Caribbean With Simon Reeve (2015) s01e02 Episode Script
Barbados, St. Vincent, Venezuela, Colombia
with thousands of beautiful islands, and an incredible mainland coast, home to millions of extraordinary people.
This is a vast area spanning a million square miles, with a rich and brutal history, and some of the most dangerous places on the planet.
It's one of the most vibrant and exciting regions on Earth.
It's the Caribbean.
I'm travelling right around the Caribbean Sea.
This second leg of the journey takes me from the tropical islands of Barbados and St.
Vincent, then along the coast of South America.
On the Caribbean's glorious islands, I eat a pest in paradise Yes, baby! and I climb a volcano to meet locals with high hopes for an illicit crop.
It's a sort of hidden, semi-secret marijuana valley.
I travel through the badlands of Venezuela's Wild West There was actually a shoot-out between smugglers and National Guard.
and in the coastal mountains of Colombia, I meet an ancient people with a powerful message for the world.
Do you think younger brother will ever listen? I was just off the coast of the beautiful island of Barbados, at the eastern edge of the Caribbean.
With glorious beaches and fabulous villas, it's the Caribbean of the rich and the famous.
But they still let me visit.
Flipping heck! That's what you call super-yachts.
But think of the upkeep.
Think of all the cleaning.
The island is one of the jewels of the Caribbean, a proper bit of paradise.
Goodness me! Welcome to Barbados.
Barbados is a major fly and flop destination for wealthy sun-seekers.
Tourism's the main money-earner here, and has made the 285,000 Bajans among the richest people in the region.
But an influx of oligarchs and movie stars buying homes has caused friction.
On the best beaches, locals are now almost invisible.
Many say they've been pushed out by property developers.
I went to meet one man who's holding out against the tide of gentrification.
All right.
Hello, sir.
Simon Reeve, BBC.
- Pleased to meet you.
- Lovely to meet you too, sir.
Yeah, come right in.
Neville Ifill lives in a house his grandparents bought.
You're going to show us the beach.
OK, after you.
Mr.
Ifill, this is very nice.
A cool spot.
Can I ask, do you know how much money your grandma paid for this plot of land, for the house originally? 24? four dollars.
And was this a less fashionable A cheaper place to buy then? Yeah.
Yeah.
This was, shall we say, a toilet area? All along the beach-front.
In the past, much of this area was swampy mangroves and only the poorest folk lived by the beach.
Now, this is not a toilet area.
Now, this is one of the most expensive, valuable bits of land on planet Earth.
Ironically, when slavery ended here black Bajans could only afford homes along what's become the Platinum Coast.
Now, villas are replacing traditional homes.
Paths giving beach access to all are disappearing.
Some locals complain they've been purged from the landscape.
Is that how it feels? Have people come to you and said, "Sell us your home"? 8 million? US.
Why didn't you want to take such a large sum? Yeah, everybody always says, "Oh, every man has their price" Right.
but it sounds like you haven't got one.
You're not selling for anything! With crazy sums on offer, it's not surprising many Bajans have sold their simple beach houses and moved inland.
But it was inspiring to see Neville's dogged refusal to take the cash.
Money's not everything, after all.
So a lot of people might think it's completely mad to turn down a multimillion pound offer for what is a fairly small patch of land, but if you're in love with a piece of paradise like this, you can't really put a price on it.
Look at that! Of course, the seas around the Caribbean offer much more than just a lovely view.
Beneath the waves, the coral reef off Barbados is a haven of bio-diversity.
Like coral reef around the world, it's critical to life in our oceans.
I went to meet Andre Miller, a local marine biologist.
Permission to come aboard.
- Come aboard.
Simon.
- Andre.
- Hello.
Simon Reeve.
Hello.
- Nice to meet you, brother.
Nice to meet you too.
Thank you for having us.
We headed out towards some of the most beautiful dive sites on the planet.
Coral reefs cover much less than 1% of the ocean floor, but support more than a quarter of all marine life.
They act as nurseries for bigger fish and feeding ground for the larger species, so damage to a reef is a huge threat to life in our oceans.
But now, more than three-quarters of the world's reefs are at risk of severe decline, threatened by pollution and our changing climate.
Here in the Caribbean there's an additional villain.
It's called the lionfish.
It's a stunning creature with an array of venomous spines.
Lionfish shouldn't be here.
Their natural home is the Indo-Pacific.
Scientists think they first got here in the ballast tanks of ships or after being released from aquariums.
The trouble is, lionfish have a voracious appetite for the young of almost every other fish, and virtually nothing eats them.
They have, when grown, no natural predators.
Every single day, they can eat half their body weight.
They can clean up a reef and remove all of the natural fish.
When we dissect these fish we find every species of reef fish inside their stomachs.
Are you really quite worried then about what they're going to do here? We are extremely worried.
If we don't do something now, in a few years we might just be diving and looking at lionfish.
A few years ago I saw lionfish far to the north in the Bahamas, while I was travelling around the Tropic of Cancer.
Since then, their numbers have exploded and they've spread across the Caribbean.
They pose such a threat to reefs that Andre and other scientists have decided the only way to stop them is to kill them.
He gave me a bit of training and asked me to help.
Conservationists don't enjoy taking life, but as we've introduced lionfish to the Caribbean, many argue it's our responsibility to stop them destroying this fragile eco-system.
Good job, first I must say.
Well, thank you.
You filled up a container.
Good job.
This is about 15 less lionfish we have to worry about.
- 15 less.
- It's a start.
Because the more people on shore start eating these, then 15 becomes 1,500.
Eating them? Yeah, more and more of our Barbadian people, more of us are eating these.
Andre's culling them, but he's also encouraging locals to start eating lionfish.
If people get a taste for them, fishermen will hunt them, but it's not easy to find anyone happy to handle the venomous fish.
We are going to, first of all, cut those spines off.
Lionfish spines are still dangerous even after the fish is dead.
That's the business side right there.
And it is, of course, the venom which I think really puts people off the idea of eating them.
But you don't actually sell lionfish here.
- No.
- You give it up for free? Yeah.
You give it away for free? - Yeah.
- Why? People are scared of it.
People are scared of it.
Once you cut this off, it's a normal fish.
If we take these to cook them, will you stay and try it? - Will you try the meat? - Oh, no.
Oh, go on! No! You don't like the idea of it or you've got something better to do? With a bit of careful cutting, the fish was ready for cooking, so we headed over to Oistins, a popular local food market.
What happens if you can't get people here eating lionfish and control their numbers in some sort of way? What will the consequences be? The word I would use is "critical".
We need to do something now, we need to be proactive, we need to act.
Lionfish has only been in Barbados for two years and already it's on every single reef that I have ever dived on.
We're seeing them everywhere we go.
Thanks a lot.
That's lovely of you.
Thank you very much.
OK.
Lionfish.
Lionfish.
Mm.
That's really good.
It's delicious, actually.
It's sort of, um, buttery.
Oh, come on, you've got to get more people trying this.
All the ladies said they're going to try it.
Go on, try some.
Who's going to try it? Come on! Tell me what it tastes like? Yes, baby.
It tastes just like snapper.
It tastes just like snapper.
That's all I've been saying.
Just like snapper.
I think that's the best thing you could possibly hear.
And you've got to recommend it to people as well.
I will.
- Promise? - I will.
- Are you coming back next week? - Get it on George's menu.
- You're going to try and get this on George's menu? - Yeah, I will try.
That's what we're talking about.
- Excellent.
- That's it.
That's it.
Congratulations, mate.
That's brilliant.
Well done.
Well done.
You worked hard there.
Mm-hm! I continued my journey around the Caribbean Sea, heading to the nearby island of St.
Vincent.
It's part of a chain of islands with a population of around a 100,000, which have only been an independent nation since 1979.
So we've managed to get the only trolley in St.
Vincent Airport, luckily.
Who's this gentleman? - Hello.
- Hey.
- Are you Tari? - Yes, I'm Tari.
Hello, Tari.
Simon Reeve.
Nice to meet you.
Oh, Tari, yeah.
We're going to be together for a few days, Tari.
OK, that's great.
I'm looking forward to that.
The island is rugged and beautiful, with an active volcano to the north that Tari took me to see.
St.
Vincent was a British colony on and off for more than 200 years.
We filled it with slaves and plantations.
St.
Vincent is poorer than Barbados, with average incomes of less than £100 a week, and it gets a lot less tourism.
So this sand isn't the traditional golden sand that many tourists expect when they're on holiday.
It's not so fantastic for the tourism industry here, but the volcano is certainly very good at pumping out nutrients.
I mean, the soil here is very rich, very fertile.
That fertile volcanic soil provides the island with most of its earnings.
For decades, bananas were St.
Vincent's single biggest export, but not any more.
Oh So now we start to climb the volcano.
But we weren't going up to peer in to a crater.
With the help of the volcanic soil, many farmers in this area are turning to a more illicit crop-- marijuana.
The US government says St.
Vincent is the source of the majority of cannabis in the Caribbean and we were heading to the secret farms where it's grown.
It's a hell of an effort to get to these plantations.
We don't know what sort of reception we're going to receive when we get there.
As in most of the Caribbean, growing or using the drug is illegal here.
Somebody's helpfully left a rope here.
The US military has backed raids on farms here and the destruction of crops.
As I discovered, the marijuana plantations aren't exactly hard to find.
Look, I can see a hut just ahead.
And those bushes there.
I think we've reached the plantations.
This is where they're growing marijuana.
I can see more acres over there.
There's a shack with more marijuana up there in the distance, up here on the hill, down below over there.
It's quite an extraordinary sight.
It's a sort of hidden, semi-secret marijuana valley.
As we got close to another farm, Tari told us to stay back and keep our camera hidden.
There's a farmer just up ahead with a field, and we're hoping we can go and speak to him but, not surprisingly, he's not entirely keen that a TV crew turn up.
Tari's just going to have a chat with him, try and negotiate.
- Simon.
- Yeah? Let's go, let's go.
OK.
That's Simon.
Hello, sir.
Simon.
Very nice to meet you.
That's Craig with the camera.
Safe, safe.
You're safe, means it's OK.
They were a bit camera shy to begin with, but it wasn't long before the farmers produced some weed, and they all began to relax.
Even farmers coming from other fields didn't seem to mind our presence.
Are you all right there, sir? Good afternoon to you.
Good afternoon.
Completely different to the reaction we would get if we tried to go to marijuana plantations in Central America, for example, where we would be quite likely to encounter guards with assault rifles, and possibly would have been shot twice in the head and dumped by the side of the road.
There's none of that here.
This is not marijuana being grown by organised crime, it's marijuana being grown by farmers.
After we'd hung out with them for a while, one of the farmers agreed to talk.
Do you make a lot of money from growing marijuana? Come on, come on.
We want to know whether you're a rich man.
This is a T-shirt that's seen better days, but you might have your Armani suit back at your home.
- How are you defining that? - Yeah.
Yeah, fair point, fair point.
I'm presuming you make a lot more money growing marijuana than you do growing bananas? - Obviously.
- Right.
But nobody's bought a yacht or a Bentley? The way you're saying that it's as if it's just another crop.
A green gold.
It is.
It is.
There are thought to be up to 3,000 cannabis farmers on the island.
Many are hoping their trade in green gold will soon be legal.
There's a global trend towards decriminalising the growing and use of marijuana.
Farmers here think they're well placed to export to the US and the rest of the world.
It's a key issue across the Caribbean region.
If it's legalised you'll be allowed to legally export it from St.
Vincent.
You could make a lot of money from that.
How? Thanks to Bob Marley and reggae, many associate the Caribbean with cannabis, however, it's illegal here and the vast majority of people don't use it.
But it's not just local farmers who think legalisation would be a good idea.
- Afternoon.
- How are you doing? - How are you? - I'm good.
We're here to see the Prime Minister.
We're from BBC Television.
The desire for a change in the law now extends right to the top of the island.
Prime Minister.
Dr.
Ralph Gonsalves has been St.
Vincent's Prime Minister since 2001.
We're happy you're here.
So this is your official home? This is the official residence of the Prime Minister.
Goodness me.
Who have you seen in this room? Many, many important people.
That picture was given to me by Fidel.
- By Fidel Castro? - Yes.
And what a view! It's a fantastic view.
That's not bad, is it? Several countries and more than 20 American states have now decriminalised recreational or medical use of marijuana.
Hundreds of American farms are now legally growing cannabis.
Dr.
Gonsalves believes it's time for St.
Vincent to start competing or the Caribbean could miss out.
The current state of the law, it ought to be reformed.
And that is part of the conversation which we are having, first in respect of medical marijuana, and also in respect of possibly decriminalising for small quantities.
What you're setting out there is the sort of different levels of reduction that could happen or dilution to the current laws.
- Yes.
- There's allowing marijuana for medical purposes.
- Yes.
- There's decriminalising use of marijuana, - the small levels of use of marijuana.
- Yes.
And then, of course, there's completely legalising marijuana use, production, exportation, etc.
That would be at the extreme end, wouldn't it? Yes, well, what we'll have to Clearly, if we dilly and dally, if we procrastinate too long you can find that we are importing pharmaceutical products with a marijuana base when we, in fact, grow it in our own region, and we can't make any money from it.
The climate in the Caribbean means this is an ideal area to grow marijuana.
Cannabis from St.
Vincent is said to be among the best quality on the planet.
Dr.
Gonsalves is lobbying neighbours to consider changing the law across the entire region.
If marijuana is going to be legalised in much of the world, he wants his farmers to make a killing.
Think of the Caribbean and you think of islands, but my journey was taking me around the Caribbean Sea, and its waters also lap the beaches of South and Central America.
My next stop was Venezuela.
Ah! So we've arrived in Venezuela.
You might be wondering why I'm here.
It's not traditionally thought of as being a Caribbean country, but it is.
And, in fact, it's got the longest Caribbean Sea coastline of any nation.
So we're in the car, we're heading in to Caracas, the capital.
We've got Virginia, who is going to be guiding us around Venezuela.
Hi.
Did you just say "Hi" in a sort of shy, camera way? Sort of.
I'll get better.
Look at that.
You suddenly emerge into the city.
Venezuela should be one of the richest countries on Earth.
It has the largest proven oil reserves in the world and has earned more than a trillion dollars from oil in the past 20 years.
Until a few years ago it was led by the charismatic left-wing firebrand, Hugo Chavez.
He'd been elected partly as a reaction against America's meddling in South and Central America.
Chavez used some of the oil money to reduce extreme poverty and said he'd create a Socialist utopia.
There is government funded housing for some, yet because of gobsmacking economic mismanagement one in three people in oil-rich Venezuela are poor.
Since Chavez died in 2013, things have gone from bad to worse.
Venezuela's now a country in turmoil.
We need to be a little bit careful filming out on the street, I think I'm right in saying.
Don't we, Virginia? Yes.
The first time I came here, neighbours kept on telling me to put my camera away because I was going to be shot from You know, by people from above.
- Shot? - Shot.
Bloody hell.
Caracas is one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
We were heading into a notorious building called the Tower of David.
What's with the motorbikes? They're going to drive us up to the 7th or 8th floor just to sort of make the hike shorter.
OK.
This is a sort of unfinished car park by the look of it, multi-storey car park.
And this is where we get out.
Virginia, what is this place? Well, it was originally meant to be a bank, one of the leading sort of banking institutions of the country, but after it went broke it was abandoned and then taken over by I don't know, close to 200 people that turned it in to their homes.
So it's an abandoned skyscraper? It's a squatters' skyscraper, yes.
Driven by poverty and a lack of proper housing, the number of squatters here quickly grew.
Oh, my God, look at that! Almost 3,000 people have been living here.
Families have raised children in the tower, carrying everything for their flats up by hand.
That's astonishing! The tower has had a fearsome reputation.
Violent drug and kidnap gangs operated from here.
My God, look at this.
And there are stories of people being pushed to their deaths tens of storeys below.
Imagine bringing children up right next to this.
I think it shows the level of desperation, really.
That families have been prepared to do this.
This is not, by a long stretch, a safe environment to raise your youngsters in the sense that, you know, they could fall down the stairs, they could fall off the edge of the building! Look, just over here, they could fall through a gap.
Look.
This is not good.
And yet, for the people who live here it was better than life outside.
Safer here in this shanty town in the sky than out there in the city.
I found the tower astonishing.
In the absence of government help, people got on with organising things themselves, even opening businesses.
There's a little shop there.
From barbers' shops to nurseries, the tower was like a vertical high street.
What's going on here? People are making cookie cutters.
That's a whole production line.
Making cookie cutters! Goodness me.
Despite an intermittent supply of electricity and water, there's even industry in the tower.
Wow.
You've got a whole factory going on in here.
We've interrupted you during lunch.
I'm very sorry.
It looks as though you're doing pretty well.
How many cookie cutters are you making? 25,000 a week! That's His fingers went Thumbs went up like that.
Could you have achieved this if you hadn't been living in the tower? Look.
Wilmer here has just given us business cards.
He's such a businessman.
I think he's thinking about exporting to the European Union.
We might be able to go in to business together importing cookie cutters in to the UK maybe.
People are currently being rehoused out of the tower, but residents have taken an enormous pride in the place, creating order out of chaos.
There's a beauty parlour on this floor.
They have committees to keep charge of cleaning and security, a real community.
It's truly inspiring that they were able to build not only, you know, houses out of bricks, but also build a sort of strong community with a strong sense of solidarity among them.
You know, they really do look after each other's neighbours.
In a way, this speaks of a more successful system of organising than most Venezuelans have outside.
There is wealth in this country and in this city, but it's in the hands of just a few.
Most people are poor and struggling.
Despite Venezuela's oil wealth, there are shortages in the shops and a lack of decent health care.
Virginia took me to the Perez de Leon Hospital which helps serve the largest slum in Caracas.
Goodness me.
It looks like a prison.
We met Dr.
Mariela Formigoni.
What's with the sort of prison level of security here? Why is that needed? Around 20,000 people are murdered in Venezuela each year.
Outside of a war zone, Caracas has the second highest murder rate in the world.
It's a symptom of poverty, ineffective policing, and failing government.
But dealing with violence is just one of the challenges facing this hospital.
The bigger issue here is how to treat patients, despite shortages of doctors and even medicines.
How easy is it for you to get basic drugs and medication for your children? That's a basic painkiller.
You can't even get basic painkillers? Of course, it's the poorest here who are suffering the most.
I'm slightly blown away, because everything we see here we have to see through While at the same time remembering how incredibly rich this country is supposed to be.
This is not the hospital of a wealthy country.
It's not just hospitals that are breaking point.
There are queues for food, building supplies, even loo paper.
It's a consequence of government restrictions on foreign currency which mean businesses don't want to import, and Soviet-era controls on prices that mean shops don't want to sell.
The country felt close to collapse.
Next day, we left Caracas and headed towards the Colombian border, in Venezuela's Wild West.
We were heading in to a tricky area, so we'd swapped hire cars for more discreet local wheels, complete with a shag pile dashboard.
We're going to hop out.
Honestly, this is quite interesting.
But he does it right to the top, doesn't he? OK, so he's put 68 litres in.
How much is that costing you? It cost 6 Ps to fill up the tank right now, so that close to a US dollar.
- One US dollar? - To fill up a 60 litre tank, yes.
And many well-connected people here can fill a tank even cheaper.
What you pay for a litre is what I pay a whole year to fill up my tank once or twice a month.
An entire year? Yeah.
My yearly budget for petrol is what you spend in one litre.
This is extra, extra, extra bonkers, isn't it? Petrol here is the cheapest in the world and is sold for far less than it costs to produce, thanks to a government subsidy introduced decades ago.
The cost of subsidising fuel is gradually bankrupting the country, but no government has been brave enough to raise prices, even though the subsidy benefits the rich, who have more cars, rather than the poor.
Look.
There's a nodding donkey just here in this suburban neighbourhood.
There's a gentleman just over there.
Could we just ask him how often, does it pump all the time? Do you see the benefits from it? I don't understand where the money's gone.
This has been pumping for years.
Venezuela, it's the biggest One of the biggest oil producers in the world.
Where does it go? Where does the money go? It's extraordinary.
Venezuela and Venezuelans should be rich.
It's unclear where the country's oil wealth has gone.
Much has been stolen or lost through inefficiency and rampant corruption, and vast sums have been siphoned off when petrol is smuggled across the border to Colombia, where I was headed next.
What's going on here? Well, basically, the kids are bringing over gas and they're going to do a quick refill for this guy.
Because of Venezuelan subsidies, petrol costs a hundred times more across the border in Colombia, so profits for smuggling are huge.
There are supposed to be controls and restrictions on petrol sales near the border, but we saw countless drivers filling huge tanks they would take to Colombia and sell.
Our route to the border was a smugglers' highway.
Look, they're turning off.
They're just going to go down Well, a little track down to the side which probably means there's a checkpoint just up ahead.
Yeah, I can even see it! We went through numerous checkpoints on the way to the border, but they were clearly not much of a deterrent.
They've obviously just gone round the checkpoint to get away with whatever it is they're smuggling.
Guns, drugs and food, as well as petrol, are smuggled here.
Huge profits are at stake and the border region has become extremely dangerous.
Oh, it's, like, an army convoy.
It was a contingent of the National Guard.
I just heard there was actually a violent confrontation yesterday, and a shoot-out between smugglers and the National Guard.
Gangs, the police and politicians are all said to be involved with the smuggling.
As we got closer to the border, it seemed everyone was at it.
And all those there! Amazing! We're just off the main road away from the checkpoint and this is all completely illegal here.
It's like a square mile of black market illegal madness.
Everybody is trading fuel here.
It's been officially estimated that roughly £30 million worth of fuel is smuggled out of Venezuela every single week.
But the government here has been a bit hopeless at preventing the national coffers being bled dry.
We were spotted by one of the guys, so we can't do a drive around again.
OK, the locks just went down, is that because he's worried for us? Yes.
It might get a bit aggressive.
We were spotted as foreigners or as TV people? TV people.
OK, not good.
The fuel subsidy here costs more than government spending on education and health care combined.
As we headed towards the border, our driver admitted he was also a smuggler, and even he was angry and worried about the state of the country.
So how often will you do a run across? Once or twice a day.
And how much money can a person make with a car like this? It's very lucrative for doing almost nothing.
And it's easy money.
Normally, I can sit here driving for two or three hours and I can make as much as a professional in this country makes in a month.
Where do you think this country will be in five years' time? Every day, I think about what this country used to be like and what it's like now.
From top to bottom, everything is bad.
It's difficult to see a future for Venezuela.
We're getting close to the border with Colombia now and I'm coming to the conclusion that Venezuela is one of the worst-managed countries that I have ever visited.
I've been in poorer places and I've been in war-torn countries, but I don't think I've been in one which has got quite this much natural wealth, and yet is being so badly run.
What a completely lawless situation.
Right at the V that marks the end of Venezuela.
It's a beautiful country with so much going for it.
But, to be honest, the muppetry of the government here meant I wasn't sad to move on.
Here we go, Colombian immigration right here.
There's a cop here smoking a fag.
Virginia, thank you so much.
May we have a little? Of course.
Good luck.
Until recently, Colombia was being torn apart by decades of violence, fuelled by the multibillion pound cocaine trade.
But over the last 10 years, life has really improved here, and after Venezuela, Colombia felt like a bit of a relief.
Is she selling coffee? Can we get one? Tres.
Tres.
"Cafe for the gringo," she said.
Look at this.
This is a motorway service station in Colombia.
- Gracias.
- Gracias.
We headed west, along Colombia's Caribbean coast, towards an area officially called "The Banana Zone".
Look at all of them! Bananas are one of the five most important crops in the world.
We've arrived.
In the UK we eat an astonishing 5 billion bananas a year.
A quarter come from Colombia.
Mathilde, what's with the blue bags? There's a pesticide which protects the bananas, so we can produce perfect bananas.
Around 80% of people in this part of Colombia are involved in the banana trade.
OK, thank you, Mathilde.
A very sharp knife.
Time for me to join them.
- Take the leaves off first? - Yeah.
Sorry.
Much of the industry here has signed up to the Fair Trade scheme.
Bueno? Now hang on, that's got the bananas on.
It ensures workers receive better wages and improved working conditions.
Ah! Bloody hell, that's heavy! This bloke's a train engine.
Bueno.
Some of the farm workers here, including Mathilde Castro, used to be farmers themselves.
They were part of a co-operative that owned and ran its own banana plantation.
But they were sucked in to the violence of Colombia's civil conflict, when guerrilla groups fought against the national government and the country descended into near-chaos.
The conflict tore their lives apart.
Some men came and killed my partner and his two brothers.
We were threatened and told if we stayed we'd be killed, so we had to leave.
Who did this? The paramilitaries.
So these are the right-wing paramilitaries who were often started by corporations, I think, weren't they? And they came and murdered your husband and stole your land? Some of them have admitted to the crimes they committed.
Why did they do it? For the land, that's why.
During the worst years of fighting here, corporations and businesses often connived with or even established violent paramilitary groups to protect their interests and even kill their enemies and claim more land.
Some of the banana corporations who've been operating here have got questions to answer about their role in what's afflicted this country.
One of the big banana multi-nationals, Chiquita, they were fined and given a multimillion pound fine just a few years ago because they confessed they had been supporting, funding paramilitary groups here that were targeting banana farm workers and trade unionists.
Multi-national corporations were involved and implicated in the half a century of violence in Colombia during which hundreds of thousands of people died.
I continued my journey along the coast to the Port of Santa Marta, from where many of Colombia's bananas are shipped abroad.
Although the Colombian government has had great success tackling the cocaine trade, it's still a major problem.
Drug gangs will hide cocaine they're smuggling to Europe and the United States inside banana shipments.
I met Colonel Romel Bernate, who's in charge of trying to stop the smugglers.
So we've got an inspection going on here.
We take them all down and then search through each crate.
We found cocaine in with the bananas and in the shipping containers.
What's the biggest find you've made, then, in recent years? In February 2014, we found two tonnes of cocaine.
Two tonnes of cocaine? How much is that worth when it gets to Europe? 88 to US $90 million.
We've found drugs inside the wall and we've found drugs inside this section.
They devise ways of removing this bit and modifying the containers.
And they try to hide them inside the refrigeration unit.
The bananas need to be kept cool on the journey, which is why we have to open up all of this.
It must be such an enormous challenge for you because, presumably, if a gang could fill just this area here with cocaine and get that past your search teams they make an enormous sum of money.
A lot of money.
A single kilo in Europe can fetch up to US $59,000.
That says it all really, doesn't it? I mean, that is the point.
Thanks to better policing and detection, the cultivation of cocaine in Colombia has more than halved since its peak.
Much of the illegal production has moved away from the Caribbean region to Peru and Bolivia.
Colombia's violent reputation continues to put off foreign visitors, but it's a stunning country.
I headed along the coast towards the last destination on this part of my journey around the Caribbean.
My route was taking me in to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the highest coastal mountain range in the world.
It's home to an ancient people.
We're heading in to the land of the Kogi people.
Now, the Kogi are the most intact surviving civilisation from the time before Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas.
When the Spanish invaders first arrived here, most of the indigenous people of the Americas were wiped out, often by the gun or the sword.
But tens of millions died from diseases they had no immunity to.
But the Kogi retreated high in to the Sierra Nevada, which is where they've remained.
Look at this.
We're arriving on the edge of a community, a village, it looks like.
There are roughly 20,000 Kogi people in these mountains.
They hunt and gather, but they're also a settled community, who have farmed here for centuries.
Unlike many indigenous communities around the world, the Kogi are choosing to remain largely isolated from the modern world.
There wasn't even a football T-shirt in sight.
It's extremely rare for the Kogi to allow a TV crew into their world.
They let me visit for a simple reason-- to show us how they live and to warn that their way of life is now being threatened.
This is right up there with the most incredible places I've ever been.
The Kogi wanted to show me what was at stake, so they took me into their back garden-- the pristine forests of the Sierra Nevada.
These misty mountains are home to extraordinary bio-diversity, including the most important concentration of threatened mammals, amphibians and birds on Earth.
We don't damage the hills, the caves or the trees, because they give us life.
These are the laws that Mother Nature has given us.
The Kogi believe the Sierra Nevada is the heart of the world.
Look at this! Absolutely spectacular.
OK.
Ooh.
So it turns out that the village we were in is more of a gathering place for farmers to assemble, farmers from the community.
So each of the people we've met has a little farm like this, but they go to meet outsiders down in the village.
This is a job made for me.
OK.
Which one? Ah.
Ooh.
Flipping heck.
Have you little ones seen tall foreigners before? Lemonade, Kogi style.
Wow, it smells incredible.
Mmm.
I don't think it's alcoholic.
- Any alcohol? - No.
I know I mustn't drink it all, but it is very good.
So this is home tonight, the village school.
We've got inflatable mattresses inside and mosquito nets to keep out the buzzing mozzies, but also we're going to tuck them underneath the mattresses and hopefully that will keep out the snakes as well.
It wasn't a horrific night but things-- Cockerels started crowing next to our heads at about quarter past three.
I hate cockerels.
The Kogi call the rest of us their younger brother, and they believe we're threatening their very existence.
I went to talk with Mamo Luntana, a Kogi elder.
What I want to know is how younger brother expects us all to live when you come from the other side of the world and destroy Mother Earth so that multi-national companies can profit.
Younger brother has caused so much damage.
River levels have fallen, the rains don't come when they should.
Crop seasons are changing.
Only when younger brother stops can this life carry on as normal.
We're used to being warned about our changing climate by scientists, but it's shocking to hear this first-hand evidence of profound change already happening from the leader of a remote people in a remote part of the planet.
And this is something I'm hearing more and more of on my travels around the world.
I'm nearly at the end of my journey, but we're heading back down to the coast to the sea.
It's not far, well, not that far anyway as the crow flies.
It takes a bit of time on these roads.
Ah-ah.
And we've got a vehicle behind that's bringing some of the Kogi with us.
The Kogi have a series of sacred sites around the area connected by what they call the black line.
It's part of their belief system.
Many of their sacred sites have been damaged by development.
They've now launched a desperate campaign to protect what's left.
They took me down to the beach and back to the Caribbean Sea.
When you see this power station what do you think as a people? You live in the mountains, but I sense the sea is very important to you.
The Kogi believe our natural world is being destroyed by us.
Do you think younger brother will ever listen? There's a desperation in their plea.
The Kogi have noticed our world is changing, not by measuring it, but by living in it.
It's been an incredible journey, from the beaches of Barbados to the mountains of the Sierra Nevada.
But this is the end of this leg.
On the next leg, my final leg, I'll be travelling up the Caribbean coast of Central America and finishing my journey around the Caribbean Sea in Jamaica.
Next time-- I join a research mission on one of the world's greatest reefs and experience the coral kingdom at night.
And I go on patrol in the most dangerous city on the planet.
I think he's got a bullet wound on his chest.
look at that.
Before finishing my Caribbean journey on the beautiful beaches of Jamaica.
March 29th, 2015
This is a vast area spanning a million square miles, with a rich and brutal history, and some of the most dangerous places on the planet.
It's one of the most vibrant and exciting regions on Earth.
It's the Caribbean.
I'm travelling right around the Caribbean Sea.
This second leg of the journey takes me from the tropical islands of Barbados and St.
Vincent, then along the coast of South America.
On the Caribbean's glorious islands, I eat a pest in paradise Yes, baby! and I climb a volcano to meet locals with high hopes for an illicit crop.
It's a sort of hidden, semi-secret marijuana valley.
I travel through the badlands of Venezuela's Wild West There was actually a shoot-out between smugglers and National Guard.
and in the coastal mountains of Colombia, I meet an ancient people with a powerful message for the world.
Do you think younger brother will ever listen? I was just off the coast of the beautiful island of Barbados, at the eastern edge of the Caribbean.
With glorious beaches and fabulous villas, it's the Caribbean of the rich and the famous.
But they still let me visit.
Flipping heck! That's what you call super-yachts.
But think of the upkeep.
Think of all the cleaning.
The island is one of the jewels of the Caribbean, a proper bit of paradise.
Goodness me! Welcome to Barbados.
Barbados is a major fly and flop destination for wealthy sun-seekers.
Tourism's the main money-earner here, and has made the 285,000 Bajans among the richest people in the region.
But an influx of oligarchs and movie stars buying homes has caused friction.
On the best beaches, locals are now almost invisible.
Many say they've been pushed out by property developers.
I went to meet one man who's holding out against the tide of gentrification.
All right.
Hello, sir.
Simon Reeve, BBC.
- Pleased to meet you.
- Lovely to meet you too, sir.
Yeah, come right in.
Neville Ifill lives in a house his grandparents bought.
You're going to show us the beach.
OK, after you.
Mr.
Ifill, this is very nice.
A cool spot.
Can I ask, do you know how much money your grandma paid for this plot of land, for the house originally? 24? four dollars.
And was this a less fashionable A cheaper place to buy then? Yeah.
Yeah.
This was, shall we say, a toilet area? All along the beach-front.
In the past, much of this area was swampy mangroves and only the poorest folk lived by the beach.
Now, this is not a toilet area.
Now, this is one of the most expensive, valuable bits of land on planet Earth.
Ironically, when slavery ended here black Bajans could only afford homes along what's become the Platinum Coast.
Now, villas are replacing traditional homes.
Paths giving beach access to all are disappearing.
Some locals complain they've been purged from the landscape.
Is that how it feels? Have people come to you and said, "Sell us your home"? 8 million? US.
Why didn't you want to take such a large sum? Yeah, everybody always says, "Oh, every man has their price" Right.
but it sounds like you haven't got one.
You're not selling for anything! With crazy sums on offer, it's not surprising many Bajans have sold their simple beach houses and moved inland.
But it was inspiring to see Neville's dogged refusal to take the cash.
Money's not everything, after all.
So a lot of people might think it's completely mad to turn down a multimillion pound offer for what is a fairly small patch of land, but if you're in love with a piece of paradise like this, you can't really put a price on it.
Look at that! Of course, the seas around the Caribbean offer much more than just a lovely view.
Beneath the waves, the coral reef off Barbados is a haven of bio-diversity.
Like coral reef around the world, it's critical to life in our oceans.
I went to meet Andre Miller, a local marine biologist.
Permission to come aboard.
- Come aboard.
Simon.
- Andre.
- Hello.
Simon Reeve.
Hello.
- Nice to meet you, brother.
Nice to meet you too.
Thank you for having us.
We headed out towards some of the most beautiful dive sites on the planet.
Coral reefs cover much less than 1% of the ocean floor, but support more than a quarter of all marine life.
They act as nurseries for bigger fish and feeding ground for the larger species, so damage to a reef is a huge threat to life in our oceans.
But now, more than three-quarters of the world's reefs are at risk of severe decline, threatened by pollution and our changing climate.
Here in the Caribbean there's an additional villain.
It's called the lionfish.
It's a stunning creature with an array of venomous spines.
Lionfish shouldn't be here.
Their natural home is the Indo-Pacific.
Scientists think they first got here in the ballast tanks of ships or after being released from aquariums.
The trouble is, lionfish have a voracious appetite for the young of almost every other fish, and virtually nothing eats them.
They have, when grown, no natural predators.
Every single day, they can eat half their body weight.
They can clean up a reef and remove all of the natural fish.
When we dissect these fish we find every species of reef fish inside their stomachs.
Are you really quite worried then about what they're going to do here? We are extremely worried.
If we don't do something now, in a few years we might just be diving and looking at lionfish.
A few years ago I saw lionfish far to the north in the Bahamas, while I was travelling around the Tropic of Cancer.
Since then, their numbers have exploded and they've spread across the Caribbean.
They pose such a threat to reefs that Andre and other scientists have decided the only way to stop them is to kill them.
He gave me a bit of training and asked me to help.
Conservationists don't enjoy taking life, but as we've introduced lionfish to the Caribbean, many argue it's our responsibility to stop them destroying this fragile eco-system.
Good job, first I must say.
Well, thank you.
You filled up a container.
Good job.
This is about 15 less lionfish we have to worry about.
- 15 less.
- It's a start.
Because the more people on shore start eating these, then 15 becomes 1,500.
Eating them? Yeah, more and more of our Barbadian people, more of us are eating these.
Andre's culling them, but he's also encouraging locals to start eating lionfish.
If people get a taste for them, fishermen will hunt them, but it's not easy to find anyone happy to handle the venomous fish.
We are going to, first of all, cut those spines off.
Lionfish spines are still dangerous even after the fish is dead.
That's the business side right there.
And it is, of course, the venom which I think really puts people off the idea of eating them.
But you don't actually sell lionfish here.
- No.
- You give it up for free? Yeah.
You give it away for free? - Yeah.
- Why? People are scared of it.
People are scared of it.
Once you cut this off, it's a normal fish.
If we take these to cook them, will you stay and try it? - Will you try the meat? - Oh, no.
Oh, go on! No! You don't like the idea of it or you've got something better to do? With a bit of careful cutting, the fish was ready for cooking, so we headed over to Oistins, a popular local food market.
What happens if you can't get people here eating lionfish and control their numbers in some sort of way? What will the consequences be? The word I would use is "critical".
We need to do something now, we need to be proactive, we need to act.
Lionfish has only been in Barbados for two years and already it's on every single reef that I have ever dived on.
We're seeing them everywhere we go.
Thanks a lot.
That's lovely of you.
Thank you very much.
OK.
Lionfish.
Lionfish.
Mm.
That's really good.
It's delicious, actually.
It's sort of, um, buttery.
Oh, come on, you've got to get more people trying this.
All the ladies said they're going to try it.
Go on, try some.
Who's going to try it? Come on! Tell me what it tastes like? Yes, baby.
It tastes just like snapper.
It tastes just like snapper.
That's all I've been saying.
Just like snapper.
I think that's the best thing you could possibly hear.
And you've got to recommend it to people as well.
I will.
- Promise? - I will.
- Are you coming back next week? - Get it on George's menu.
- You're going to try and get this on George's menu? - Yeah, I will try.
That's what we're talking about.
- Excellent.
- That's it.
That's it.
Congratulations, mate.
That's brilliant.
Well done.
Well done.
You worked hard there.
Mm-hm! I continued my journey around the Caribbean Sea, heading to the nearby island of St.
Vincent.
It's part of a chain of islands with a population of around a 100,000, which have only been an independent nation since 1979.
So we've managed to get the only trolley in St.
Vincent Airport, luckily.
Who's this gentleman? - Hello.
- Hey.
- Are you Tari? - Yes, I'm Tari.
Hello, Tari.
Simon Reeve.
Nice to meet you.
Oh, Tari, yeah.
We're going to be together for a few days, Tari.
OK, that's great.
I'm looking forward to that.
The island is rugged and beautiful, with an active volcano to the north that Tari took me to see.
St.
Vincent was a British colony on and off for more than 200 years.
We filled it with slaves and plantations.
St.
Vincent is poorer than Barbados, with average incomes of less than £100 a week, and it gets a lot less tourism.
So this sand isn't the traditional golden sand that many tourists expect when they're on holiday.
It's not so fantastic for the tourism industry here, but the volcano is certainly very good at pumping out nutrients.
I mean, the soil here is very rich, very fertile.
That fertile volcanic soil provides the island with most of its earnings.
For decades, bananas were St.
Vincent's single biggest export, but not any more.
Oh So now we start to climb the volcano.
But we weren't going up to peer in to a crater.
With the help of the volcanic soil, many farmers in this area are turning to a more illicit crop-- marijuana.
The US government says St.
Vincent is the source of the majority of cannabis in the Caribbean and we were heading to the secret farms where it's grown.
It's a hell of an effort to get to these plantations.
We don't know what sort of reception we're going to receive when we get there.
As in most of the Caribbean, growing or using the drug is illegal here.
Somebody's helpfully left a rope here.
The US military has backed raids on farms here and the destruction of crops.
As I discovered, the marijuana plantations aren't exactly hard to find.
Look, I can see a hut just ahead.
And those bushes there.
I think we've reached the plantations.
This is where they're growing marijuana.
I can see more acres over there.
There's a shack with more marijuana up there in the distance, up here on the hill, down below over there.
It's quite an extraordinary sight.
It's a sort of hidden, semi-secret marijuana valley.
As we got close to another farm, Tari told us to stay back and keep our camera hidden.
There's a farmer just up ahead with a field, and we're hoping we can go and speak to him but, not surprisingly, he's not entirely keen that a TV crew turn up.
Tari's just going to have a chat with him, try and negotiate.
- Simon.
- Yeah? Let's go, let's go.
OK.
That's Simon.
Hello, sir.
Simon.
Very nice to meet you.
That's Craig with the camera.
Safe, safe.
You're safe, means it's OK.
They were a bit camera shy to begin with, but it wasn't long before the farmers produced some weed, and they all began to relax.
Even farmers coming from other fields didn't seem to mind our presence.
Are you all right there, sir? Good afternoon to you.
Good afternoon.
Completely different to the reaction we would get if we tried to go to marijuana plantations in Central America, for example, where we would be quite likely to encounter guards with assault rifles, and possibly would have been shot twice in the head and dumped by the side of the road.
There's none of that here.
This is not marijuana being grown by organised crime, it's marijuana being grown by farmers.
After we'd hung out with them for a while, one of the farmers agreed to talk.
Do you make a lot of money from growing marijuana? Come on, come on.
We want to know whether you're a rich man.
This is a T-shirt that's seen better days, but you might have your Armani suit back at your home.
- How are you defining that? - Yeah.
Yeah, fair point, fair point.
I'm presuming you make a lot more money growing marijuana than you do growing bananas? - Obviously.
- Right.
But nobody's bought a yacht or a Bentley? The way you're saying that it's as if it's just another crop.
A green gold.
It is.
It is.
There are thought to be up to 3,000 cannabis farmers on the island.
Many are hoping their trade in green gold will soon be legal.
There's a global trend towards decriminalising the growing and use of marijuana.
Farmers here think they're well placed to export to the US and the rest of the world.
It's a key issue across the Caribbean region.
If it's legalised you'll be allowed to legally export it from St.
Vincent.
You could make a lot of money from that.
How? Thanks to Bob Marley and reggae, many associate the Caribbean with cannabis, however, it's illegal here and the vast majority of people don't use it.
But it's not just local farmers who think legalisation would be a good idea.
- Afternoon.
- How are you doing? - How are you? - I'm good.
We're here to see the Prime Minister.
We're from BBC Television.
The desire for a change in the law now extends right to the top of the island.
Prime Minister.
Dr.
Ralph Gonsalves has been St.
Vincent's Prime Minister since 2001.
We're happy you're here.
So this is your official home? This is the official residence of the Prime Minister.
Goodness me.
Who have you seen in this room? Many, many important people.
That picture was given to me by Fidel.
- By Fidel Castro? - Yes.
And what a view! It's a fantastic view.
That's not bad, is it? Several countries and more than 20 American states have now decriminalised recreational or medical use of marijuana.
Hundreds of American farms are now legally growing cannabis.
Dr.
Gonsalves believes it's time for St.
Vincent to start competing or the Caribbean could miss out.
The current state of the law, it ought to be reformed.
And that is part of the conversation which we are having, first in respect of medical marijuana, and also in respect of possibly decriminalising for small quantities.
What you're setting out there is the sort of different levels of reduction that could happen or dilution to the current laws.
- Yes.
- There's allowing marijuana for medical purposes.
- Yes.
- There's decriminalising use of marijuana, - the small levels of use of marijuana.
- Yes.
And then, of course, there's completely legalising marijuana use, production, exportation, etc.
That would be at the extreme end, wouldn't it? Yes, well, what we'll have to Clearly, if we dilly and dally, if we procrastinate too long you can find that we are importing pharmaceutical products with a marijuana base when we, in fact, grow it in our own region, and we can't make any money from it.
The climate in the Caribbean means this is an ideal area to grow marijuana.
Cannabis from St.
Vincent is said to be among the best quality on the planet.
Dr.
Gonsalves is lobbying neighbours to consider changing the law across the entire region.
If marijuana is going to be legalised in much of the world, he wants his farmers to make a killing.
Think of the Caribbean and you think of islands, but my journey was taking me around the Caribbean Sea, and its waters also lap the beaches of South and Central America.
My next stop was Venezuela.
Ah! So we've arrived in Venezuela.
You might be wondering why I'm here.
It's not traditionally thought of as being a Caribbean country, but it is.
And, in fact, it's got the longest Caribbean Sea coastline of any nation.
So we're in the car, we're heading in to Caracas, the capital.
We've got Virginia, who is going to be guiding us around Venezuela.
Hi.
Did you just say "Hi" in a sort of shy, camera way? Sort of.
I'll get better.
Look at that.
You suddenly emerge into the city.
Venezuela should be one of the richest countries on Earth.
It has the largest proven oil reserves in the world and has earned more than a trillion dollars from oil in the past 20 years.
Until a few years ago it was led by the charismatic left-wing firebrand, Hugo Chavez.
He'd been elected partly as a reaction against America's meddling in South and Central America.
Chavez used some of the oil money to reduce extreme poverty and said he'd create a Socialist utopia.
There is government funded housing for some, yet because of gobsmacking economic mismanagement one in three people in oil-rich Venezuela are poor.
Since Chavez died in 2013, things have gone from bad to worse.
Venezuela's now a country in turmoil.
We need to be a little bit careful filming out on the street, I think I'm right in saying.
Don't we, Virginia? Yes.
The first time I came here, neighbours kept on telling me to put my camera away because I was going to be shot from You know, by people from above.
- Shot? - Shot.
Bloody hell.
Caracas is one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
We were heading into a notorious building called the Tower of David.
What's with the motorbikes? They're going to drive us up to the 7th or 8th floor just to sort of make the hike shorter.
OK.
This is a sort of unfinished car park by the look of it, multi-storey car park.
And this is where we get out.
Virginia, what is this place? Well, it was originally meant to be a bank, one of the leading sort of banking institutions of the country, but after it went broke it was abandoned and then taken over by I don't know, close to 200 people that turned it in to their homes.
So it's an abandoned skyscraper? It's a squatters' skyscraper, yes.
Driven by poverty and a lack of proper housing, the number of squatters here quickly grew.
Oh, my God, look at that! Almost 3,000 people have been living here.
Families have raised children in the tower, carrying everything for their flats up by hand.
That's astonishing! The tower has had a fearsome reputation.
Violent drug and kidnap gangs operated from here.
My God, look at this.
And there are stories of people being pushed to their deaths tens of storeys below.
Imagine bringing children up right next to this.
I think it shows the level of desperation, really.
That families have been prepared to do this.
This is not, by a long stretch, a safe environment to raise your youngsters in the sense that, you know, they could fall down the stairs, they could fall off the edge of the building! Look, just over here, they could fall through a gap.
Look.
This is not good.
And yet, for the people who live here it was better than life outside.
Safer here in this shanty town in the sky than out there in the city.
I found the tower astonishing.
In the absence of government help, people got on with organising things themselves, even opening businesses.
There's a little shop there.
From barbers' shops to nurseries, the tower was like a vertical high street.
What's going on here? People are making cookie cutters.
That's a whole production line.
Making cookie cutters! Goodness me.
Despite an intermittent supply of electricity and water, there's even industry in the tower.
Wow.
You've got a whole factory going on in here.
We've interrupted you during lunch.
I'm very sorry.
It looks as though you're doing pretty well.
How many cookie cutters are you making? 25,000 a week! That's His fingers went Thumbs went up like that.
Could you have achieved this if you hadn't been living in the tower? Look.
Wilmer here has just given us business cards.
He's such a businessman.
I think he's thinking about exporting to the European Union.
We might be able to go in to business together importing cookie cutters in to the UK maybe.
People are currently being rehoused out of the tower, but residents have taken an enormous pride in the place, creating order out of chaos.
There's a beauty parlour on this floor.
They have committees to keep charge of cleaning and security, a real community.
It's truly inspiring that they were able to build not only, you know, houses out of bricks, but also build a sort of strong community with a strong sense of solidarity among them.
You know, they really do look after each other's neighbours.
In a way, this speaks of a more successful system of organising than most Venezuelans have outside.
There is wealth in this country and in this city, but it's in the hands of just a few.
Most people are poor and struggling.
Despite Venezuela's oil wealth, there are shortages in the shops and a lack of decent health care.
Virginia took me to the Perez de Leon Hospital which helps serve the largest slum in Caracas.
Goodness me.
It looks like a prison.
We met Dr.
Mariela Formigoni.
What's with the sort of prison level of security here? Why is that needed? Around 20,000 people are murdered in Venezuela each year.
Outside of a war zone, Caracas has the second highest murder rate in the world.
It's a symptom of poverty, ineffective policing, and failing government.
But dealing with violence is just one of the challenges facing this hospital.
The bigger issue here is how to treat patients, despite shortages of doctors and even medicines.
How easy is it for you to get basic drugs and medication for your children? That's a basic painkiller.
You can't even get basic painkillers? Of course, it's the poorest here who are suffering the most.
I'm slightly blown away, because everything we see here we have to see through While at the same time remembering how incredibly rich this country is supposed to be.
This is not the hospital of a wealthy country.
It's not just hospitals that are breaking point.
There are queues for food, building supplies, even loo paper.
It's a consequence of government restrictions on foreign currency which mean businesses don't want to import, and Soviet-era controls on prices that mean shops don't want to sell.
The country felt close to collapse.
Next day, we left Caracas and headed towards the Colombian border, in Venezuela's Wild West.
We were heading in to a tricky area, so we'd swapped hire cars for more discreet local wheels, complete with a shag pile dashboard.
We're going to hop out.
Honestly, this is quite interesting.
But he does it right to the top, doesn't he? OK, so he's put 68 litres in.
How much is that costing you? It cost 6 Ps to fill up the tank right now, so that close to a US dollar.
- One US dollar? - To fill up a 60 litre tank, yes.
And many well-connected people here can fill a tank even cheaper.
What you pay for a litre is what I pay a whole year to fill up my tank once or twice a month.
An entire year? Yeah.
My yearly budget for petrol is what you spend in one litre.
This is extra, extra, extra bonkers, isn't it? Petrol here is the cheapest in the world and is sold for far less than it costs to produce, thanks to a government subsidy introduced decades ago.
The cost of subsidising fuel is gradually bankrupting the country, but no government has been brave enough to raise prices, even though the subsidy benefits the rich, who have more cars, rather than the poor.
Look.
There's a nodding donkey just here in this suburban neighbourhood.
There's a gentleman just over there.
Could we just ask him how often, does it pump all the time? Do you see the benefits from it? I don't understand where the money's gone.
This has been pumping for years.
Venezuela, it's the biggest One of the biggest oil producers in the world.
Where does it go? Where does the money go? It's extraordinary.
Venezuela and Venezuelans should be rich.
It's unclear where the country's oil wealth has gone.
Much has been stolen or lost through inefficiency and rampant corruption, and vast sums have been siphoned off when petrol is smuggled across the border to Colombia, where I was headed next.
What's going on here? Well, basically, the kids are bringing over gas and they're going to do a quick refill for this guy.
Because of Venezuelan subsidies, petrol costs a hundred times more across the border in Colombia, so profits for smuggling are huge.
There are supposed to be controls and restrictions on petrol sales near the border, but we saw countless drivers filling huge tanks they would take to Colombia and sell.
Our route to the border was a smugglers' highway.
Look, they're turning off.
They're just going to go down Well, a little track down to the side which probably means there's a checkpoint just up ahead.
Yeah, I can even see it! We went through numerous checkpoints on the way to the border, but they were clearly not much of a deterrent.
They've obviously just gone round the checkpoint to get away with whatever it is they're smuggling.
Guns, drugs and food, as well as petrol, are smuggled here.
Huge profits are at stake and the border region has become extremely dangerous.
Oh, it's, like, an army convoy.
It was a contingent of the National Guard.
I just heard there was actually a violent confrontation yesterday, and a shoot-out between smugglers and the National Guard.
Gangs, the police and politicians are all said to be involved with the smuggling.
As we got closer to the border, it seemed everyone was at it.
And all those there! Amazing! We're just off the main road away from the checkpoint and this is all completely illegal here.
It's like a square mile of black market illegal madness.
Everybody is trading fuel here.
It's been officially estimated that roughly £30 million worth of fuel is smuggled out of Venezuela every single week.
But the government here has been a bit hopeless at preventing the national coffers being bled dry.
We were spotted by one of the guys, so we can't do a drive around again.
OK, the locks just went down, is that because he's worried for us? Yes.
It might get a bit aggressive.
We were spotted as foreigners or as TV people? TV people.
OK, not good.
The fuel subsidy here costs more than government spending on education and health care combined.
As we headed towards the border, our driver admitted he was also a smuggler, and even he was angry and worried about the state of the country.
So how often will you do a run across? Once or twice a day.
And how much money can a person make with a car like this? It's very lucrative for doing almost nothing.
And it's easy money.
Normally, I can sit here driving for two or three hours and I can make as much as a professional in this country makes in a month.
Where do you think this country will be in five years' time? Every day, I think about what this country used to be like and what it's like now.
From top to bottom, everything is bad.
It's difficult to see a future for Venezuela.
We're getting close to the border with Colombia now and I'm coming to the conclusion that Venezuela is one of the worst-managed countries that I have ever visited.
I've been in poorer places and I've been in war-torn countries, but I don't think I've been in one which has got quite this much natural wealth, and yet is being so badly run.
What a completely lawless situation.
Right at the V that marks the end of Venezuela.
It's a beautiful country with so much going for it.
But, to be honest, the muppetry of the government here meant I wasn't sad to move on.
Here we go, Colombian immigration right here.
There's a cop here smoking a fag.
Virginia, thank you so much.
May we have a little? Of course.
Good luck.
Until recently, Colombia was being torn apart by decades of violence, fuelled by the multibillion pound cocaine trade.
But over the last 10 years, life has really improved here, and after Venezuela, Colombia felt like a bit of a relief.
Is she selling coffee? Can we get one? Tres.
Tres.
"Cafe for the gringo," she said.
Look at this.
This is a motorway service station in Colombia.
- Gracias.
- Gracias.
We headed west, along Colombia's Caribbean coast, towards an area officially called "The Banana Zone".
Look at all of them! Bananas are one of the five most important crops in the world.
We've arrived.
In the UK we eat an astonishing 5 billion bananas a year.
A quarter come from Colombia.
Mathilde, what's with the blue bags? There's a pesticide which protects the bananas, so we can produce perfect bananas.
Around 80% of people in this part of Colombia are involved in the banana trade.
OK, thank you, Mathilde.
A very sharp knife.
Time for me to join them.
- Take the leaves off first? - Yeah.
Sorry.
Much of the industry here has signed up to the Fair Trade scheme.
Bueno? Now hang on, that's got the bananas on.
It ensures workers receive better wages and improved working conditions.
Ah! Bloody hell, that's heavy! This bloke's a train engine.
Bueno.
Some of the farm workers here, including Mathilde Castro, used to be farmers themselves.
They were part of a co-operative that owned and ran its own banana plantation.
But they were sucked in to the violence of Colombia's civil conflict, when guerrilla groups fought against the national government and the country descended into near-chaos.
The conflict tore their lives apart.
Some men came and killed my partner and his two brothers.
We were threatened and told if we stayed we'd be killed, so we had to leave.
Who did this? The paramilitaries.
So these are the right-wing paramilitaries who were often started by corporations, I think, weren't they? And they came and murdered your husband and stole your land? Some of them have admitted to the crimes they committed.
Why did they do it? For the land, that's why.
During the worst years of fighting here, corporations and businesses often connived with or even established violent paramilitary groups to protect their interests and even kill their enemies and claim more land.
Some of the banana corporations who've been operating here have got questions to answer about their role in what's afflicted this country.
One of the big banana multi-nationals, Chiquita, they were fined and given a multimillion pound fine just a few years ago because they confessed they had been supporting, funding paramilitary groups here that were targeting banana farm workers and trade unionists.
Multi-national corporations were involved and implicated in the half a century of violence in Colombia during which hundreds of thousands of people died.
I continued my journey along the coast to the Port of Santa Marta, from where many of Colombia's bananas are shipped abroad.
Although the Colombian government has had great success tackling the cocaine trade, it's still a major problem.
Drug gangs will hide cocaine they're smuggling to Europe and the United States inside banana shipments.
I met Colonel Romel Bernate, who's in charge of trying to stop the smugglers.
So we've got an inspection going on here.
We take them all down and then search through each crate.
We found cocaine in with the bananas and in the shipping containers.
What's the biggest find you've made, then, in recent years? In February 2014, we found two tonnes of cocaine.
Two tonnes of cocaine? How much is that worth when it gets to Europe? 88 to US $90 million.
We've found drugs inside the wall and we've found drugs inside this section.
They devise ways of removing this bit and modifying the containers.
And they try to hide them inside the refrigeration unit.
The bananas need to be kept cool on the journey, which is why we have to open up all of this.
It must be such an enormous challenge for you because, presumably, if a gang could fill just this area here with cocaine and get that past your search teams they make an enormous sum of money.
A lot of money.
A single kilo in Europe can fetch up to US $59,000.
That says it all really, doesn't it? I mean, that is the point.
Thanks to better policing and detection, the cultivation of cocaine in Colombia has more than halved since its peak.
Much of the illegal production has moved away from the Caribbean region to Peru and Bolivia.
Colombia's violent reputation continues to put off foreign visitors, but it's a stunning country.
I headed along the coast towards the last destination on this part of my journey around the Caribbean.
My route was taking me in to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the highest coastal mountain range in the world.
It's home to an ancient people.
We're heading in to the land of the Kogi people.
Now, the Kogi are the most intact surviving civilisation from the time before Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas.
When the Spanish invaders first arrived here, most of the indigenous people of the Americas were wiped out, often by the gun or the sword.
But tens of millions died from diseases they had no immunity to.
But the Kogi retreated high in to the Sierra Nevada, which is where they've remained.
Look at this.
We're arriving on the edge of a community, a village, it looks like.
There are roughly 20,000 Kogi people in these mountains.
They hunt and gather, but they're also a settled community, who have farmed here for centuries.
Unlike many indigenous communities around the world, the Kogi are choosing to remain largely isolated from the modern world.
There wasn't even a football T-shirt in sight.
It's extremely rare for the Kogi to allow a TV crew into their world.
They let me visit for a simple reason-- to show us how they live and to warn that their way of life is now being threatened.
This is right up there with the most incredible places I've ever been.
The Kogi wanted to show me what was at stake, so they took me into their back garden-- the pristine forests of the Sierra Nevada.
These misty mountains are home to extraordinary bio-diversity, including the most important concentration of threatened mammals, amphibians and birds on Earth.
We don't damage the hills, the caves or the trees, because they give us life.
These are the laws that Mother Nature has given us.
The Kogi believe the Sierra Nevada is the heart of the world.
Look at this! Absolutely spectacular.
OK.
Ooh.
So it turns out that the village we were in is more of a gathering place for farmers to assemble, farmers from the community.
So each of the people we've met has a little farm like this, but they go to meet outsiders down in the village.
This is a job made for me.
OK.
Which one? Ah.
Ooh.
Flipping heck.
Have you little ones seen tall foreigners before? Lemonade, Kogi style.
Wow, it smells incredible.
Mmm.
I don't think it's alcoholic.
- Any alcohol? - No.
I know I mustn't drink it all, but it is very good.
So this is home tonight, the village school.
We've got inflatable mattresses inside and mosquito nets to keep out the buzzing mozzies, but also we're going to tuck them underneath the mattresses and hopefully that will keep out the snakes as well.
It wasn't a horrific night but things-- Cockerels started crowing next to our heads at about quarter past three.
I hate cockerels.
The Kogi call the rest of us their younger brother, and they believe we're threatening their very existence.
I went to talk with Mamo Luntana, a Kogi elder.
What I want to know is how younger brother expects us all to live when you come from the other side of the world and destroy Mother Earth so that multi-national companies can profit.
Younger brother has caused so much damage.
River levels have fallen, the rains don't come when they should.
Crop seasons are changing.
Only when younger brother stops can this life carry on as normal.
We're used to being warned about our changing climate by scientists, but it's shocking to hear this first-hand evidence of profound change already happening from the leader of a remote people in a remote part of the planet.
And this is something I'm hearing more and more of on my travels around the world.
I'm nearly at the end of my journey, but we're heading back down to the coast to the sea.
It's not far, well, not that far anyway as the crow flies.
It takes a bit of time on these roads.
Ah-ah.
And we've got a vehicle behind that's bringing some of the Kogi with us.
The Kogi have a series of sacred sites around the area connected by what they call the black line.
It's part of their belief system.
Many of their sacred sites have been damaged by development.
They've now launched a desperate campaign to protect what's left.
They took me down to the beach and back to the Caribbean Sea.
When you see this power station what do you think as a people? You live in the mountains, but I sense the sea is very important to you.
The Kogi believe our natural world is being destroyed by us.
Do you think younger brother will ever listen? There's a desperation in their plea.
The Kogi have noticed our world is changing, not by measuring it, but by living in it.
It's been an incredible journey, from the beaches of Barbados to the mountains of the Sierra Nevada.
But this is the end of this leg.
On the next leg, my final leg, I'll be travelling up the Caribbean coast of Central America and finishing my journey around the Caribbean Sea in Jamaica.
Next time-- I join a research mission on one of the world's greatest reefs and experience the coral kingdom at night.
And I go on patrol in the most dangerous city on the planet.
I think he's got a bullet wound on his chest.
look at that.
Before finishing my Caribbean journey on the beautiful beaches of Jamaica.
March 29th, 2015