It’s cold on Thursday morning in Kennedy, a neighborhood in the south of Bogotá, but the streets are already full of street vendors. Bags of goods are mixed with small tents where merchants sleep so they don’t miss the point of sale at dawn — the dispute for the best locations, some say, sometimes takes place with clubs or knife blows.
Built in the 1960s to house popular housing projects, Kennedy has seen a population boom that includes “desplazados” (internally displaced by armed conflicts in the interior), Venezuelan refugees and homeless groups, who set up camps or rent beds in boarding houses for less than $2 a night.
In this environment of poverty and desolation, criminal factions infiltrate and vie for space. In addition to selling drugs in small quantities, they use refrigerated trucks that pass through the neighborhood to transport illegal substances that supply the illicit market in the center of the capital.
Kennedy is a microcosm of the violence in Colombia, which has escalated under the current president, Iván Duque. In the last month alone, 16 bodies were found in the neighborhood, in vacant lots, garbage dumps and in the Tunjuelo River, which runs through the town. According to the police, the deaths are linked to the dispute over drug trafficking spaces.
“Afraid, we’re afraid. We don’t leave the house after 6 pm, because at that time [os ambulantes] they are already fighting in the street for the next day’s points. And at dawn there are reckonings [entre gangues]. We often wake up to the police rummaging through garbage dumps or carrying bags in which corpses were wrapped,” says Paz Barrera, 52, a merchant and resident of the neighborhood.
For violence specialist Andrés Nieto, from Universidad Central, “the increase in cases of violence related to drug trafficking on the outskirts of large cities has to do with the reheating of the illegal economy, after the months of pandemic restrictions”.
The trend, however, is also seen in the interior of the country. Although the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) demobilized through a peace agreement in 2016, guerrilla dissidents have joined criminal groups operating in different parts of Colombia.
If after the signing of the treaty an atmosphere of relative calm came to reign, reflected in the drop in the homicide rate, right at the beginning of the Duque administration -which took over with a bellicose speech in relation to organized crime- the rates began to increase again. From 24 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2018, the figure in Colombia today is 27 per 100,000.
“Since 1997 we have seen a gradual improvement, due to a series of factors, but in the last four years there has been a brake on this path”, he tells Sheet Jeremy McDermott, co-founder and director of the think tank Insight Crime, dedicated to organized crime in the Americas and who has been monitoring the issue in Colombia for 25 years. “The numbers show that the situation is worse today than when Duque took office — which is ironic, given that he was elected on a security platform.”
The improvement McDermott refers to is linked to peace treaties with guerrillas and paramilitaries and to the hard-line policy adopted under Álvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos.
For the first round of the presidential elections, this Sunday (29), the Ministry of Defense warned that there are 290 municipalities at extreme risk of episodes of violence and highlighted for them special observation by the security forces. The election has, according to the latest polls, the leftist Gustavo Petro (40% of voting intentions) as the favorite — in the event of a second round, the rightists Federico Gutiérrez (27%) and Rodolfo Hernández ( 20%).
All are in favor of implementing the peace agreement and a less frontal confrontation with organized crime than that of the current president, although there are differences in their programs on the public security platform.
Alerts from authorities increased after the Gulf Clan, one of the country’s main criminal factions, carried out an “armed strike” in response to the extradition of its leader, Dairo Antonio Úsuga, known as Otoniel, to stand trial in the US. There were acts of violence recorded in more than 100 municipalities in 11 of Colombia’s 32 departments.
“This movement was a threat to Colombian democracy and showed that Duque lost some control over criminal groups – something that had already happened in the previous administrations of Santos and Uribe”, says analyst James Bosworth, from the Wilson Center. “If an armed group can cause violence in 100 municipalities, it can also repress voters and undermine the legitimacy of democracy.”
According to the Defense report, the highest risks of violence are in the departments of Norte de Santander, Antioquia, Chocó, Nariño, Cauca, Meta, Putumayo and Huila. “The State must implement more mechanisms to investigate and verify complaints related to electoral crimes and threats against candidates or their campaigns. It must also redouble its efforts in rural areas and guarantee the free participation of voters”, says Carlos Camargo, of the Ombudsman’s Office, a kind of state ombudsman.
For McDermott, Duque’s policy of persecuting the heads of criminal organizations did not prove to be effective and should not be repeated by his successor. “What is expected is a fragmentation of groups, following a pattern of the organized crime scene in Colombia,” he says. According to him, this movement has been taking place since the demobilization of the paramilitaries, between 2003 and 2006, so that today there are fewer and fewer large groups dedicated to drug trafficking with national reach — as were the cartels in Cali and Medellín.
“The proliferation of smaller organizations running the illegal economy is happening even as Colombia is producing more and more cocaine than ever before. Otoniel’s arrest is likely to increase the autonomy of several of its subgroups.”
In the last presidential debate, the candidates explained their positions in relation to violence in the country. Petro said he wanted the full implementation of the agreement with the FARC and the reopening of negotiations with the ELN (National Liberation Army) guerrillas. In the fight against criminal groups, he plans to establish investigations to “know their links with politics and business.”
Fico Gutiérrez also believes in the implementation of the agreement with the FARC and in increasing investments in infrastructure in the interior, “to improve the quality of life of those who today find an easier life in crime.” In third place, Rodolfo Hernández, stated that “peace is achieved by giving citizens a dignified life, with work, land and State assistance.”
