Bogotá, Colombia, December, 2077, Monday…
Sergio loved to fly. He just didn't like the bureaucratic hassle at each end of a trip. There was always heavy security. Flights outside the country also required customs, visa, and passport checks. When he flew his private scramjet, the trip was so quick that the bureaucracy seemed even more tedious.
The approach to Bogotá was spectacular. Coming in low over the second chain of the Andes, one first saw emerald peaks and then the houses of the small fincas with smoke drifting out of their chimneys. The fields formed a checkerboard of different shades of green where animals grazed or crops were grown. As one approached the capital, the checkerboards became more regular. This was agrarian Colombia and it had been like this for nearly five hundred years.
Closer to the city, one came upon the new Colombia. Sprawling factories and cloying traffic sprawled across the high Andean valley surrounding the old capital. Their pollution made the government center and the old colonial district invisible to the air traveler. Even the shrine on Monserrate was rarely visible. The factories worked full time spewing toxins into the land and air; the smog was worse than LA's smog had ever been, although it never rose to the levels of Mexico City or Sao Paolo where now one only ventured out into the open air if he was wearing a gas mask.
The factories produced manufactured goods that sold well on the world market because Colombian labor was cheap and plentiful. This made their investors very rich at the cost of destroying the environment and human living conditions. Bogotá, Cali, and Medellin were fast becoming carbon copies of Caracas, Maracaibo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Sao Paolo, and other urban centers around what used to be Third World Latin America. Prosperity had finally come to Colombia, at a cost. The government traveled rapidly down the highway of an uncontrolled capitalism that approached fascism.
I don't know what else to call it. Governments all over the planet, even the so-called democracies, have trounced on individual rights in order to be able to better compete in a cut-throat globalized economy, using the excuse of battling terrorism. That only means that an honest crook really has a harder time now. He smiled at the oxymoron. He had always worked in the twilight zone between legal and illegal. He mostly followed the rules but was not above bending them. The latter was so much easier to do in a democracy. But with the countries that had never quite made it, like Colombia, there were many more rules. Nowadays, though, even the US and the tattered remains of the EU were more fascistic than democratic.
