Violent Tide
In the most miserable streets of Buenaventura lives a war without mercy that has the civilian population cornered. Semana traveled to the zone.
It is already habitual for the inhabitants of El Cristal, a barrio in Buenaventura on the edge of the Pacific, that the noise of the waves is confused with the rattling of machine guns. Today is El Cristal, yesterday was el Lleras, tomorrow will be Juan XVIII, the most humble barrios not only of this Port, but the whole country. There runs free a war without mercy that has led the people to prefer to live close to or in the streets before returning to their shot-up board houses.
The confrontation is over the control of routes that offer access to the sea and that facilitate the shipments of drugs to the exterior. Nobody knows exactly who is confronted with whom. The authorities say that they are the FARC, the inhabitants think that they are simply narco-traffickers, others more opine that they are those left behind from paramilitary groups. But the people do not care from which band are the violent ones, they just want to regain the tranquility.
"We resisted the shootings for a few days, until a bullet pierced the cradle of the youngest of my children. Thank God we had taken him out of there because we were hidden under the beds waiting for the shots to pass," recounts Gilberto Orozco, a merchant gleaner (rebuscador) who had to leave the barrio Kennedy in this Port, and when he tried to return, he found that his house had been knocked down and his few things taken. The same thing happened to three of his neighbors.
The violence does not discriminate. Only a few days ago, Saulo Quinones, the mayor of the Port, was warned that in the barrio el Firme, a shoot out had been going on for more than an hour. He went to the place convinced that his presence, and that of his bodyguards, would succeed in stopping the outburst of violence. But upon getting out of his car, it received various bursts of fire that caused panic and confusion. Desperate, he ran in search of cover accompanied by some of the journalists that went with him. "This did not allow us to keep going," was the only thing that the mayor guessed right in saying, still pale and with at tone of disappointment.
They are various the residents of this place that coincide in that this overflowing wave of violence that started two years ago. It started when, in the plain light of day, 12 teenagers were gathered together for a soccer game. They appeared floating in a swamp with their feet and hands tied with barbed wire.
It is a paradox, but many arrived to these barrios fleeing other close by hells, convinced that they are in luck in the promised land. William Palomino arrived two weeks ago together where 11 family members fleeing the war in El Charco [where intense fighting between the Army, guerrillas and paramilitaries has displaced 7,000 people]. They are a handful of the 42,000 displaced that, according to Social Action [the Colombian government institute that deals with the displaced], have come to the city between 1998 and 2007. Palomino has the tanned hands from work in the countryside and despair painted on his face. "One day we were washing clothes when a shot flew by the pants that I was hanging up. Frightened, we closed ourselves [in the house], but later three men arrived and they interrogated us, and said that so nothing would happen to us, we had to pay them 30,000 pesos per month."
The most outrageous thing is that many people are fishing in these intricate waters. They extort humble homes that hardly are able to subsist. "Twenty thousand from don Pacho’s house, 10,000 from Aguante’s, 50,000 from Mocho’s house," one can read on some of the lists that the Police have found on the criminals that they capture. But despite hundreds of joint operations by the Police and Army, the 11 dead that have put in the last 15 months, and the constant councils about security, many of them directed by [Colombia’s President] Alvaro Uribe, the controls are not sufficient.
In the journey through the barrio el Lleras journalists from Semana found quite easily two guys, 15 and 18 years old, that without much fuss agreed to show two automatic weapons that each one was carrying on their waist and a gun that they had (encaletado) nearby. What are the guns for? "Without them, nobody respects us. Here we give ourselves the lead with whoever may strike."
Antero Viveros, president of the local action committee in this same barrio, has an explanation for what has happened to Buenaventura: "The poverty is not an excuse in order to return to crime, but when the hunger pursues, the people do not make good decisions and the problems follow. Because of this, we have lost a generation of boys that faced with the uncertainty of their future, go down the wrong path."
The authorities say that part of the difficulties in containing the violence is that many of the protagonists are minors. "However many we capture, the law requires us to free them," says Yamil Moreno, commander of the special group of Police, that with 900 men, started operations in the zone in January.
There the kids are the protagonists of the war as victimizers as they are the victims. Just in the last three months, eight children have arrived to the hospital injured by bullets. Half of them have died. This statistic sums up the most worrying statistics on the violence. Last year, 403 people were murdered in Buenaventura, which elevated the murder rate to 130 people every 100,000, the highest in the country. This year, Legal Medicine already registers 184 violent deaths, with 73 murders just in the month of April, four of which were done by dismembering [the victims].
The employers of the Port are looking desperately for the violence in the city to disappear. They are worried by the stigma in a zone where millions of investments exist and, [worried] because the violence, [where] the poorest barrios can be turned into commercial zones. Just last Friday, a small bomb seemed to announce that the war is moving towards the center of Buenaventura. This was the twenty-first attack with explosives in what goes without stopping this year.
The worst thing for the humble barrios of the Port is that the presence of the state is limited to neutralizing the stigma of the city. [And] that the "solutions" do not take into consideration the narco-trafficking, which is the root of the problem, and cannot alleviate the misery in which the inhabitants live in his place where the bullets silence the sea.
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