In the 1990s, merchants in Medellín’s El Hueco district swapped Miami for China as their source of goods. Travel broker Aracely Rojas recounts how Chinese support networks and visa facilitation opened the route to Guangzhou and Yiwu for Colombian traders.
Sebastian Castaño Palacio
A growing number of Colombians are starting their own businesses with products sourced from China. Some travel there in search of raw materials; others buy finished goods and add their own brand or style. Labels such as Trendy, a makeup brand, and Renesme, which sells hair accessories, belong to an expanding group of Colombian small and medium-sized enterprises built on direct dealings with Chinese manufacturers. Their presence is easy to spot in places like Unilago, in Bogotá, and in the San Andresitos—informal shopping centers found in cities across the country—marked by the emblematic “made in China” label.
Buying Chinese goods through platforms such as Alibaba, Shein and Temu is increasingly common. But before these tools made it easy to deal with suppliers directly, merchants looking to stock up had to travel to trade fairs, walk the markets and build those relationships in person. The way people buy in China has changed; the practice of stocking Colombian businesses with Chinese products has not. Part of its origins can be traced back to the 1990s in the department of Antioquia.
Aracely Rojas, a native of Medellín, has spent more than forty years working in the tourism sector—what she herself describes as “my whole life and a true passion.” That long experience would eventually center on arranging travel to China for people going there on business. It all began in the early 1990s, when Colombia was only starting to open up to international trade and when violence was escalating as cartels profited from drug trafficking. Until then, Colombians had acquired electronic goods mostly abroad, whether to resell in Colombia or for their own homes. Much of what could be found in informal markets came in as contraband.
At the time, the Gómez family, one of Rojas’s main clients, sold electronics brought in from Miami. Almost overnight, the Gómez family decided to replace Miami with Beijing as their source of supply. According to Rojas, the decision was prompted by a tip from an acquaintance in the state of Florida, who pointed them to the low prices China offered compared with those in the United States.
From then on, word of mouth about Chinese prices spread from the Gómez family to many of the merchants of El Hueco, Medellín’s largest mass-market and wholesale shopping district. Located in the Guayaquil area, El Hueco is a maze of passageways and storefronts where all kinds of goods can be found at low prices. Its name dates back to a time when trade was concentrated in the basements of old buildings and the narrow corridors of the city center. Today, however, it is a full-fledged commercial ecosystem and a historic point of reference for electronics merchants—both for paisas, the colloquial name for the people of Medellín, and for vendors from other municipalities in Antioquia and other departments across the country.
It was in this setting that a number of long-established families built businesses that found in China a key source of supply. The Gómez, Alzate and Aristizábal families are among those Aracely remembers as regular clients who, from that point on, have treated the People’s Republic of China as a trade destination.
At first, Rojas’s work was limited to buying plane tickets and checking the visa requirements with the Chinese Embassy. Over time, however, she realized that travelers had far more concerns than the immigration paperwork and trip logistics. She began to ask herself: what happened once they reached the other side of the world? Where would they stay? How would they find the warehouses selling supplies and merchandise? How would they communicate in a completely unfamiliar culture and language?
She found some of the answers through her own clients’ experiences. On one occasion, a client told her that China had an entire support network for foreign traders. There were people, the client explained, whose job was to meet them at the airport, take them to their hotel and guide them through the main shopping centers and wholesale markets where they could make their purchases. The client also told her that all it took was for that contact to send a letter of recommendation to the Chinese Embassy in Colombia to ease the visa process from Medellín.
Beyond the individual experiences of these merchants, this account reveals an institutional support system promoted by China to ease the arrival of potential buyers at its main sourcing hubs. Access to logistical guidance, reception networks and formal recommendations that helped speed up visa processing points to coordination between commercial actors and Chinese diplomatic missions which, according to Aracely, had been operating in Colombia for more than a decade.
In her view, this level of support stood in contrast to the experience of those seeking business ties with the United States, where immigration and commercial processes were more individualized and came without any backing from diplomatic channels.
For Rojas, this marked a turning point. Little by little, Aracely built a network of contacts and learned every detail of the trade process between Colombia and China. What began as simply booking tickets and handling consular paperwork eventually made her a well-known organizer of travel packages for Colombian merchants. Her work came to cover the entire commercial chain, from travel between Medellín, Bogotá and China to ongoing support to make sure her clients reached their destination without setbacks and could achieve their business goals.
“It’s a source of satisfaction for me to know that my clients reached their destinations and that I can help them get organized for their trip… giving them peace of mind gives me peace of mind,” she said.
Aracely notes that, of the Chinese cities her clients have visited most over nearly three decades, Guangzhou and Yiwu account for the bulk of the trips. The first, capital of Guangdong province, hosts the Canton Fair, one of the largest and most important trade fairs in the world. Its 2026 edition covered 1.55 million square meters, with 32,000 exhibition booths and more than 32,000 thousand international visitors.
Over time, however, Yiwu, in the east of the country, has become the preferred destination. According to Rojas, its wholesale markets—the largest on the planet—offer lower prices and a variety that is hard to match. Travelers fly into Shanghai or Guangzhou and continue by train to the city, whose market halls carry everything from lighting fixtures and cosmetics to surgical gloves, stationery and kitchenware.
In recent years, a good number of Colombians have made Yiwu their main source of supply, Rojas says. Merchants from across the country—from Bogotá, Cali and beyond eastern Antioquia—come to its halls every season in search of the goods they stock their businesses with, following in the footsteps of the Antioquian pioneers who took up that route more than thirty years ago.
That said, there is no indication that a significant share of Colombian merchants, or of the country’s SMEs, depend on Chinese products. Even so, Rojas’s account hints at the growing number of Colombians traveling to China to supply or launch their own businesses.
In the early 1990s, household electronics were sourced mainly from the United States. That pattern has clearly become a thing of the past, giving way to China. The shift has also been accompanied by an unusual degree of promotion of China by the merchants themselves, as in the case of Camila Orrego—creator of the Trendy products and owner of Renesme—who posts about her experiences buying in China on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.
For many Colombian merchants, entering the Chinese market still means working through questions about intermediaries, suppliers and logistics. Those hurdles, however, have not dampened interest in buying directly in China. Rojas says that, over the years, she has received a steadily growing number of clients interested in traveling to China to stock their businesses.
At the same time, these merchants’ trajectories show that this expansion did not depend solely on private initiative, but also on institutional mechanisms that lowered barriers to entry and eased the movement of people seeking to plug into global trade circuits—among them China’s own official representation in Colombia.
For small and medium-sized businesses that have built their offering around Chinese products, recurring purchases can create a growing dependence on that market. Prices, the range of goods available in wholesale markets and the infrastructure that facilitates sourcing make it hard to find alternatives at comparable cost. As a result, many of these businesses rely on suppliers in China for the merchandise they sell in places like El Hueco in Medellín, the Sanandresitos and other low-cost shopping centers around the country.
Today, Aracely works independently and is affiliated with EUPACLA, an agency whose name combines those of its founders—Eugenia, Pauly and Clara, three sisters based in Colombia. Located in the Centro Comercial Oviedo in Medellín, the agency has close to 50 years in business and is considered one of the most reputable and well-established in the city. According to Aracely, over the years it has made a name for itself in certain segments of Antioquia’s mass-market retail trade and even in other regions of the country.
Although she acknowledges that she is no expert on the dynamics of the relationship between China and Colombia, her experience allows her to bear witness to a shift in where paisa merchants source their goods: from the United States and Mexico to China. As she herself puts it, they are a group known for their business acumen and their ability to find practical solutions that benefit their trade.
Translated from Spanish with AI assistance and reviewed by the FAB team. The Spanish version is the authoritative text.
