Come to sunny Columbia!

Come to sunny Colombia!
Jun 29th 2006 in The Economist
Seriously, it’s almost safe

MENTION¹ Colombia, and most people think of cocaine, kidnappings and guerrilla violence. These have served to keep all but² the most danger-loving tourists away for decades. But under Álvaro Uribe, Colombia’s president since 2002, violence has fallen³ steadily and many parts of the country have become safe. Now the government is trying to replace conventional images of Colombia with different ones: white-sand beaches, colonial cities, jungle-clad mountains⁴ and placid⁵ coffee farms.
The tourism campaign has begun at home. This month, during the mid-year school holidays, thousands of Colombians have enjoyed the newly-recovered⁶ freedom to travel, using specially policed routes from major cities to favourite holiday spots. The aim now is to convince⁷ foreigners. With a promotional budget of just $4m this year, the tourism agency is concentrating its efforts on tour operators and cruise and airline executives. This spring, it invited 130 of them to see the country’s beaches, its coffee farms and the Amazon region.
Mr Uribe has himself lobbied bosses of cruise-ship firms. This seems to have paid off⁸. In May, Royal Caribbean announced that from next year some of its ships would call at Cartagena, a colonial walled port on the north coast. The Florida Caribbean Cruise Association held its annual⁹ meeting in the city last week.
Tourism officials expect 1.5m foreign visitors this year, more than 50% up from¹⁰ the 925,000 in 2005. (Mexico, Latin America’s top tourist destination, attracts 20m foreigners a year.) Lonely Planet, a travel publisher, has chosen Colombia as one of its top ten travel hotspots¹¹ for 2006, in large part¹² because of the improvement in safety.
But care is still needed. Lonely Planet advises tourists to steer clear of¹³ Chocó on the Pacific coast, Putumayo in the far¹⁴ south and "anywhere east of the Andes", where there are still guerrillas. America’s State Department and the British Foreign Office also warn travellers against wandering¹⁵ into rural areas.
Even so, groups of foreign hikers have recently taken to¹⁶ visiting Ciudad Perdida, one of the largest and oldest pre-Columbian settlements in the Americas, in the jungles of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The area is still home to¹⁷ leftist guerrillas and remnants¹⁸ of their arch-enemies¹⁹, the right-wing paramilitary militias. But the fact that many other parts of what is a large and physically beautiful country are now safe to visit amounts²⁰ to progress.

Which word(s) in the columns below could replace the numbered one(s) in the text above?