged their own Velvet Revolution and elected a coterie of liberal intellectuals who were not affiliated to any of the traditional parties to various city offices. They quickly established community crime reporting centres, increased policing, improved schools and provided vocational training. Now they are well into their second term and Medellín is living up to its nickname, "The City of Eternal Spring". 

The city's Finance Minister (a mathematician) arrives at our interview dressed in a striped pink shirt, jeans with red stitching and hiking boots, his long wavy hair pulled back into a ponytail. As we talk over a distinctly unglamorous lunch of over-grilled chicken, rice and lettuce in the dining room outside his office, he rattles off figures and anecdotes of educated children and employed single mothers who are no longer the hapless victims of endless violence. That he is a true believer there is no doubt.

I'm told such zeal is typically paisa, as natives of the Medellín region are called. Alvaro Uribe is paisa, too. "We paisas are renowned for being clever and hard-working," says my guide, "and Uribe is an example to us all. He works 20 hours a day and constantly travels the country to meet his people and shake their hands." 

I fly to the coffee region north-west of Bogotá and meet Don Ignacio, an energetic, machete-swinging septuagenarian who lovingly farms his four-and-a-half- hectare farm. Don Ignacio is surprisingly typical: Colombia's fractured mountainous geography means that 95 per cent of coffee farms are five hectares or less. As he shows me round and explains about what he intends to plant to draw pests away from his coffee trees, two men in blue-and-yellow Coffee Federation T-shirts tell me how they are helping Don Ignacio and his ilk to enter the modern era. "We come and check his crop and give him advice on the latest farming techniques to help him produce an excellent crop so he can get the best price possible when he takes his beans to the collective, who will then negotiate the packaging and export. Don Ignacio is also taking computer lessons with us. Soon he will be able to email other coffee growers." Don Ignacio admits he is more excited about emailing his daughter, who moved away when she left university and got married.

But reminders of the Farc and the narcos are never far away. The various narco groups don't ask nicely when they take over farms, but simply plant coca and encircle the area with land mines. I meet a woman whose legs were blown off when she went for a walk around her own farm, not realising coca had been planted on a corner of her land. The Farc's latest trick is to indenture indigenous tribes who live in national parks, as they are allowed to grow coca for cultural reasons and the parks cannot be sprayed.