Ms. Chávez, originally from San Agustín, had studied international business in Ibague, in central Colombia, and attended a winter camp, too, in Denver, and later traveled around the United States for a month. By her mid-20s — she’s now 28 — she recognized that her education, fluency in English and overseas experience could make for a more fulfilling profession in tourism than in office work. She said she believes her country’s natural resources (sun, coffee, beach, mountains) attract tourists, but also that Colombia’s dramatic history of war — and now peace — offer even more to the curious traveler.

“When I was growing up here,” she told me, “I didn’t see the violence. The guerrillas lived in the countryside. They kidnapped stock breeders and merchants, and they had what we called vaccines, whereby people would pay them a monthly amount of money to just stay away.”

There was also the guerrilla fighter who once showed up at her grandfather’s doorstep with a rifle — which, it turned out, he wanted to sell.

“We later knew that he was back living with his family, working on a farm,” she said. “Until the guerrillas found him, took him to the back of his house and shot him in the head. That was how it was: you could become a guerrilla easily enough. But you couldn’t leave that life.”