She didn’t ask. She just put her hand on my shoulder, started kneading, and said “sólo siente la presión, mi amor.” Just feel the pressure. I said no. She kept going. I said no again. She finally walked away, but two minutes later her cousin showed up with the same script. By the end of the afternoon I’d said no to maybe twelve people. Massage women, bracelet kids, coconut guys, a guy with a parrot who wanted me to take a photo with it for a “donation,” and a tour operator very personally offended I didn’t want to see the Rosario Islands at his special foreigner- cachaco price, even after I told him in Spanish that I was Colombian from Santa Marta.

That’s Cartagena’s beach. That’s the postcard that put my country on every gringo’s bucket list.

I left that afternoon thinking the same thing most expats think after their first Boca Grande visit: this is what people are flying twelve hours for? Then I went home. The next weekend I sat at Inca Inca, four hours back up the coast in Santa Marta, and remembered why I never tell anyone to swim in Cartagena.

Let me show you what 25 dollars buys you when you go where I go.

Inca Inca

Inca Inca sits just past El Rodadero, the main beach strip in Santa Marta. You get there two ways: hike about 15 minutes along a coastal trail (beautiful if your knees still work) or take a lancha, small fishing boat, for five minutes from the main beach. The lancha runs 15,000 to 20,000 pesos depending on the captain’s mood ($3.50–$5 USD). Pay with a smile. Don’t argue. It’s a beer’s worth.

A few years ago someone with money walked into Inca Inca, looked at the sand, and built a private club. I know how that sounds. Private club on a Colombian beach reads like everything wrong with how this coast is getting commodified. Stay with me, what they actually built is the closest thing to peace you’ll find on a Caribbean beach in this country.

Entry is 80,000 pesos for the whole day ($20). What you get for that: a palapa, a thatched beach hut with an actual bed inside it, not a plastic chair, not a sun-bleached towel, an actual mattress where you can take a real nap with the waves doing the heavy lifting on your nervous system. Lunch on site runs 30,000 pesos ($7.50) for a full plate of fried fish, patacones, coconut rice, and a side of salad nobody eats. A cold Pola is supposed to be 10,000 but if you treat the staff like humans it drops to 5,000 ($1.25).

Total damage for a full day with food and drinks: under 100,000 pesos. About $25.

But that’s not why I’m writing this. The real reason is what you don’t experience.

Nobody touches you. Nobody approaches your bed every six minutes. There’s no parade of vendors with bracelets and coconuts and unsolicited body work. The volleyball game on the sand is families, not a hustle. The hammocks have books and beer cans and quiet people in them. The water is clean enough that you actually want to be in it. You exist as a person, not as a walking ATM with sunscreen on.

That alone is worth the 80,000 pesos.

Why my coast has two faces

Here’s the part the guidebooks won’t write, because they’re written by people who’ve been to Cartagena three times and called it Colombia.

Cartagena got rich. Or some neighborhoods of it did. The walled city is a Disneyland for couples on their second honeymoon. Real estate in Boca Grande went from cheap to absurd in 15 years. Tourism dollars flooded in for two decades, and the people who didn’t get a slice of that pie, most of them, by the way, learned one survival strategy: the foreigner is the resource. Extract maximum value per interaction. Never let one walk past without an attempt. It’s a hustle culture born from watching prosperity arrive in your city and skip your house. I don’t blame the people doing it. I blame what tourism did to the city.

Santa Marta is still mostly poor. Still mostly slow. The roads are bad. Half the downtown smells like fish on a hot afternoon. Half the businesses don’t open when they say they will because the owner had a long night. There’s no walled city, no luxury hotel arms race, no Instagram boulevards. And precisely because of that, the locals haven’t been sharpened against the visitor yet. Vendors here are sometimes annoying but they’re not predators. They walk by, offer once, you say no, gracias, they move on. Nobody touches your shoulder. Nobody runs the long con.

It’s not a moral difference between the two cities. It’s an economic one. Less tourism = less hustle pressure = a beach where you can read for two hours without anyone attempting commerce on your body.

I’m not going to pretend I want my hometown to stay poor forever. Santa Marta needs better roads, better hospitals, better schools. But I genuinely hope it develops without turning into Cartagena’s beach economy. Because once a city learns the hustle, it doesn’t unlearn it.

What’s coming

Next weekend I’m hitting Playa Calderón. Even quieter, even less known. The kind of place where ten gringos show up per month and five hundred locals already know exists. I’ll write that one up too.

After that, more. I’m building a small library of the spots most expats never find because they listen to the same five Cartagena influencers who keep recommending the same six restaurants where they get a free meal for the post.

I won’t be blowing these places up. I won’t be geotagging them into oblivion. The whole point of having a costeño parcero, somebody who grew up on this coast, who knows the boat captains by name and the lunch ladies by their kids’ names, is that you get the real version, not the version Google rewards.

If you’re heading to the Colombian Caribbean, do yourself this favor: spend one day in the walled city of Cartagena if you must. Eat the arepa de huevo, take the photo at the Reloj. Then get on a bus or a flight to Santa Marta and find Inca Inca. Pay your 80,000 pesos. Eat your fish. Drink your “fría” or “Pola”. Watch the water.

You’ll understand why no one from my hometown actually swims in Cartagena.

Dios te bendiga, amigos. More gems on the way.

So there’s this whole thing blowing up right now in Medellín. Some American influencer posted a video saying locals should be grateful for the Passport Bros because, hey, at least they’re bringing money in. His whole argument was basically: Medellín isn’t a real tourist city anyway, it’s mostly just about sex tourism, so what are you complaining about?

That’s when I knew this conversation needed to happen. And not the sanitized version everyone’s pretending to have on Twitter.

Let me be straight with you first: the gringo’s not completely wrong. But he’s also not completely right. And that’s the part that makes people uncomfortable.

I’ve spent time in Medellín’s tourist zones. The vibe is clear if you pay attention. And yeah, there’s actual tourism happening: Provenza, La 70, Guatapé, Comuna 13. But here’s the thing nobody says out loud, there’s a reason Medellín and Cartagena are both known as tourist cities AND both have some of the highest prostitution activity in the country. That’s not coincidence. That’s not random.

So when the gringo says sex tourism is a huge part of the economy? He’s pointing at something real. But then everybody loses their mind instead of asking the actual questions.

Here’s what gets me, though: the response from locals is to blame the Passport Bros for everything. Rent going up? “Blame the gringos!” Property prices insane? “Blame the gringos!” Everyone wants a simple villain.

Except that’s lazy thinking, parcero.

The real story is messier and darker, and it actually requires you to look at what’s happening underneath.

Follow the money, it doesn’t go where you think

Last year I was looking at rentals in Medellín. You can find places for 5 million pesos (roughly USD $1,200) all the way up to 60 million pesos (USD $14,500) for a nice apartment. Properties selling for millions of dollars. G-Wagons everywhere. Ferraris in the street like it’s nothing. Mercedes with tinted windows.

Now, Colombia makes things. Colombia has entrepreneurs. That’s real, I’m not saying the wealth is fake. But you’d have to be blind not to see what’s actually happening: massive money laundering operations. And I’m talking about massive.

The cocaine production under the Petro government has gone through the roof, we’re talking record numbers. And all that money has to go somewhere. You can’t just deposit USD $10 million in a bank and say “don’t ask questions.” So what do you do? You buy property. You buy cars. You start businesses. You open bars and clubs and “massage” places. You buy apartments and rent them out.

This is what people should be angry about. Not the gringo looking for a girlfriend.

The “security” everyone keeps praising? Yeah, about that...

Here’s the thing nobody likes to say: Medellín feels safer than Bogotá. It feels safer than Cartagena. And most tourists feel that difference immediately. They walk around, they go out at night, and yeah, it’s fine.

But why?

Because there are roughly 400 criminal band structures operating in that city, and they’ve made a pact. With the mayor’s office, with the government, with whoever’s in charge. These groups have basically agreed: we control security in our territories, we keep it manageable, we don’t make big scandals, and in exchange, you let us operate. We bring tourism dollars, we keep things “calm,” everybody wins.

That’s not safety, amigos. That’s a business arrangement. It’s organized crime providing a service.

And yeah, compared to other Colombian cities where there’s chaos and robberies happening every night, it works. It’s efficient, even. But it’s built on a foundation that’s completely rotten. The gangs use tourism as a front, it gives them cover to move drugs, move money, move prostitution, all while the hotels and the influencers and the tourists take their pictures.

It’s a perfect ecosystem for money laundering.

So who’s really responsible for the prices?

When rent goes from 2 million pesos to 5 million pesos in two years, and everyone screams “PASSPORT BROS!”, they’re missing the actual story.

The locals are the ones jacking up the prices. A landlord sees gringos coming in with dollars, and suddenly they’re thinking “why am I charging 3 million when I can charge 8?” A property owner sees foreign investors buying, sees the money floating around, and they’re not thinking about their countrymen, they’re thinking about profit.

The Passport Bros are just the excuse. The locals are the ones using them as a reason to extract money from the economy and stick it somewhere that gets cleaned.

But here’s what really pisses me off: people won’t admit this because it requires looking in the mirror. It’s easier to blame the foreigners than to acknowledge that your own neighbor is choosing to price you out of your own city.

The regional pride thing, and why it’s keeping you blind

This is where I’m going to sound harsh, but it needs to be said: a lot of Colombians, especially Paisas, carry a pride that feels good until you realize it’s the thing keeping you from seeing clearly.

“Medellín is the best!” “Paisas are the hardest workers!” “We don’t need anybody!”

That kind of pride stops you from asking the real questions. You want to know what actually moves you forward? Recognizing your problems. Working with people who aren’t from your region. Learning from other places. Humble competence beats proud mediocrity every single time.

A person is good or bad based on what they can do, not where they’re from. A city improves when it’s honest about what’s happening inside it, not when it defends itself against outsiders.

Medellín’s a beautiful city. It’s green, it’s got incredible weather, it’s got real entrepreneurs and real culture. But it’s also got massive drug production feeding criminal organizations that have basically taken over the economy. Both things are true at the same time.

And until locals stop pointing fingers at Passport Bros and start pointing them at the actual systems that are broken, the prices won’t come down. The money laundering won’t stop. The structure won’t change.

What should actually happen?

First, stop with the tribalism. Medellín vs Bogotá, Paisa vs Costeño, it’s baby thinking. You want progress? Work with everybody.

Second, look at what’s actually happening with money. Not all of it is criminal, but enough of it is that it’s distorting the entire economy. And that’s not the Passport Bros’ fault. That’s a policy problem.

Third, understand that tourists are going to come. Some will be there for beautiful reasons, some for gross reasons. Both are happening. You can’t change human nature. What you can do is make sure the money that comes in actually develops the city instead of just cleaning it.

And maybe the hardest part: admit that your own people are choosing profit over community. That’s where the real shame is.

The gringo was right about one thing: there is a lot of sex tourism in Medellín. He was wrong about everything else. But instead of arguing about whether he’s right or wrong, maybe ask yourself why that’s even true. And who benefits from keeping it that way

Dios te bendiga, amigos. Keep your eyes open.

I want to tell you about a guy who calls himself Basenji (https://x.com/cryptobasenji)

I watched him on Vélez por la Mañana this morning. He’s anonymous. Lives outside Colombia. Trades on Polymarket for a living. The name comes from his dog. While the rest of the country was arguing about polls for the May 31st election, this guy was reading the blockchain.

What he found is the reason I’m writing this.

A single wallet. Created for one purpose: to buy “Cepeda YES” on Polymarket. No other transactions in its entire history. Just Cepeda (Socialism), week after week, in identical chunks, at intervals so precise that no human places orders that way.

His exact words, translated:

“When you’re a trader and you want to make money, you don’t buy against your own entry price. If I have an entry at 30 cents, why would I be aggressively buying at 45 cents? It makes no sense. I’d be pushing the price against myself.”

Then Vélez asks him the question everyone watching wanted answered. How much money? Basenji answers like he’s reading the weather:

“At least $50,000. In a market with a total capitalization of $400,000.”

Twelve percent of the entire pool. From one wallet. Through automated bots. Over months.

Fifty thousand dollars buys you twelve percent of a prediction market and three months of headlines. That’s the cheapest political ad ever bought in Latin America.

The Loop Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here’s why this small operation matters more than it should:

“The main problem I identified is that Colombian media uses Polymarket as a reference in their reporting, because the polling firms are doing such a bad job. And that creates an incentive for political campaigns to try to pump the market.”

Polls are broken. Media doesn’t trust them. So media starts citing Polymarket. Polymarket has $17 million in volume for our entire election (Hungary’s recent race had $60 million resolving in two days). Liquidity that thin means a few thousand dollars moves the headline number for an entire week.

Whoever controls the bot controls the front page.

Basenji also tore the polls apart. The 2025 polling law forces sampling in territories that aren’t statistically relevant, territories that conveniently favor the government’s candidate. His weighted error margin across the major firms is over 6%. He thinks Cepeda is actually sitting at 30%. The press keeps quoting 37 to 44.

That is a completely different election than the one we have been told we are watching.

His own position, on the record, with no hedge: short Cepeda. Long Paloma and Abelardo. He compares the runoff to Chile, where the right wing outsider beat the leftist who topped round one. And he drops the line that explains all of Colombian politics in one sentence:

“Only 4 percent of Colombians trust the traditional parties. The other 96 percent don’t. That’s why Abelardo took the outsider road. Outsiders work very well in Colombia.”

The country has lost faith in everything that ran it for two centuries. Whoever runs as the wrecking ball wins. Left or right doesn’t matter anymore. That’s the dynamic the polling firms can’t measure because their methodology was built for a country that no longer exists.

Where Basenji Stops, I Start

I had lunch with a friend last week. Works in a ministry. Smart guy, master’s from Externado, makes about 9 million pesos a month in a job that he basically cannot lose unless he punches his boss on camera. I asked him who he was voting for. He looked at me like I had asked him to skip a paycheck.

“Cepeda, parce. Obvio.”

He doesn’t even like Cepeda. He told me as much over the second beer. He thinks the government has been a disaster. He thinks Petro promised everything and delivered scandals. But the math on his end is simple. Petro controls the money. The state controls his next ten years of stability. There’s a gravity that pulls government workers toward whoever holds the wallet, and what they actually believe in private has nothing to do with how they vote in public.

There are over 1.25 million people on that gravity field nationally. One in every five formal workers in this country gets their paycheck from the State. That is the largest single voting bloc nobody talks about.

Outside the capital, the picture flips. Medellín, Bucaramanga, Boyacá, parts of the coast. I don’t see anyone fired up about Cepeda. I don’t see anyone defending Petro’s legacy. I see exhaustion. Scandal stacked on scandal, UNGRD still hanging in the air, ministers leaving in handcuffs. That kind of disappointment doesn’t show up in a phone poll. It shows up at the ballot box.

The Number Nobody Is Reporting

While we have been arguing about wallets and polls, the government has spent the past three weeks taking on new sovereign debt at high interest rates. Astronomical amounts. Levels no previous Colombian government has attempted, including during the Uribe security crisis.

A month before they hand over power.

Think about that. A normal president with 30 days left thinks about transition. About not leaving the country in a smoking pile. What they don’t do is borrow at punishing rates with no time to deploy the money on actual projects. There is no infrastructure that takes effect in 30 days. There is no program that justifies it.

Unless the project is just cash.

Add it to the December 2024 “economic emergency” Petro declared, the one the Constitutional Court ordered reversed, the one where the collected taxes were never returned to the people. Pattern starts to look pretty obvious.

The Maduro Lesson Nobody Learned

Look at Venezuela. Maduro lost an election. The opposition proved it with their own receipts. Edmundo González had it locked.

Maduro stole it anyway. Like he was changing the channel on a TV. He sat in the chair, served out the term, kept the cronies, kept the apparatus running for years after the world had declared him illegitimate.

Today he is in a US federal prison. Captured. Indicted. Done.

Here is the part you need to sit with: he still got away with stealing the election. He served the years he wanted to serve. He kept enriching his people. He bled the country dry on his way out. By the time the United States actually got their hands on him, the damage was permanent. Millions of Venezuelans had migrated. The opposition was scattered. The economy was a corpse.

The lesson of Maduro is not that he eventually paid. The lesson of Maduro is that paying eventually does not deter anyone.

Petro has photos with Maduro. Multiple. They were close allies for years. Petro himself has interesting things going on with US authorities that I will not speculate on in writing, but the people who follow this seriously know what I mean.

If I am Petro right now, I am studying the middle of the Maduro story. Not the ending. The middle. The years of impunity. The fact that even prison at the end did not undo any of it.

The Bot Was a Preview

Connect the dots with me.

Basenji proved that fifty thousand dollars deployed methodically was enough to swing public perception inside a four hundred thousand dollar market. One person, one bot, manipulating the number that the entire Colombian press corps then quotes as if it were a poll.

Apply the same logic with the resources of the Colombian state. With a payroll of 1.25 million public servants. With one in five formal jobs in the country flowing through Hacienda. With control over the social programs budget. With the borrowing capacity of the national treasury. With a Constitutional Court whose rulings the executive feels free to ignore.

You stop talking about price manipulation on a crypto site. You start talking about the Maduro template, run by people who watched it work in real time.

Basenji caught the small version. The bigger version doesn’t run on bots. It runs on subsidies, on contracts, on jobs for the cousins of the people with jobs, on debt taken out today and paid back by your kids in exchange for loyalty bought in April.

What I Think Happens Next

If this election were held in normal conditions, with a level field, I do not think Cepeda wins. Basenji’s data says the same thing from a completely different angle. Cepeda at 30%, no party willing to coalition with him, considered too radical by the rest of the spectrum, Chilean pattern repeats and the outsider takes it.

But normal is not the assumption I would make right now.

The next time someone shows you a poll, ask who paid for it. The next time they show you Polymarket, ask who is running the bot. And the next time somebody tells you Petro is going to politely walk away from Casa de Nariño on August 7th, ask them if they have been paying attention to Caracas.

We are about to find out which Colombia we actually live in. The one Basenji can model with data, or the one Maduro already wrote the playbook for.

If you got something from this, share it with someone who needs the same picture. And if you are not subscribed to BowTiedColombia yet, this is what I do every week. The view from inside, in your language, without the diplomatic varnish the gringo press puts on everything that happens here.

Saludos parceros,

BowtiedColombia

Real numbers. My actual spending. Not a curated lifestyle post. Not “you can live on $1,500 if you eat arepas every day and never leave your apartment.” The actual breakdown of what it costs to live well in Colombia AND run a business from here at the same time.

Here’s this month:

Let me break this down so it actually makes sense.

What’s Business, What’s Life

First thing you need to understand: that $13,300 isn’t me eating wagyu and driving a Range Rover through Bogotá. That number includes everything - my personal life AND my entire business operation mixed together, because that’s how it actually works when you run a company from your apartment in Santa Marta.

The $7,071 in payroll isn’t me living extravagantly. That’s my team. I run a BD company focused on Latin America and that payroll covers the people who make the operation function. Real humans. Real salaries. Plus Sofía - my AI employee who just booked her first meeting last week, but that’s a different story.

The $919 in software is every tool I need to actually work. Apollo for leads, Claude for AI, every subscription that keeps the machine running. People never talk about this. They show you their rent and their food and pretend that’s the whole picture. It’s not.

If you’re running any kind of remote business, you’re paying for infrastructure. That’s real money every month that doesn’t show up in any “cost of living in Colombia” YouTube video.

Business Meals at $811 is legitimate and anyone who’s done real business in Latin America knows why.

You don’t close deals on Zoom here. You close them over lunch, over coffee, over a meal where you actually looked each other in the eyes. That’s not entertainment. That’s how business works in this part of the world.

The Travel at $295, Marketing at $179, Employee Benefits at $177, Legal at $100 - that’s the invisible weight of running something real. Nobody posts their software receipts on Instagram.

Now here’s what it actually costs to live.

The Real Cost of Living Well in Santa Marta

I’ve bounced around Colombia like a lost tourist who finally made money. Cartagena, Medellín, Bogotá, Bucaramanga, now Santa Marta. I’ve paid rent in all of them. I know the numbers.

Rent:

Here in Santa Marta: 1,500,000 to 1,800,000 pesos monthly. That’s about 420-500 USD at the current tasa. Decent place, nothing fancy, but somewhere I don’t wake up wondering about my safety. I live with my girlfriend - she’s studying full time so I cover everything - but when you’re calculating what a real apartment actually costs, that’s the number.

Compare that to Bogotá where I paid 2,400,000 pesos (670 USD). Medellín was 2,800,000 pesos (780 USD) back when I was there. And the problem with those big cities beyond the price?

Real estate agencies run everything. Minimum one year contracts, they want your life story, your employment history, basically they want to audit your existence before they hand you a key. Try finding month-to-month in Bogotá without an agency. You can’t. Not as a local, definitely not as a foreigner.

Santa Marta? I could find something on a handshake. That flexibility matters more than people think.

Utilities:

Electricity in the Caribbean region is brutal, parcero. Just to keep the AC running - and you NEED it, this isn’t negotiable - I’m paying about 300,000 pesos monthly (83 USD).

Water: 176,000 pesos (49 USD).
Gas: 50,000 pesos (14 USD). The only cheap thing.
Internet and phone: 100,000 pesos combined (28 USD).

Total utilities: roughly 626,000 pesos (174 USD).

Food:

Here’s the real number. I do groceries twice a month - 600,000 pesos each time, so 1,200,000 pesos monthly (333 USD). That covers everything for the apartment.

Weekends I go out or order domicilio - maybe 250,000 to 300,000 pesos per weekend (70-83 USD). Multiply by four weekends and you’re at roughly 1,100,000 pesos (306 USD).

Total food: about 2,300,000 pesos monthly. That’s 639 USD. Eating real food, not performing poverty, not eating at Andrés Carne de Res every night either. Just normal.

The honest personal total:

Rent + utilities + food + personal expenses: you’re looking at 1,500 to 2,000 USD monthly to live well in Santa Marta. Real apartment. Real food. Not stressed. Girlfriend covered.

That’s the number nobody tells you because it doesn’t fit the “Colombia is crazy expensive now” narrative OR the “live like a king on $800” fantasy. The truth is in the middle and it’s genuinely good.

The Make Dollars Spend Pesos Formula

This is everything, amigos. This is the entire game.

The tasa is sitting around 3,600 pesos per dollar right now. If you earn in USD - contracting, remote work, running a business with American or European clients - your expense ratio is ridiculous in your favor.

Every dollar you earn is worth 3,600 pesos the moment it hits Colombia.

I make dollars. I spend pesos. The business operates in USD. Life operates in pesos. That gap is where the real advantage lives. Not in the cheap beer. Not in the low rent. In the structural arbitrage of earning in one currency and living in another.

A founder running the same operation in San Francisco is burning $8,000 just on rent before they’ve paid for a single tool. My cost of experimentation is near zero by comparison. I can run three half-working ideas at the same time, fail at two of them, and not feel the financial pressure that makes people skip the learning phase.

That’s not luck. That’s deliberate. Colombia isn’t just cheap - it’s a structural advantage for anyone willing to build something here.

Why You Should NOT Live in Medellín or Cartagena

Medellín is expensive now. The influx of digital nomads and dollar earners over the last five years has inflated prices in every neighborhood a foreigner wants to live.

El Poblado is basically a theme park at this point.

Cartagena is a tourist trap masquerading as a city. Beautiful for three days. As a place to actually live? You’re paying tourist prices for everything while locals quietly resent the extraction happening around them.

The best cities to live in aren’t the famous ones. They’re the second-tier cities. The medium cities. The ones that still have a local soul. Santa Marta. Bucaramanga. Pereira. Manizales.

Cities where you can build actual relationships with actual people who aren’t calculating your dollar earnings while you talk to them.

The Safety Math Nobody Explains

Two types of foreigners get robbed in Colombia. Both making the same mistake from opposite directions.

The first tries to live on 500 USD a month. Rents a room in a poor neighborhood, tries to blend in by living like the local poor.

Doesn’t work. The neighborhood knows immediately. A foreigner living cheap is a foreigner with a hidden stash. You become a target.

The second flashes money. Bottle service, designer clothes, buying rounds for strangers.

In Medellín they don’t rob you at gunpoint - they befriend you first. Get close over weeks. Then one night something goes in your drink and you wake up having lost everything. Escopolamina. It happens regularly.

The middle ground saves you: middle-class comportment. Decent apartment, decent neighborhood. Not ostentatious. Not broke. Just normal. You call no attention. You’re just a person who works.

How to Build Real Safety Here

You need time and real Spanish. Not tourist Spanish - real Spanish where you can read between the lines of what someone is actually saying versus what they’re telling you.

You need one real local friend. Not someone from a hostel bar. Someone you met naturally over time - at the gym, at a recurring place, somewhere you saw the same person month after month until friendship developed because neither of you was trying to extract anything.

Find friends at the gym. Go consistently. See the same people. Let it happen naturally. That person becomes your navigation system for everything you don’t understand about how Colombia actually works.

The Full Breakdown

Business:

• Payroll: $7,071

• Uncategorized: $1,830

• Software and Subscriptions: $919

• Business Meals: $811

• Travel and Transportation: $295

• Marketing and Advertising: $179

• Employee Benefits: $177

• Legal and Professional: $100

• Business total: ~$11,382

Personal living (Santa Marta):

• Rent: 1,500,000-1,800,000 pesos (420-500 USD)

• Utilities: 626,000 pesos (174 USD)

• Food: 2,300,000 pesos (639 USD)

• Everything else: varies

• Personal total: 1,500-2,200 USD

Combined this month: ~$13,300. Not every month. But this is what a real month looks like.

The people telling you Colombia is still dirt cheap are living in 2018. The people telling you it’s unaffordable are living in Poblado comparing it to Iowa.

The real answer is in the middle: Colombia is an extraordinary place to build a life and a business if you approach it honestly and stop performing for social media.

Make dollars. Spend pesos wisely. Live in a real neighborhood. Cover your people. Build quietly.

That’s the formula, parcero. Everything else is noise.

Dios te bendiga,

BowTiedColombia

My best friend from university did leave. He’s in Canada now - good job, stable life, Canadian winter. He got there because his family received an inheritance. Enough to cover Canadian tuition - $8,000 a semester, plus rent, plus food, for at least two years. That’s the bar Canada sets. He cleared it.

I couldn’t.

I was going to go with him. The plan was real. Then Petro won the election, the peso tanked, and the math became impossible. I was a Colombian kid trying to make that work in pesos during one of the worst moments for the Colombian economy. It wasn’t happening.

So he left. I stayed. And I had exactly one option: figure out how to make dollars while spending pesos. That’s literally how BowTiedColombia started. Not as a lifestyle choice. As a survival strategy.

Years later, staying turned out to be the best decision I never made. Because if I'd left, I never would have built what I'm building now. Including Sofía

Who Is Sofía

Sofía is my AI employee. She’s not real - but she works like she is.

She has a corporate email. She has a LinkedIn profile. She has one job: find companies in Latin America that run events and webinars, research the decision-makers, write personalized outreach emails, send them, and follow up automatically. Every day. Without me touching anything.

I built her because I hate cold outreach. The writing of it, the sending of it, the waiting of it. All of it. And when you hate something that much, you either stop doing it or you build something to do it for you.

I built her with Claude as the brain, Apollo for finding leads, and a Telegram bot as the interface. My only job is to check Telegram in the morning and see what she did overnight.

She’s been running for one week.

This morning she booked a meeting.

How It Actually Works

Every day Sofía wakes up before me. Not literally - she doesn’t sleep - but the automation runs on a schedule. By the time I’m drinking tinto, ten researched, personalized emails are already out. Not templates. Not copy-paste. Actual emails that read like a human wrote them after spending time on the prospect’s LinkedIn and company website.

Apollo pulls the leads based on criteria I defined once. Claude writes the emails in the voice I trained it on, with the angles that work for LATAM decision-makers. The system sends, tracks, and follows up automatically on the right days with the right tone.

I built the whole thing through a Telegram bot. I don’t open a laptop to run it. I don’t search for companies. I don’t write emails. I don’t follow up manually.

Sofía does it. jaja

What Broke Building This

The AI was never the hard part. My own thinking was the hard part.

You can’t hide vague strategy inside a prompt. Give Claude fuzzy criteria and it finds fuzzy leads. Write a vague brief and it writes a vague email. The model doesn’t rescue bad thinking - it scales it. Whatever confusion you walk in with, you walk out with ten times more of it, automated and sent to real people.

Building Sofía forced more strategic clarity in two weeks than months of doing it manually. That was not what I expected.

Still Building Together

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about leaving: you don’t actually leave the people.

My friend is in Canada but we still work together every day. He posts on my BowTiedColombia X account sometimes and people either love it or lose their minds - because his take and my take aren’t always the same. haha. We’re brothers. 5,000 kilometers apart, building businesses from Bogotá and Toronto.

The plan now is to bring him back. Once he gets Canadian residency, the math flips completely. A Canadian passport plus Colombia’s cost of living plus dollar income is arguably the best arbitrage on earth. We’re building toward that.

He left to find opportunity. I stayed and built it. Neither of us was wrong. We just had different hands to play.

And now - from opposite ends of the continent - we’re both watching Sofía book meetings while we sleep.

Sofía’s First Win

This morning a decision-maker at a company I’ve been targeting replied to one of Sofía’s emails. We’re on a calendar. I have a call this week.

I didn’t write that email. I didn’t find that company. I didn’t research that person. Sofía did it.

If this call closes it’ll be the first deal sourced entirely by an AI employee. Built in Colombia. Run from Telegram. By someone who almost left but didn’t - because he couldn’t afford to.

Funny how that works.

I’ll tell you exactly how the call goes. If it closes - proof of concept. If it doesn’t - also a story worth telling.

Either way, parcero, Sofía is just getting started.

What’s Next

LinkedIn automation goes live next. When it does, Sofía’s daily reach doubles without me adding any work. Then come the real numbers - open rates, reply percentages, what kind of message worked and what got ignored. I’ll share all of it here.

Ten emails a day is not impressive. Ten emails a day that close is a business. We’re not there yet.

But this morning we got a lot closer.

Dios te bendiga,

BowTiedColombia

Alright amigos, so I went to Medellín a few months back. Full tourist mode - Guatapé, Piedra del Peñol, Comuna 13, Plaza Botero, all of it. You know how it is when you’re trying to really know a city that’s not yours? You get an Uber and suddenly you’ve got a captive audience, haha. And let me tell you, the drivers there are bored. They want to talk. And that’s where things got weird.

I had two encounters that stuck with me. Both left me thinking, “Que descaro, Colombia. What are we doing?”

The Guy Who Worked for the Devil

First driver. My girlfriend and I hop in, heading somewhere downtown. This guy’s got a sticker on his steering wheel. Not just any sticker - Pablo Escobar. And he’s talking about him. With pride. Like the man was some kind of hero. Like he built hospitals or something

Here’s the kicker: he lived in Santa Marta for a while. My Santa Marta. And get this - he went to San Luis Beltrán. Same school I went to as a kid, parcero. Haha, small world.

Turns out he now runs some of Pablo Escobar’s museums in Medellín - the actual tourist spots that thousands of people visit every year. So when he was talking about “the boss” with that pride, it wasn’t just some guy performing a myth. This is literally his business. His livelihood. That sticker on the steering wheel? That’s his brand.

My girlfriend and I start getting tense. Like, is this guy going to rob us? Is he serious? He’s rattling off crime stories like they’re bedtime tales, counting them like accomplishments. And you can’t tell if he’s bullshitting or if he actually lived that life. So I played along - asked him about Popeye, asked about some German narco I can’t even remember the name of. Real specific questions about the drug trade.

And here’s the creepy part: he wouldn’t answer directly. I’d ask him something straight up - something he should know if he really ran in those circles - and he’d dodge it. Not like he was scared. More like... he was performing. Like he’d curated this whole story about managing Pablo’s museums, protecting them, knowing the criminals. But when you pressed him on details? Nothing.

It was like asking someone “what time is it?” and they respond with “the sky is blue.” You’re sitting there thinking, hermano, that’s not what I asked. But he kept doing it. Over and over. Talking with all this pride about the shopping centers built, about how “the boss” never touched his own product, about robberies at the museums. Showing me chat logs of motorbike thieves who’d robbed tourists at his place. All suggesting he was important.

And honestly? I think he was a good dude. Real friendly. Treated me well because we had the Santa Marta connection. I think he’s gonna do fine in life. But that whole vibe was strange, amigos. He wasn't performing for us exactly. He was just... living inside his own story. This identity he’d built around proximity to something dark.

That’s Colombia, though. That’s how it works sometimes.

The Homeless Industrial Complex

Second driver takes us to Plaza Botero. Different vibe, same weirdness.

This guy explains why Medellín has so many street people: the climate. No, seriously. He says it’s not too hot, not too cold. Perfect for living on the streets, basically. And then - here’s the thing - the city basically encourages it. The mayor’s office sets up these shelters, feeds them, gives them everything. Three meals a day. Drugs. Good weather.

So street people from all over Colombia come to Medellín. Venezuelans, Americans who got hooked, people from other cities who figured out the system. Why work? Why try to change your life? The city’s basically said, “Stay here, we got you.”

And I’m not saying this guy was wrong. I think he was describing something real. Medellín’s got a homeless population that’s actually growing because the conditions are better than anywhere else. The city’s trying to do something humane, which is decent. But the unintended consequence is you’ve created a poverty trap. You’ve made it too comfortable to stay at the bottom.

There’s no incentive to leave. No pressure to push forward. Just three meals, a bed, and whatever escape you want. Bendito Dios, that’s a dangerous combination.

What I’m Getting At

These two rides, back-to-back, showed me something about how we live down here. We’re all kind of performing our lives, no? The guy with the Pablo sticker is performing his connection to power. The homeless system is performing compassion while accidentally building dependency.

And look - I’m not a saint. I make dollars, spend in pesos, and I like cheap beer as much as the next person. But this stuff matters. How we talk about the narcos, how we handle poverty, how we incentivize people to stay stuck.

The craziest part? Both drivers were honest. They weren’t trying to trick me. They were just... describing their reality. The world as they see it.

That’s scarier than an actual robbery, amigos.

Dios te bendiga,

BowTiedColombia

The people who say Colombia is a great country and safe are often the same ones who benefit from foreigners visiting. Whether it’s selling properties, renting expensive Airbnbs, or something else, I understand—everyone benefits from tourism in that sense.

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In your life, you’ve never met or even heard a story about a woman who has deceived so many men simultaneously. Guaranteed.

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Today, I’m bringing you something practical: my monthly bills, so you can see what it takes to keep the lights on in this slice of the Caribbean. But it’s not just numbers—there’s a bigger story here, one of medicine shortages, corruption scandals, and a security situation that’s got me on edge. Buckle up, because this gets real.

First Things First: The Bills

I live in a quiet, breezy spot near Cartagena, away from the hustle and the sticky heat that turns air conditioning into a non-negotiable for most. That little detail? It saves me a bundle. Here’s the breakdown of what I paid this month:

• Electricity: 84,000 Colombian pesos, about 20 bucks. Not too shabby, right? I barely use the AC, which helps. Compare that to my parents, who live closer to the coast in the Caribbean region—they’re shelling out $200 just for power. The cost per kilowatt here hits hard, especially with El Niño threatening reservoirs and jacking up rates.

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It is not a surprise that the major issue he notices is how expensive everything is. He says that gas, food, and everyday expenses are out of control. Just consider that when he left, one gallon of gas was $9.000 and now is around $16.000, which in a term of 3 years is a significant increase. I understand his surprise, almost doubling in gas prices is scandalous I guess while we live here everyday, we complain but nothing much that can be done. Petro’s government has been a disaster and has been unable to control how expensive the gas is.

In the same way, food prices are too high. He’s been getting surprised by how much more a regular meal is at any restaurant. Same in the grocery stores, trying to do a simple grocery haul for a week you cant get nothing much for $100.000, an amount he was used to spend before. Not only in grocery shopping. Going out for lunch is been a bigger surprise. Any simple restaurant you cant get anything for less than $30.000, taking as an example, a meal for two for hamburgers, fries and soda costed $70.000, in his experience was too expensive.

On the bright side, he noticed at least in Bogota, tons of roads being fixed and built. And is true, a lot of improvements had been made in Bogota, just to mention the Metro is finally being build, but also Transmilenio is expanding which can help the traffic in Bogota. Obviously traffic has always been chaotic and probably is worse than ever with all the road closures, but at least the city is getting improved.

When he left, the Venezuelans migration crisis was at the worst moment and where he used to live (close to the Terminal de Transportes) the situation was out of control, migrants were scattered all over the place and security started to decline. But as he noticed, his neighbourhood is better now in that regard, he didn’t encounter the same situation as before.

Also some small details he can notice after being aways for some time, cars tend to be old and pollution is noticeable. Weather is wormer than usual (but is probably biased as he lives in Canada and winters are too cold). Lots of new buildings have been made. Sense of security is the same, lots of people mention how much more insecure is but it always depends on the area where you are.

Overall, changes that have been happening can be materialized in rising prices, inflation and insecurity (but mostly in specific areas of the country). Rising prices in food and gas are out of control and everything that the government does looks like they didn’t care about it. We are getting used to pay for expensive food and gas, but lifestyle is not really improving, salaries are not growing at the same rate, unemployment is rising and companies are being dissuaded to leave the country.

I fully understand the surprise of my friend. We are use to it now but we always have to remind to ourselves how incompetent are the politicians on charge of the country. The main alternative for me, and what I can recommend to you, is always try to make dollars and spend in pesos, even if everything is getting expensive, living with USD$5k monthly you can live like a king, even in Bogota, one of the most expensive cities.

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In Cartagena, agencies are a den of thieves. They whip up crazy contracts to rip off foreigners, exchange students, and even me, a “costeño” from Santa Marta aunque mis padres son de Bucaramanga y Boyacá.

They jack up your bills, overcharge you, and trap you with shady clauses. A total plague, I swear.

But this apartment? A rare win. I dodged the crooked agencies and landed a flexible deal straight from the owner.

How’d I pull it off in a city crawling with scammers? And what’s my next move to make this place work for me?

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It was a “big” apartment, around 70 square meters, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, living room, dining area, balcony, pool, and all that stuff.

Here are the photos… but in the end, I decided not to take it.

I want to tell you that Cartagena has the most dishonest people in Latin America.

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I’ve already lived in Bogotá for over 10 years and in Santa Marta for more than 10 years. I’ve also lived in Medellín and Cali, but only for short periods and a few years ago. I need to revisit those places.

Well, I’m in Cartagena now. It’s been about a week, and honestly, I don’t like it very much.

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I voted for him for mayor of Bogotá because he is the leader of the libertarian movement in Colombia. He wouldn’t technically be a “new Milei” because he has been trying for years, long before Milei became globally known.

I can attest to that because I voted for him and knew he wouldn’t win back then.

I find him to be a reasonable candidate.

In this article, I will share some of his thoughts on Bitcoin from 2015 and his proposals from 2014 when he was a candidate for mayor in Bogotá.

Also, I offered him a chance to write in my newsletter, and he said he would think about it.

If you want, you can comment below on what questions you’d like me to ask him. I have direct contact with him.

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What happened yesterday was simply a wake-up call for the world to realize that the president of Colombia is a drug addict.

(I don’t mean this as an insult).

All Colombians know he’s a drug addict, an alcoholic, and that he’s into trans people.

Personally, I’ve known this for years, back when I was studying at university, and Bogotá’s elite always talked about his infamous parties.

At that time, Petro wasn’t as famous as he is now.

Today, I’ll tell you about their true intentions and why it’s difficult for a dictatorship like Maduro’s to succeed in Colombia.

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Yesterday, I made a small shopping trip to PriceSmart, which is essentially Costco in Colombia—literally the same company operating under that name.

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I understand that this type of tourism (resorts) don’t really show you the real way locals live, even more, you don’t really meet locals more than the people working in the resort. But I would like to tell you my experience as it was my first time in this type of all-inclusive resorts.

The plan I got was around $1200 USD, including everything I mentioned before plus they pick you and take you back to the airport. As soon as I arrive to the airport nothing really to complain, migration was quick given that around 3 flights arrived at the same time. Is a small airport, give me vibes like any other airports in the Colombian Caribbean coast. After I cleared migration, asked for the transportation company and they took me to the van, I went alone and dropped me to the airport.

Highways were good and in my way to the resort I was surprised of the number of hotels and how big they were. As soon as I got to my hotel it was surpassing how big and well organized everything was, checkout was smooth (but I was arriving essentially alone so it helped). It surprised me the number of employees I saw everywhere, everything was clean and well organized.

Rooms are clean and everything you need they can provide, it was clear at this point the service is good and the employees try to help you all the time.

Now, if you never been in that type of resorts (as I did at that point) you go there to essentially relax and not doing more than going to the beach or the pool, get tan, go eat and drink as much as you want, then just go to sleep. After one hour of being there you get used to go to the bar and ask for something to drink or just go to the buffet to get food. Is not expected, but people usually tip in USD, they give 1 or 2 dollars and I did see a lot of people tipping.

I did see a lot of families with kids, lots of couples and to a lesser extent groups of singles men and women. I also got to see a wedding happening at the beach the first day. I imagine the resort I went was a more popular destination for families and couples. Obviously if your plan is to go as a single guy/girl you can find a resort specialized in parties and singles trying to meet new people.

In terms of capacity I see tons of guest, it was busy always and you get to see people from different parts of the world, I see a lot of Canadians (particularly from Quebec), Spaniards, Russians (surprisingly), Americans and latinos from Argentina.

I notice how important tourism is for Dominican Republic and how hard they work towards attracting people to the country, the business model of all-inclusive resorts certainly is working. Just imagine, I got to see only one resort but the city is full of them.

It bring me to the main thing that I notice and a lesson for Colombia. Everything is organized and you can see how tourism is a well establish industry there. Everything works towards providing a good service:

-You arrive and the transportation company provably has an arrangement with the resort, so you the tourist don’t need to worry about it or worrying about taxi overcharges.

-At the resort you see how many people work there, so I guess employment for locals is high.

-You get to see the usual plans for going to buggy cars, excursions, parties, going on tours etc… But I was in the beach all the time and people obviously will come at you to try to sell tours, cigars or crafts, but is not like Cartagena where you feel bombarded with people trying to sell you things.

I feel thats a lesson for Colombia tourism. I could feel how everything there was organized with the purpose of serving tourist a good stay there. I bet there may be instances where they try to scam, but never to me while I was there. Sadly, when you go vacationing in Colombia, you arrive defensively and you know people will try to overcharge you and try to sell you things all the time.

On the other side, I still feel surprised on how big and how much people work in the resorts. It made me think on how they profit, I was always wondering how much they spend on food daily, on salaries (again I see a lot of people working plus the people you don’t see at the kitchens, cleaning, clerks…), all the alcohol, and the utilities. I mean, if they still working and receiving that many people they should be on profit but in my mind still crazy.

It was a good experience, you go for a full days of relax and the hotel and the people working there help you to do that. I see a lot of thing that can be learn for Colombia specially in the tourism organization, specially because the growing number people arriving to Colombia and becoming day by day a tourism attraction.

I understand now how Punta Cana specialized on this type of tourism and completely respect how well it is going for them (or at least it looks like it). I can see as a costumer that the industry provides a lot of employment and money to the country and they deserve that for the good service they provide.

I literally scheduled a doctor's appointment ( January 13th), and I had it yesterday. I do this every year to get all sorts of blood and urine tests done.

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