- Colombia’s massive population of internally displaced is second only to Syria, and thousands fleeing violence make homes in the forests outside of cities.
- Outside of Colombia’s capital of Bogotá, thousands live in groups of makeshift homes that form a range of communities from villages to shanytowns.
- The shanytowns present worsening health and public safety problems, and have a devastating impact on the forests where communities are established and growing.
BOGOTA, Colombia – Up here amidst the clouds and on the spine of the Andean mountain range, it’s hard to believe that San German is situated on the outskirts of Colombia’s booming metropolis of Bogotá. The shantytown is nestled between three marshlands, a messy constellation of homes improvised from plywood, tarpaulin sheets, and brick. There is an almost permanent dampness in San German, caused by the high altitude, and a cold wind whistles through its homes.
Speaking recently above the din of a noisy rain smacking down on his home’s tin roof, San German’s twenty-six year-old community leader, Arley Estupiñán, argues that the settlement is a result of politics. Estupiñán says places like San German owe their existence to an unwillingness by Colombia’s politicians to house vulnerable and destitute citizens who migrate to the capital.
“That is why we end up living here in these conditions, and yet [the government] still wants to kick us out,” he said. Estupiñán is the spokesperson for the growing population of San German, and his goal is to get it recognized as a legitimate neighborhood. There are no official estimates, but Arley puts the number at 300 or so families living there. At the moment the shantytown is in limbo, deemed an illegal squat by the Bogotá mayor‘s office because it lies within the boundaries of a national park, called Entrenubes (literally, “between the clouds”).
In the meantime, the community is working with a nonprofit legal group seeking to help San German obtain a legal title.
Estupiñán, a musician and barber by trade, came to Bogotá from the coastal city of Buenaventura with his partner, Esmeralda, in 2014. They fled the surging violence of paramilitary drug gangs there. Paramilitaries are latter-day state-backed militias that formed in the 1980s, many of which turned to narco-trafficking when they were disarmed in the late 2000s. The couple arrived in Bogotá “with nothing but the clothes on their back and 10,000 pesos” (US$ 3), he recalls ruefully.
He claims that after trying and failing to obtain shelter from the government – which is legally responsible for the resettlement of Colombian citizens displaced by the conflict – they ended up in San German, where they were told by friends they could carve out a place for their family.
“Everything you see here, we built with our bare hands,” he says, proudly. His house is made of plywood, corrugated plastic and tin, and sits on a muddy bluff at the outer edge of the settlement.
Historically, people move to capital cities for myriad reasons, largely because of economic need. But the story of Bogotá’s internal migrants can’t be explained without reference to Colombia’s bloody 53-year civil war, which ended in a treaty last year, but which killed over a quarter of a million people and displaced six million more over the last five decades. Today, Colombia is second only to Syria in the number of people internally displaced by war.
A huge proportion of Colombia’s displaced people have come to the capital seeking sanctuary, but many of them end up in shantytowns like San German, many of which also spill over into the city’s surrounding mosaic of national parks, which in turn threatens the area’s unique forests and marshlands.
A large number of these shantytowns are built on hillsides, which also puts them at risk from landslides, a phenomenon that has been exacerbated by the effects climate change and by forest loss.
Legal enforcement
The situation with housing and shantytowns has also created a lawless frontier within the city where criminal gangs take advantage of the state’s absence by forging land deeds, bribing authorities, and extorting money from residents. Bogotá’s mayor’s office has said it is addressing the problem; but it faces fierce criticism and resistance from locals.
Estupiñán acknowledges that San German has grown “a lot,” hinting strongly that it has become a problem that he and the other leaders of the community can’t control. When he arrived three years ago, he said, there were fourteen houses; there are now close to three hundred.
As a result, the mountainside is quickly being eaten up by human settlement, and there are remaining few trees in sight. A landscape of rudely-built concrete houses and flickering lights fills the vista, and it is impossible to discern which of these may or may not be “legal” homes.
Bogotá is situated in a fertile highland basin, and was originally part of the Muisca civilizations’ capital until the Spanish conquered it in 1538. Sitting at nearly nine thousand feet above sea level and located three hundred miles from the nearest coastline, it was an odd place to set up a colonial capital – were it not for the abundance of Muisca gold (the legend of El Dorado is attributed to the Muisca).
Since 1950 Bogotá has since transformed from a modestly-sized city of 700,000 into a global megacity, with a current population of 10 million.
Sprawling cities
Managing population growth has been a concern for urban societies since they first began around 10,000 years ago, but only since the recent advent of biological annihilation caused by climate change, has it become a truly transnational issue. The global population explosion and shift from a predominantly rural to an urban dwelling world beginning in the mid-twentieth century has brought land conflict – a problem long associated with the countryside – to the city.
According to urban scholar Mike Davis, the world contained 86 cities with populations of over 1 million people in 1950, but by 2015, the number had risen to 550.
The problem with this trend, he argues, is that the majority of that growth is happening in the developing world, where an estimated 78 per cent of the urban population live in sprawling shantytowns like San German. They are also often in zones that are not safe for human habitation.
Another danger with this global pattern is the damage that these settlements cause to the surrounding natural habitat, a dilemma that San German is visibly struggling with. But without any legal status or basic provisions from the government, there is little its residents can do to remedy the environmental impacts caused by their presence, argues Estupiñán.
Bogotá is currently reeling with problems related to housing and environmental management – two issues amplified by the mounting effects of climate change, which is making more extreme weather patterns and increasing the frequency of landslides. There are over 20,000 illegal settlements in the city, according to a report in the influential weekly magazine Semana. These vary in size from shantytowns like San German with 300 or so families, to smaller settlements of pioneer families. Many of these shantytowns are either situated in national parks or on hilly terrain where landslides are a risk.
Over 2,000 illegal settlements were identified this year within Usme alone, the district in which San German is located, covering over one thousands acres of land. The authorities have identified ten gangs that control Bogotá’s illegal land takeover schemes, according to Semana.
Heavy-handed approach
Bogotá’s current mayor, Enrique Peñalosa, has promised to tackle the criminal gangs that monopolize properties and run protection rackets and drug-trafficking in Bogotá’s poorer barrios. In a show of force last year, the national police raided an infamous gang-controlled neighborhood known as the “Bronx,” which had become synonymous with Bogotá’s crack epidemic, gang violence, and prostitution. The raid was effective in clearing up the quarter, but critics say that it merely dispersed the Bronx’s criminal activity and didn’t solve the city’s underlying social problems.
In San German, the government’s approach has been similarly heavy-handed. On October 6, 2016, a police force of 500 accompanied by helicopters and news crews came to forcibly evict and arrest residents of San German. They had been tipped off by local authorities that the settlement was invading Entrenubes Park and also that tierreros – “urban land pirates” – were imposing a kind of “sharia law” within the community, threatening its residents with amputations less they paid them rent.
Six people were arrested that day, and since then the police have continued to carry out patrols. The police have also threatened residents and destroyed some newly-built homes, according to several San German residents.
Estupiñán shrugs off the stories about tierreros as a ludicrous fabrication and defamation attempt. He claims that it is part of a wider strategy by authorities to dislodge the community without resettling them as part of a scheme to make way for lucrative development projects there instead.
The mayor has also promised a sweeping “legalization” and resettlement initiative for many of the most affected districts in the city. But many of those that fall within or near national parks, like San German, remain in limbo.
Estupiñán says that San German was on the verge of receiving legal status during the tenure of Bogotá’s last mayor, and was to have been incorporated into a “green barrio” scheme that aimed at tackling poverty and addressing the effects of climate change, but both measures were stalled when the city administration changed hands. Under a green barrio scheme, houses are built with sustainable materials, and waste is managed.
Resistance to change
There are other problems related to these informal communities. Seven watersheds in Entrenubes Park feed the Bogotá River, making it an extremely vulnerable ecosystem given its proximity to human settlements that have no sanitation, irrigation or waste management.
Colombia’s environment ministry claims that San German is a threat to law and order and is damaging Entrenubes Park, which is 622 hectares in size. According to the ministry, 55 percent of the park was lost to illegal settlements between 1989-1999, which is why it was expanded in 2000 – so as to recuperate the land that was lost and to rejuvenate its ecosystem.
But San German’s residents want to stay, and want to revive their petition to become a green barrio. The community leaders believe that while the district authority denies their claim to legality, it is making back-door deals with realty development companies to build on the land they currently occupy.
In a detailed report on San German published by the digital news outlet imaginabogota.com last year, the author found that a Bogotá-based company had been advertising upcoming apartments in Entrenubes Park, seeming to confirm such suspicions.
Looking down from San German, new apartment complexes pepper the hillside.
But there are other concerns for San German that surpass the current dispute. As the population swells, the social equilibrium that was previously maintained by the community is becoming distorted. More and more newcomers are arriving with false land claims, and drugs are also becoming an issue, says Estupiñán.
“There are also paramilitaries in the area, that is a fact,” he adds. Estupiñan says that has also experienced assassination attempts, which he suspects have come from corrupt authorities who have business interests in mind. In such ways, Estupiñán acknowledges that the community is facing a complex series of problems.
For better or worse, San German is no longer a place that can be dismissed.
“Now that the community has grown so big the authorities can’t just pick us off or ignore us anymore,” said Hermes Alberto, a 62-year old local who arrived when San German consisted of a handful of houses surrounded by scrubland. “They have to deal with us now.”
Banner image: Arley Estupiñan walks towards his house at night. Photo by Ana Cristina Vallejo with permission.
Maximo Anderson is a freelance journalist and photographer currently based in Colombia. You can find him on Twitter at @MaximoLamar.
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