THE SECRET LIFE OF JUAN VALDEZ (NEWSWEEK)<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
 
Bogotá, abril 13-2010 (OP). El siguiente es el texto en inglés de un artículo escrito por Daniel Gross, Editor Económico de Newsweek, luego de su visita a Colombia:
Remember Juan Valdez? In a long-running series of television ads, the iconic Colombian coffee farmer and his donkey were the embodiment of Colombia's legitimate cash crop.
Until the emergence of Shakira, Valdez, who was played by two different actors, was the Colombian celebrity most known to Americans. My Slate colleague John Dickerson recalls that on a trip to Colombia with President George W. Bush, the press corps was sequestered at the airport, and "Juan Valdez" was brought out to pose for photographs with reporters. "People took a few and then he hung around smiling at all of us typing on our laptops for the next seven hours." (Dickerson doesn't remember whether the donkey was present. After all, when you're traveling with the White House press corps, it's tough to keep track of the precise number of asses on the premises.)
In the past decade, Colombia has undergone a transformation—it's safer, more prosperous, and, while still poor, much more integrated with the global economy. Exports tripled between 2002 and 2008. Juan Valdez has also undergone a transformation. The stock character is gone, but the name lives on. In the past decade, Juan Valdez has shifted from being a person who traded on a stereotypical, pre-modern image of Colombia—lilting Spanish, peasant garb, farm animal—into an international brand and consumer experience.
As I learned from my visit to Colombia last week, where I was traveling with a group of journalists and attending the World Economic Forum Latin America, Juan Valdez is now a brand, not a guy. In 2002, Colombia's National Confederation of Coffee Growers (here's their English site) launched an ambitious plan to turn Juan Valdez into a sort of Colombian Starbucks. It set up stores to sell beans by the bagful to tourists and began to open coffee bars. Outside Colombia's borders, expansion has been relatively slow. Juan Valdez has opened stores in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. (though it closed one of its New York stores in February), a few in Spain, and several in Chile and Ecuador. (Here's a store locator.)
In its home country, however, Juan Valdez is beginning to gain Starbuckian scale, especially in Bogota, home to at least 60 Juan Valdez shops. It's capitalizing both on nationalism and the significant advances of the Colombian economy. In recent years, as the domestic security situation has improved, Colombia has benefitted from rising global demand for commodities—oil and metals—and steady growth in foreign investment. In the World Bank's most recent