Mark and Cindy say they love each other to the core. For three months now he has referred to her as "my baby." Waist-high in the pool behind the swanky Hotel del Prado, Mark lifts Cindy over his shoulder and spins her around. The sun is brilliant in this coastal town and the Greek columns of the luxurious Prado sparkle white and silver like micah. The lovers splash each other and squeal with bliss. Their loving pantomime continues for a languorous time while the local radio plays shuffling salsa music over the hotel P.A. Eventually, Mark rises from the water before Cindy, so he can meet her with open arms and a clean ribbed towel. After they've embraced, Cindy gestures towards her waterproof purse. Mark removes a fashion magazine and hands it to her, eyebrows inquiring, but Cindy shakes her head "no." So Mark pulls out every item in the bag - sunglasses, enamel for Cindy's nails, a small wallet -until Cindy makes clear with emphatic nodding that Mark has grabbed the object of their quest: an English-Spanish dictionary. Cindy, 21, doesn't speak English. Mark, a 35-year-old New Hampshire native, landed in Barranquilla, Colombia three months ago and still speaks under ten words of Spanish. The pair met through events at the marriage agency just down the block from the Prado. "One day," says Mark, "I am going to marry Cindy and take her home." The agency, one of five in this sleepy Caribbean town, calls itself "Lo Mejor de Barranquilla." Its English name, "Barranquilla's Best," is painted in bold capital letters on the dark windows of the little building, which inside contains hundred of paper profiles of young Colombian women and generally older North American men. The men's profiles arrive daily at the agency, where they get stapled in rows to the walls. Their grainy faces, churned out of the agency's fax machine, carry the distant expressions of kids on the backs of milk cartons. By day "Barranquilla's Best" is an office run by young barranquilleras who can show other young barranquilleras how to fill out a profile. These alluring administrators then slide the profiles into a plastic binder by the door, for the visiting men to examine. Some of them speak enough English to assist the guys who pile in daily with heavy suitcases and engagement rings. On weekend nights some of the agency's social events are held in the darkened office. The girls hang streamers, play their favorite radio stations, and set out drinks on their desks. "Barranquilla's Best" opened its doors and its website, www.barranquillasbest.com, in January of 2003. Since that month, four "agency couples" have been married, and almost twenty more are going forward with the process of acquiring the visa and papers necessary for marriage in the United States. Each month, says the agency's founder and administrator, Margarita Pérez, about fifty guys from Canada and Western Europe, and still more from the U.S., arrive in war-torn Colombia with the objective of meeting women. Pérez is 25 years old but appears much younger. Her eyes are enormous and her clothing is boldly colored. She's a licensed lawyer, though after law school she decided to found "Barranquilla's Best" instead of battling her way through the Colombian court system. Pérez says the idea of running a marriage agency seemed promising to her when a friend told her that North American men often fetishize Latin American women. In less than a year, Pérez made "Barranquilla's Best" the world's most popular agency offering intimate access to Latin women. She also snagged a North American boyfriend along the way; Andrew is 32 and lives in New Jersey. "I've always gone more for European types than for Colombian guys, you know, guys with more sophistication than the ones we have here," Pérez says with a coy and generous smile. The web page she designed, and which is viewed by about a hundred web surfers every day, describes Colombian men as "machistas" (macho men) and "drunks," and tantalizingly explains that "Colombians who live in Barranquilla don't understand what they have here, a city full of beautiful women and a 3:1 woman-to-man ratio." The website portrays coastal Colombia as a little-known goldmine full of "uncomplicated," "very feminine" women who think that "foreign men make better husbands," and implies that Northern visitors can expect romantic success, if not good grammar, from "Barranquilla's Best": "Beautiful latinina [sic] women here can only dream about having a relationship with a man from North America or Europe. We [men] are in high demand here with almost no supply. Why, because guys from North America and Europe do not visit Barranquilla. Colombia's reputation, portrayed by the U.S. media generalizes the entire country as bad, this keeps the dream away." Many young barranquilleras express unbridled enthusiasm for the agency's services. Ángela, 19, invited all her girlfriends to leave their profiles - containing a photo, a list of interests, and level of spoken English - with the agency in the plastic binder by the door. These women are middle-class by Colombian standards, though they'd never dream of being able to live well in New Hampshire. Ángela is extremely thin, with nails and eyelashes that stretch to the sky. Watching Mark and Cindy from a poolside chair, Ángela lovingly describes her experience with, and as one of, "Barranquilla's Best." "I met Scott [a 27 year-old high school Spanish teacher] at a cocktail party the agency was throwing last month for all the new guys," she recounts. "I had seen his profile before, on the wall at the agency, and I liked how handsome he looked. Plus, it said he was looking for a serious relationship with a woman who was willing to live in the United States." Scott hasn't been back to Colombia for a couple of months, and Ángela has never been to the U.S., but she says that their phone conversations have shown her that he's the man she should marry, and soon. "When I'm [in the U.S.] I can learn English and work as a singer. The agency has helped me so much. I'm in love," she gushes. Ángela says that Scott is not a machista like the boys she's known in Barranquilla. But just because Ángela's preferences and experiences are common among the young barranquilleras who flock to the agency, that doesn't mean every guy who arrives from the North will be anti-machista, or even a little sensitive. One of the many excited testimonials about the agency on the web page, posted there by a Texan named Josh, muses: "Barranquilla is the best city in Colombia because you can bring your new girlfriends to the beach to see how they look in their bikinis. Some of my friends got terrible surprises when they finally saw the bodies their girlfriends had hidden under sweaters and jackets in Bogotá." The rest of the site's text was mostly written by Frank, an older North American guy who found success in Barranquilla and is pictured on his link dancing with a much smaller woman. Pérez admits that the North American and European men who buy tickets to Colombia, drawn by the agency's promises, are usually older types, often divorced, and sometimes "just pathetic, because they arrive here thinking they're going to get to go out with some twenty-year-old girl, just by offering them everything, economically speaking." Some younger guys, too, fly out of Barranquilla without a girl on their arm. "I don't believe in love, and I think that this trip has been a big mistake," says Jeff, 30. Jeff says he came to Barranquilla because "women in Montreal are all bitter and cold. They're terrible." Still, Pérez insists that the majority of guys passing through Barranquilla "leave here happy, and for us [they're] great business." One satisfied customer is Matt, 45, a New Hampshire friend of Mark's who came to Colombia on Mark's suggestion. Divorced, tall, shaky, and talkative, with thin skin and a dark brown mustache, Matt could be a UPS guy, but he's actually an accountant. Matt describes himself as "adventurous" and calmly reports that when he walks among the women of Barranquilla he feels like "a rock star, because to them I'm an exotic outsider." In New Hampshire, Matt plays guitar in a Journey cover band; Mark is the singer. Although he hasn't found a girlfriend yet, Matt says he returns to Barranquilla every two or three months, where he passes his time joyously meeting Colombian women at agency parties and trying to communicate with them. He still doesn't speak any Spanish, but says he is thrilled by Barranquilla's seemingly boundless supply of beautiful, sweet, and "uncomplicated" women. Matt maintains that Colombia is an infinitely better place to meet women than Brazil, where he had tried to find a wife before but just kept being introduced to whores. "Every day I'm here I see scores of women who take my breath away, women who look like that," he reflects, as Ángela strides by. The website's text underscores Mark's praise: with Barranquilla's Best, "you will question reality. The emotions and feelings these women bring out in you is (sic) unimaginable." Matt's eyes then shift to the Prado's pool, where Mark, Cindy, and Cindy's girlfriends lunge and gesticulate in the bright water. (Cindy says that many of these girlfriends also are using the services of "Barranquilla's Best"; and like Cindy, many of them, curiously, wear dental braces.) Matt grows braver the more he meditates on his passion for Colombian women. "In the U.S., women want to be professionals like men and act like men, and that doesn't attract me at all," Matt declares. "I like Barranquilla because it's more conservative than the U.S. The women are much more feminine and sweet than the women where I live." The agency's web page reflects, and directly stokes, Matt's resentment of North American women. On the link called "Bringing Her Home," Frank explains how to maintain post-matrimonial bliss with a Colombian woman: "1. Try to join a gym or recreation center together, you will want your Latin wife to keep that beautiful body for many years to come. They will be eating more fatty foods here then in their country. Look around at all these fat American women, they will look at your beautiful wife with scorn, don't let it happen to your wife, she is your greatest investment. 2. Americanized - This is the worst thing that can happen to your sweet, innocent Latin wife. She becomes like the women you are trying to get away from. She can become Americanized through her friends or her work. It only takes one lesbian or feminist to plant the seeds in her head, our society can do the rest." Matt says he feels liberated as he lives by the philosophy and attitude of the agency's webpage. "You could call me a traditional guy and I'm proud of that. I'm proud to want a woman who wants to share life with me instead of compete with me," he says, then rises up from his plastic pool chair to meet his first date of the afternoon: the only woman who walks into the Hotel del Prado carrying a bilingual dictionary in her manicured hand.