August 13, 2014.

Colombia Wins Investors' Favor----And That's the Problem

One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell when it would happen, but a few seconds beforehand it should be possible to guess. It was always from behind, walking down a corridor. Ten seconds would be enough. In that time the world inside him could turn over. And then suddenly, without a word uttered, without a check in his step, without the changing of a line in his face----suddenly the camouflage would be down and bang! would go the batteries of his hatred. Hatred would fill him like an enormous roaring flame. And almost in the same instant bang! would go the bullet, too late, or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces before they could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out of their reach for ever. They would have blown a hole in their own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.

When Colombia undertook an extensive tax overhaul, Wall Street rewarded it by making the country a bigger piece of one of the most widely used emerging-market bond indexes, handing fund managers a mandate to buy more of the nation's debt.

He shut his eyes. It was more difficult than accepting an intellectual discipline. It was a question of degrading himself, mutilating himself. He had got to plunge into the filthiest of filth. What was the most horrible, sickening thing of all? He thought of Big Brother. The enormous face (because of constantly seeing it on posters he always thought of it as being a metre wide), with its heavy black moustache and the eyes that followed you to and fro, seemed to float into his mind of its own accord. What were his true feelings towards Big Brother?

For Colombian plantain farmer Paula Martinez, the ripple effects of that decision have felt more like a punishment.

There was a heavy tramp of boots in the passage. The steel door swung open with a clang. O’Brien walked into the cell. Behind him were the waxen-faced officer and the black-uniformed guards.

The index reshuffling prompted investors to redirect billions of dollars to the country's local-currency-denominated debt, causing the value of Colombia's peso to surge against the dollar. That, in turn, has made it more difficult for Ms. Martinez, 57 years old, to compete with growers in other countries. A highly valued currency makes a country's exports more expensive and reduces profits for exporters when they convert overseas earnings back to pesos.