For the last half of the 20th century, the nation of Colombia gained a dubious reputation around the world for violence and conflict.

During the last decade, Colombians have undertaken a campaign to reverse that reputation and demonstrate to the world that they can be leaders in urban development, conservation and economic progress.

Two places they now point to with pride are a world's apart, but equally fascinating.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

Colombia is the most ecologically diverse nation in all of South America.

It has mountains, volcanoes, forests, and jungles and cities on both the Caribbean and the Pacific.

The climate on the ocean is humid and hot even steamy.

That's why a majority of Colombianos live in the mountains, where it's a lot cooler.

The capital and the biggest city is Bogotá.

Its climate is cool.

It's located at over 8,000 feet and it's by far the country's largest city.

Bogotá is surprisingly a large urban center as my friend historian Bill Beezley is eager to point out.

Well, this is downtown Bogotá, but for all practical purposes we could almost be in the middle of Madrid in Spain.

Bogotá is a proud and beautiful city built on the model of Spanish cities like Madrid and we are in the Candelaria neighborhood, the oldest part of the city, with beautiful buildings, a history of Bohemian people, musicians, artists, poets.

The heart of the country.

This is Ciclovia in Bogotá.

Every Sunday the city authorities close down a part of the city and make it available for cyclists, pedestrians, runners, dogs, skaters and people who want to travel in any unorthodox way that's not motorized.

It was an attempt by city authorities to get people out of cars, get out of their houses and onto the streets in a 8,000 feet elevation and improve their health, improve the atmosphere of the city, and improve the overall general relationship between the parts of the city.

It's been enormously successful.

Three million people are generally involved in it and it also has been copied throughout the world.

(Spanish) The ciclovia is important for Bogotá because it gives the people of our city a public space or better said the people take over the public space so they can practice sports, walk around, not just the adults, but the old people, teenagers and children.

There are 120 kilometers of dedicated space, extending to the south, north, west and east of the city.

City officials studied models of other cities with lots of bikes in countries like Holland, Spain and others and based on this here they decided that every Sunday in Bogota should have dedicated spaces for their citizens.

When you travel throughout the city by bike on skates or just by walking, you see a different city, unlike the one you see through a car window.

You feel that the city is yours.

You can enjoy it.

It is beautiful.

You gain a sense of pride.

It is incredible to have such a public space, to know it, to live it, all because of the ciclovia.

It is something that we are proud of and we know of several cities in the U.S. that want to do a ciclovia themselves.

This is the pride of the urban planners of the city of Bogotá, the TransMilenio.

It's a rapid transit system that connects all parts of the city of seven million people, for 75 cents, any person in Bogotá can get on the TransMilenio, travel to any other region.

It means there is far less pollution, far less traffic jams and far easier way to get around.

One million people a day use the system.

There's hardly any public transportation 1,000 milies to south of Bogotá, just a small jungle town, inaccessible by highway, nestled on the banks of the world's largest river.

Leticia, Colombia on the Amazon.

A parade is in progress, welcoming me I'm sure.

It's one of the few places in the world to get a glance of the pink, fresh water dolphin, the enormous Queen Victoria water lily and an island dedicated to squirrel monkeys.

All in one day.

We're at the very limits of Colombia.

Across the river is Peru.

I'm standing in Brazil and the Colombian border is about a kilometer up the way.

Here the river isn't very deep.

Right now it's only about 240 feet deep, but it will get to about 500 feet deep.

There's no other river in the world like the Amazon.

Every night at 5:30, huge flocks of swallows and parrots descend on this park, whether it's because of the right mix of trees, or it's because they feel safe here.

It's sort of a mystery, but the numbers are beyond belief.

Fifty to a hundred thousand probably show up every night at this time.

Here in Leticia at the very southern most tip of Colombia, where Colombia meets the Amazon.

My Colombian friend anthropologist Marcela Vásquez knows her country well, including the remote panhandle that gives the nation a port on the Amazon.

The Amazon region is about 1/3 of Colombia.

So it's a large part of the territory.

However, it has been basically abandoned by the state.

You have also a large number of colonials that have come here as a result of different violent periods.

Usually peasants that have come from very volatile areas of the country have to flea because of violence and have settled in the Amazonian departments.

One of the big problems in the Amazonian department like the Putumayo is the production of coca and for farmers it is the only crop that produces the possibility of getting some money.

The state in combination with the U.S. has reacted in ways that have been very damaging through Plan Colombia.

So for many years, especially for the department of the Putumayo has been sprayed with Roundup SL, which is a highly toxic defoliant.

This is an issue that has impacted people in this 1/3 southern part of Colombia and we have to keep in mind if we want to preserve resources and cultures for the future.

This is the harbor of Leticia.

It's the only fresh water harbor that Colombia has.

The population of the area, including the Brazilian sector is probably about 15,000 people.

Most of them are either indigenous people who have come to depend on Leticia for their supplies.

They come boat by boat, or settlers who have come down to the Amazon region displaced by others by violence or their land will no longer sustain them and they came here and unfortunately, there is land here, but it does not provide much in the way of agricultural production.

There are almost no roads coming in and going out of Leticia, so everything is based on of the river and its tributaries.

The river fluctuates here greatly.

The houses nearby have to be built on stilts, otherwise they get flooded out, but people that have lived here forever know that, it's perfectly easy and everyone knows how to use a boat to get in and out of a boat and you don't see native peoples wearing a lot of life jackets.

I think what is wonderful about Colombia is that you can find, not only different geographies, flora, fauna, but also very different cultures.

Here we have mostly indigenous population, but when we go to the coast we have mostly Afro-Colombian population and all through the Andes you have Mestizo, indigenous, and also people from European descent.

The Colombian Amazon is very rich in fauna and flora and has incredible rivers.

It's a beautiful environment and the people who have lived here for many decades or centuries deserve to be respected, and deserve to be given their place.

Puetro Nariño is particularly interesting, because people have managed to live off tourism without destroying who they are.

This great kapok or Ceiba tree is an outstanding example of how massive trees can survive in these very shallow soils because the roots can't go down very deep, the earth is just too hard.

To keep themselves up they send out these buttresses and tiny roots coming out of the buttresses and roots out of the roots and rootlets out of the rootlets.

They maintain the ability to withstand winds, even the falling of other trees.

They able to hold themselves up because they are buttressed all the way around.

The buttresses come at least 20 feet out from the base of the tree.

(Spanish) So this is a great tree a Ceiba tree that is well known in the forest.

It's forty five meters tall over 150 feet, but it's used for communicating.

They call it la mamba but it's drum sound can be heard from a long way away.

From Leticia upstream is the only direction, we can travel from the water and still be in Colombia.

It's also a great place for the sighting of the two species of fresh water dolphin.

In addition to the Amazon and this forest being one of the great natural treasures in the world, the Amazon is a huge climate driver.

The immense amounts of heat generated around the tropics, plus the enormous amount of moisture, rainfall are one of the great factors in driving the climates all over the world.

The heat creates movement in the atmosphere, the movement in the atmosphere is really responsible for the rainfall to the north and the south.

It determines season all over the planet.

I've tried to get a photograph of these elusive dolphins.

There's two species here in the Amazon, which is another thing that makes the Amazon different from any other river in the world, two fresh water species of dolphins.

There's the pink ones that get up to, oh I guess close to 10 feet long and then there's the gray ones which are smaller maybe five to six feet long.

They like to jump very quickly, they don't jump way out of the water and smile at you so it's hard to get the photos.

Everywhere you see around the boat, you can see their bubbles coming up from where they are exhaling.

Boy, they are elusive.

They are teasing me.

Missed it.

Finding a place to stay is a bit of a challenge.

The village of Puetro Nariño offers lodging and food, native food and mosquito proof places to sleep.

We finally arrived at Puetro Nariño.

It's not on the Amazon itself.

The river here, which is huge, is called the Loreto Yacu.

The water color is completely different.

It doesn't have all the mud carried from the Andes.

So it's kind of a refreshing difference to see.

Everything is on foot in this town.

There are no vehicles.

(Spanish) This is a sample of the cuisine in the Amazon.

(Spanish) So this first thing that is cooking here, Hector tells me is a catfish.

(Spanish) These are little cakes made out of manioc flour.

This is traditional Amazon, everything in the Amazon seems to have manioc associated with it.

(Spanish) Oh plátanos.

You see these everywhere in the Amazon.

So these patagonis are made out of green bananas.

(Spanish) So this is, she is ladling out a, oh my goodness, a fish chowder that looks very appealing.

(Spanish) Most of this food, the people would've been eating for centuries.

Well, this is a delightful stew.

The potatoes in it come from Peru and that's easy because Peru is the world's leading producer of varieties of Potatoes and you can just float them down the Amazon and snag them here in Puetro Nariño as they go by.

We've got carrots, we've got manioc, oh we've probably got fish base.

You can't loose.

This is actually green banana fritter, catfish, a manioc flour fritter.

Put it all together and you've got a vintage Amazonian meal.

It's the real thing.

It's hard to imagine a more compelling animal than this Macaw.

What's even more compelling is that it's wild.

Several of these wild birds come in for food and visit this overlook here in Puetro Nariño then they go away and find their nest at night, but it's also clearly a sign of how easily they are captured and the unregulated capture of these birds is decimating the populations.

This one has my heart.

Looking out here from Puetro Nariño you can really see the big picture.

It's all in Colombia, but out in the Amazon right down the middle, it's Peru and Colombia and there's been a contest for control over that.

All across the 20th century, Peruvians have believed that this was their territory and several times they have attempted to conquer it.

It seems strange in this remote are that there would be wars fought.

In 1932, 200 Peruvian soldiers invaded Leticia, a Colombian army started marching from Bogota.

Marching?

Marching 800 miles away.

Across most of the jungle.

They sent two steam ships from Cartagena all the way around South America up the Amazon and just before they landed, the governments of Peru and Colombia decided this is silly, let's reach some kind of accommodation.

Well, lots of Peruvians were unhappy with it, but nevertheless a peace treaty was arranged.

Leticia belonged to Colombia and this area was settled as Puetro Nariño named for an independence hero to claim this spot, to mark this spot as Colombia.

Puerto Nariño was a port centuries before the Spanish ever got here.

The Rio Loreto Yacu is close enough to the Amazon that the traffic can come up here, but the water is calm so it's easy to get in and out of the river.

There are also three different cultures that converge right in this place so it was a natural meeting place, a natural place of embarkation to the river and a place of trade for a vast region in the Amazon.

Most of the inhabitants of the Amazon have traditionally been indigenous troops.

Here in Puerto Nariño we have the Ticuna, Cocama and the Yagua, which live in Azuerdo in a land given by the state for indigenous settlement and management.

Tourism is an important part of their lives here in Puerto Nariño.

They have managed to construct a tourist area where they have control over what comes and goes and how decisions are made and this is not very usual, so it is indeed great to see this place here, a city managed by people themselves.

Basically, it's an indigenous community that has taken upon itself to provide a model for all the rest of Colomba and much of South America as how you can build a sustainable community.

You have to find a quite pond to find the world's largest water lilies, that's what these are.

They are called Queen Victoria water lilies.

They are apparently strong enough they say here to hold a four month year old child without sinking.

So the boat we are sitting in is handmade.

I can't tell if it's one piece or not, but it looks as though it's a dugout, a second planking inside.

You don't want to do salsa dancing when you're in this boat.

They look so innocent, so gentle, so delicate, but they are actually very leathery and tough.

The Queen Victoria water lilies are found only in select places in Colombia.

They have to have very peculiar conditions, absence of big fish predators, absence of wind, and really absence of disturbances that will keep them from growing.

So to fill those conditions it takes a lot.

What happens in this pond is that during the high season, the river reaches in here.

The river will be about 6-8 feet higher than it is now and will flood all this and the added nutrients that come in with that flooding provide the fertilizer for the Queen Victoria water lilies.

They do so well.

Squirrel monkeys are very gregarious.

They have no computation whatsoever about jumping on people, they do no have prehensile tails and they run in very large troops and are inquisitive and sometimes one looks up and finds a tail sticking in one's face and it can be confusing.

One might thing that one has graduated and just moved a tassel from one side of one's hat to the other.

The sound person, the camera guy, and everyone else seems to be the object of extreme affection.

Sometimes if there's food available it becomes an object of contention.

It breaks up the family spirit.

The whole idea of family values is shattered.

There are up to a hundred of these squirrel monkeys in one troop and they seem to be relentless in their movement around some people.

Our poor audio person has been the object of vicious attack and they jump to our excellent cameraperson and then to our magnificent audio assistant.

They view this as their area.

They are very territorial, but they like this tree because there basic sustenance on this island is the fruit on this tree, so they hang around here.

On the island itself, there's well over 2,000 of the monkeys.

The females give birth just once a year.

The average age is about 10-12 years.

So when they get 12 years, they are pretty old.

Right now the level of the river is down pretty far, but within the height of the wet season, it rises up to about where my hat is.

The entire island becomes flooded.

It's closed to the public and the monkeys have to live in the canopy, if they venture down into the water, they become prey for anacondas, for boas, for harpy eagles and for Caimanes, the alligators they have here.

Colombia's geographical presence on the Amazon is tiny, but its efforts at conservation and the protection of native peoples both loom large on the international landscape.

Join us next time In the Americas with me David Yetman.

Not many people appreciate the connection between fine Malbec wine and volcanoes.

I'm traveling to Mendoza, Argentina to make that connection.

Mendoza is a large city surrounded by vineyards and to the west the misty mountains, the towering Andes along a fabled highway Rute Quarante, Route 40.

[Music] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

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