Dark, hairy hands reach towards my right arm to stop me. I shuffle to my left to avoid the unwanted touch and peculiar aggressiveness of my suitor. He is offended and stops in the middle of the brightly lit street. The darkness of night makes his face a blur. I keep moving with my group but turn my head to look at his muscular legs. A garter belt wraps around his left thigh, and a tight black skirt hugs his ass. He stands upright with his back arched. His glittery top shines as cars pass by and honk at his perfect posture. His breasts are pointy but fit nicely beneath the cups of his tacky blouse. He smiles down at us. I smile back, and he starts a conversation.
“Are you from the mayor’s office?” he asks us, flicking the straight hair of his black wig off his rouged face. It falls right back over his eyes.
“No,” my colleague responds, “well not exactly, but he is,” he says pointing to our guide, Hernando Gómez.
“Oh yeah, I know him,” the transvestite says.
Hernando, realizing that this is his cue, moves closer to explain to the man in the skirt that he is organizing a meeting between the prostitutes and the transvestites. The transvestites now surrounding Hernando are open to the offer even though their rivalry with the prostitutes has intensified in recent months. The prostitutes say a new city ordinance forbidding the “misuse of public space” is the transvestites’ fault. The transvestites say they are victims of discrimination. The wealthy residents of this posh Bogotá neighborhood just want both of them to work in another area of town.
We are on 98th Street and l5th Avenue beginning our night walk––an eight-to-ten-hour overnight jaunt through Bogotá, the capital city of one of most dangerous countries in the world. An average of 25,000 people are killed yearly in Colombia––ten times the per capital homicide rate in the United States. Within Colombia, only Medellín has a higher murder rate than Bogotá. Colombia also accounts for at least half of all kidnappings that occur worldwide. In 1996 alone, 1,461 people were kidnapped. Large landowners and their relatives were the principal targets, and the three guerrilla groups still operating in Colombia were the primary perpetrators. Bogota is one of the top three places in Colombia where kidnappings take place.
Despite these startling numbers, Hernando says there is a logic behind the walks. By defying the warnings to stay away from dangerous or unknown areas at night, those who participate in the walks are able to experience a country where war is an everyday occurrence and where violence is an intimate part of the urban landscape. Abstract generalizations of the city’s problems––from “social cleansing” to urban warfare to drug abuse––only get at the surface of the problem. A nighttime walk through one of the most dangerous cities in the world makes the problems appear in their full dimensions.
“My dream is to take hundreds of people on a walk to take back the night,” Hernando explained when we first gathered “it would be a way of saying that this is public space, and to reclaim the right to walk at night. It would also be a way to break through the barriers between people.” He paused briefly, adding, “but when I say run, I mean run.”
Hernando has been walking the Bogotá streets at night for 14 years, and tonight’s group of 15 Europeans and North Americans is the one-hundred ninetieth night walk he has organized. Hernando is a sociology professor at the National University in Bogotá who also works part-time for the mayor’s office keeping tabs on the urban environment. Since the antiprostitution ordinance was issued, he has been trying to mediate between the local community, the prostitutes and the transvestites.
After walking five blocks south along 15th Avenue, we run into the prostitutes. Six women wearing different colored one-piece jumpsuits stare right through us. The youngest, I guess, is around 14 and the oldest is 25. Potential clients pass slowly in sports cars and family wagons, hiding their faces behind their visors. Two transvestites walk behind us but do not speak.
The prostitutes are angry and exchange words with Hernando, who tries to convince them to attend the meeting with the transvestites. “But they will arrest us,” one complains, referring to the recent police roundups since the antiprostitution ordinance was passed. “No they won’t,” Hernando pleads with them, but as he enters into an explanation two teenage boys––most likely the women’s bodyguards––warn the prostitutes that a police caravan is approaching.
The caravan is led by a large armored vehicle as wide as a mack truck and as long as a school bus––the type of vehicle normally used for crowd control during riots. Following it is an army truck with a tarp hanging from the rear to cover the police inside and ten policemen on horseback. Just as the caravan comes into full view, three prostitutes and their teenage escorts escape onto a side street. The mounted police quickly maneuver to corral the rest of us. No one moves. We wait for one of them to signal. “You!” one of the policemen finally says pointing towards us, “Move out of the way! Just step out of the way!” They create a little gap between the horses for us to slide through. “All transvestites against the wall,” the sargeant yells. “All of you against the wall!” Other police officers on foot move to review the street workers’ documents while the three prostitutes and two transvestites stand with their hands against the wall and their legs spread. We watch as the police review their identity papers and then usher them in a line made by the horses into the truck. The detained leave quietly and the caravan continues up 15th towards 98th Street, where we started. “They violated the ordinance,” Hernando says ironically.”They misused public space.”
After walking four blocks, we enter the infamous Parque de la 93, the wealthiest neighborhood in all of Colombia. The area is politically very conservative and access to the general public is restricted. Guards stand watch with their Rottwielers at virtually every corner. The housewives in this neighborhood––the same women who pressured the mayor for the antiprostitution ordinance––became famous for protesting against President Ernesto Samper in 1995 following accusations that he received over $6 million in campaign contributions from the Cali Cartel. In their efforts to impeach the already politically embattled President, the “ladies of the 93,” as the newspapers called them, held several sparsely attended rallies in the National Park. Their stranglehold on the moral high ground came to an abrupt end when the attorney general’s office prosecuted then Minister of Defense, Fernando Botero, for brokering the influx of the drug money into the Samper campaign. One of their own had been implicated in the drug trade, and the ladies of the 93 made a hasty retreat from public view.
A half-hour walk from the Parque de la 93, around 67th Street and 15th Avenue, we cross the Caracas, which connects northern and southern Bogotá and is the city’s busiest street. After scurrying across the eight-lane road and past the speeding taxis and buses belching out exhaust, we enter the lower-class neighborhood known as 7 de Agosto. Four-story apartment buildings with iron bars on the lower floors run along the narrow streets. Advertisements for local colas and juices sprout from every third garage, which house makeshift mom-and-pop stores. As in the transvestite area, taxis circle the neighborhood and slow down to get a good look at us. Our group is large enough to represent a possible threat, but the drivers laugh as they realize we are foreigners and speed away. One taxi driver shines his headlights on us and honks before turning out of sight.
Taking a turn towards the south again, we suddenly find ourselves on a street with several thriving bars full of the working-class patrons that inhabit this neighborhood. Unshaven men with dirty jeans hang on the edges of the wooden doorways. No one speaks in these bars, they yell over the volume of the vallenato music emanating from the four-foot-high speakers. Some men lean heavily over the wooden tables full of empty beer bottles. The general din of yelling slows as we cross paths with them. Their gaze meets ours, but we are so harmless that they let us pass without comment. Small groups of teenage boys line the street as well and speak softly to the few women hanging around. These boys, Hernando tells us, are the militias.
Militias are gangs of young men and women who work as local vigilantes. They specialize in recognizing people, a talent particularly useful when guarding the small territories that divide the city. To an outsider, there is no particular logic to these divisions. Like in Colombia itself, the divisions exist for a myriad of personal, political, social and economic reasons.
The most infamous, well-organized and reliable militias were political. The Bolivarian Militias, as they were known, were members of the country’s largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), until a couple of years ago, when they suddenly disappeared. The militias were just a bridge for the FARC to infiltrate Bogotd’s marginal neighborhoods, according to Hernando, and they were dismantled once this was achieved.
The FARC’s plan to enter the city is actually the final phase of a 15 to 20 year strategy developed by the guerrillas in the early 1980s to take over the Colombian state. Today, both the FARC and the National Liberation Anny (ELN) have a strong urban presence, though the ELN tends to focus its operations in Medellín. The FARC’s arrival to Bogotá brought the war to the city, alarming the Colombian armed forces as well as the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, which declared earlier this year that without a massive overhaul of the Colombian armed forces, the FARC could overrun the Colombian government within five years. With the failure of the police and the military to regain control over the FARC’s new urban strongholds, paramilitaries began to appear in working-class neighborhoods like Barrios Unidos, which is adjacent to 7 de Agosto.
Financed by some of the wealthiest businessmen and landowners in Colombia––including drug traffickers––the paramilitaries have become, over the past four years, a national force that drives the government’s counterinsurgency campaign. These small groups of armed men are Colombia’s number one human rights violators. Just last year, paramilitaries killed 215 people in 25 different massacres. While the government attempts to publicly distance itself from these atrocities, there is clear evidence that many army battalions continue to provide logistical and even military support for the paramilitaries’ rural campaign.
In contrast to their rural activities––marked by the indiscriminate massacre of entire campesino communities––the paramilitaries’ urban campaign is more selective and precise. With support from wealthy Bogotá residents, the paramilitaries use strong-arm tactics to establish control in poorer barrios and expel the guerrillas from the city. In Barrios Unidos, for example, there was a wave of suspicious rapes of young girls shortly before the arrival of the paramilitaries, leading some to suspect that the new “protectors” of the barrio were behind the attacks. According to Hernando, although there have been few skirmishes between the paramilitaries and the guerrillas, the paramilitaries sought to establish a foothold into Barrios Unidos in order to create a buffer zone against the guerrillas in 7 de Agosto. In other areas in Bogotá, conflict is more direct and open. When five former members of the Bolivarian Militias began protecting one of the most legendary homeless neighborhoods in Bogotá, the Calle del Cartucho, several battles between the militias and the paramilitaries ensued. The militias lost the fight and the security of the Cartucho was lost along with it.
Three hours and several neighborhoods after 7 de Agosto, we approach the Calle del Cartucho. In the distance we can see a few fires, a pile of garbage and people standing, sleeping and walking around in tattered clothing. There is more movement in front of us than at the main police station two blocks to the west. Hernando motions with his left hand for us to stop. We wait while he moves into the darkness. After a few minutes, he returns. We can hear whistles in the background. “We have permission to enter,” Hernando says. “They are advising the others that we are corning.”
As we inch our way through, eyes meet with our own. They are underneath blankets, deep in garbage dumps or cuddled in front of fires. Children are scattered throughout. Some sleep while others move closer to us, sticking their hands out to touch us. We are greeted by a large man with long white beard who is wearing yellow fishing overalls that are big around the waist. He is, as we find out, the comanche, the head of security and governance.
People have been living in the Cartucho for 30 years. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hernando notes quietly, they came under attack. Death squads with names like Muerte a Gamines (Death to Kids), acting in accord with local businesses and with the help of special police units, began to engage in “social cleansing” of areas like the Cartucho. Wearing ski masks and carrying automatic weapons, the death squad members rode motorcycles in twos through the Cartucho, shooting randomly at the homeless. In the first six months of 1989 alone, over 40 bodies of what were called the desechables––the expendables––appeared along roads on the outskirts of Bogotá. According to Hernando, other bodies which had been burned with acid to prevent tracing them back to the crime scenes began appearing at the city morgues.
Between 1988 and 1993, the nongovernmental Center for Research and Popular Education (CINEP) documented 1,926 cases of “social cleansing” throughout Colombia. Most of the victims were males between the ages of 16 and 25 and were described as delinquents or drug addicts by their self-professed killers. One particularly brutal case involved local police, guards and university personnel at the Free University in the northwest city of Barranquilla. Between 1990 and 1992, the guards would lure homeless people onto the university grounds by saying they could pick up the refuse. Once inside, the guards shot or beat the indigents to death. They would bring the bodies to the head of the anatomy laboratory of the School of Medicine, who would dissect the corpes and sell them on the black market for organs.
While such extermination campaigns have forced many residents out of the neighborhood, a huge number of people still live in the Cartucho. As we move through the streets avoiding the fires that provide the only warmth on chilly Bogotá nights, whole rows of people are asleep at my feet. A few wake up and laugh as we pass. There are groups on the corners smoking bazuco, the Colombian version of crack made from the pasty residue left over from cocaine production. Men dressed in jackets and ties hide in the dark shadows of the doorways. They are small-time traffickers, Hernando says.
A policeman emerges 14 from the shadows and joins the rear of our group as we continue moving through the Cartucho. He is dressed in an olive green uniform and has a night stick poised in his left hand and a large revolver strapped to his waist on his right side. His radio blurts out information every few yards. “three people detained, two bags of bazuco, one bag of marijuana.”
A thin, hunched-over man from the Cartucho accompanies us on our walk as well. A different one joins us from the next block. They announce our every movement in conjunction with the policeman’s. “Mario, accompanying the Christians on 9th,” one yells. “Mario” is slang for sicario, or hitman, Hernando tells us. We are, of course, the Christians he’s referring to. “Mario with the New World Order on 8th,” another yells, donning us with a different but equally disparaging name as we pass the next block.
At the next corner, the policeman stops and moves into a dark area of concrete rubble where there was once a building. Three young men on the corner smoking bazuco yell out the policeman’s movements, “Mario in the building.” A car comes speeding by the corner and as it moves out of sight the three coked-up kids––the “lost” militia members Hernando was referring to earlier––announce that it has disappeared.
Three hundred meters out of the Cartucho, two well-equipped motorcycles pass us going at least 60 miles an hour. The drivers wear dark clothing and black helmets to camouflage their faces. The passengers carry large handguns that they hold facing the sky. They are undoubtedly “cleansing” the neighborhood again. We stop to see if they ride straight through the Cartucho or turn into it. They continue without stopping.
Just five blocks from the Cartucho we walk by the home of President Ernesto Samper, who is surely sleeping unless the sound of the motorcycles woke him. Turning north again up a slight incline we walk past many other government buildings. They are dark and asleep as well. As we pass one building, two guards dressed in pristine grey uniforms whisper “beautiful people” to some female members of our group, in an obvious attempt to kill their boredom.
Hernando ends the walk just 300 meters past the President’s house, at the yet-to-be rebuilt Palace of Justice––burned to the ground by the Colombian army 12 years ago during the raid that ended a takeover by the M-19 guerrillas. The army killed over 100 people in the operation, including 11 of the 12 chief justices being held captive. The tall blond pillars of the palace are covered with white dust, and the entire edifice is surrounded by a fence with green plastic tarps that blow in the wind. Above the pillars, an inscription from the famous general of the Liberation Army, Francisco de Paula Santander, reads: “Our guns gave us independence, our laws will give us freedom.”
Hernando has no words of wisdom for the group as we prepare to depart. I say goodbye to everyone, slipping my hood over my head. My neighborhood is poorly lit and dangerous, I think to myself. I walk quickly and deliberately the three blocks to my apartment. When I get there I put on some coffee and start writing. It is 4:00 a.m.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Dudley is a freelance Journilist who lived in Colombia for two years. He has written tor NACLA, The Nation and The Progressive
