Staycationing in Bogotá

Eating and playing in the street behind the Paloquemao Market.

Bogotá is vacant these days (except for tourists), its streets empty, schools and shops closed and many homes unoccupied. The wealthy and middle classes have mostly cleared out to the coast or their countryside fincas.

But the poorer, working class folks, such as these families of the Los Martyrs neighborhood behind

Paloquemao Market, mostly stay put, either because they have to work or because they can't afford to travel.

But life in an emptied out Bogotá isn't so bad: it's peaceful, relatively unpolluted, and you can play in the street, as this family was doing the other day.

Doesn't that beat crowding onto a dirty beach where you're surrounded by screaming kids and grouching adults, the sun fries your skin and your new shoes get stolen?

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Our Home for Used Tires

Displaced people wait on a Median Strip.

You'd be angry, too, if you were out on the street and your potential home was occupied by...discarded tires.

Displaced people tossed tires onto the sidewalk.
(Photo; El Tiempo)

That was why a group of people who said they'd been displaced by Colombia's violence occupied a vacant building behind the Central Cemetery today and tossed the used tires stored inside out into the street.

Workers move tires out of the building.
Where will they take them? To an illegal dump?

The situation captures the intersection of two Colombian disfunctions: the lack of solutions for people displaced by the internal armed conflict - some say that Colombia has up to six million displaced people, perhaps the second-largest number in the world. And Bogotá's inability to find a solution to the problem of used tires, which are tossed onto sidewalks, median strips and parks. In this case, this vacant building had been filled with old tires, which waited there for some homeless person to crawl inside, light a fire and start a viciously polluting conflagration. Other cities have found ways to reuse, or at least responsibly dispose of, used tires. But that costs money, and Bogotá officials don't want to offend the tire companies by forcing them to charge deposits.

As for the displaced people, they charge that the government has failed them on promises to provide new homes, and are demanding a solution.

Much of the building is still packed with tires, which generate huge pollution when burned.

A displaced man from El Chocó tells how he was driven from his home by paramilitaries.

Used tires wait on a sidwalk along 26th Street, near the National University.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Homeless Man and the Monument

On Los Martires Plaza today I noticed these tell-tale clothes on the monument to Colombian patriots executed by the Spaniards during the revolutionary era.



Soon, the clothes' owner appeared: A homeless man who's apparently taken up residence in the monument. Remember that this is an extremely important monument, hallowed ground immortalizing the people who gave their lives to make an independent Colombia possible. But now it's an illegal homeless residence.

 The police and soldiers nearby don't appear to care....

The Iglesia del Voto Nacional, built in gratitude after the end of the Thousand Days War, is being repaired and renovated.

On the plaza today, homeless men listened to an evangelical service and then received lunch. How sincere is their faith?

A homeless drug addict on the plaza.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Evening in Los Martires

The Los Martires neighborhood, located a few blocks west of La Candelaria, is a run-down, hardscrabble area, but retains a sort of weathered charm. Once, perhaps close to a century ago, the residents were rich, and their stately homes remain, now converted into grain shops, hardware stores and welding shops.

The area should be a historical monument. On its plaza, the Spanish colonialists executed Colombian patriots. But today that same plaza is roamed by drug addicts from the nearby alley known as El Bronx.

A salesman on a bike pedals down an unpaved street.

A house, once grand, now a hardware store.

Pedicabs delivering passengers.

The Iglesia del Voto Nacional, built after the Thousand Days War in gratitude for a peace which did not last.

Bar games for sale on a sidewalk. The silver objects are disks for playing tejo.

A homeless man searches thru a corner garbage pile. Such is Bogotá recycling.

Soldiers stand guard by the obelisk memorializing Colombia's martyrs.

By the plaza, a spontaneous flea market appears every day, offering products scrounged from the garbage or perhaps stolen. 

Tools on the sidewalk.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Sculpting Memory in Los Martires

A group of Los Martires residents have been sculpting these monuments in the field beside the Centro Memoria during the past several weeks. The sculptures, which are meant to represent themes of human rights, history and the culture of Los Martires, are to be finished by the end of the month, I was told.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The New Centro Memoria Falls Short

The new Centro Memoria, with its reflecting pool. In the background are now-empty mausoleums, once part of the Central Cemetery. 

The recently opened Centro Memoria, just off of 26th St. near the Central Cemetery, is heavy with symbolism of Colombia's long, tragic domestic conflicts: the somber building, whose design suggests a headstone; the building's walls, embedded with vials of earth representing tens of thousands of victims of the conflict; and the very location of the Centro, in Bogotá's Central Cemetery.

A visitor to the center can obtain a general understanding of Colombia's long, tragic and often senseless internal conflicts (as long as that visitor knows Spanish). But the displays - texts, photos and a video - don't rise much above high school level and do nothing to bring the conflict's tragedy home to visitors, much less bringing it to life.

An exhibit about the history of Colombia's
guerrilla groups looks like it could have come from a
high school textbook...and perhaps did. 

The Centro's very limited exhibitions consist of panels with texts and photos and a short film providing a summary of Colombia's violent history and the actors involved. It's interesting - I learned things - but this is what kids are supposed to learn in high school and tourists could find on Wikipedia. The Centro Memoria should provide something additional and different. (On the positive side, an employee told me that the exhibitions will be expanded and change every few months.)

The Centro Memoria could fill in a gap in Bogotá's cultural and educational offerings. But I found myself wishing that its exhibits were more dynamic, more interactive.

How about victims' testimonies about their experience, both written and on video?

An exhibit about the paramilitary demobilization points
out that only a tiny number of paramilitary fighters have
 been prosecuted judicially, despite their horrific crimes. 

How about asking visitors what they would do if confronted by some of the horrific situations produced by Colombia's conflict.

What if guerrillas threaten to take away your children and turn them into child fighters? Do you abandon your town or farm for refuge in the city?

How about if paramilitaries threaten your family unless you denounce your neighbors as guerrilla sympathizers?

What if you're a soldier whose unit is expected to murder civilians to inflate guerrilla kill numbers? Do you cooperate or risk your own life and career by opposing your comrades?

The video: 'From Gaitan to La Havana.'

If you live in a town where paramilitary death squads are performing 'social cleansing' by hunting down and killing prostitutes, drug addicts and small-time criminals, do you keep quiet?

What if you're a small farmer ordered by a cartel to plant drug crops? Those sorts of terrible decisions have contronted thousands or even millions of Colombians, and could bring home the drama of the nation's conflict.

Dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in a scene from the video.

And how about asking visitors to consider some of the big questions facing Colombia in its negotiating with the FARC guerrillas in Havana Cuba? How should guerrilla leaders be punished for their numerous crimes? Or, should Colombia give in to their demands for particularly the punishment - or lack of same - to be given to the guerrillas. Is political representation for the FARC too high a price to pay for representation in Congress, as a necessary price for ending a half-century of killing, kidnapping and forced displacement?

The 1954 massacre of
university students by the
Rojas Pinilla regime.

Neither did I see an examination of the roots of Colombia's violence: the drug trade and unequal distribution of land and wealth, which continues today. The illegal drug trade, which made 'Colombia' shorthand for violence during the 1980s and '90s and continues financing Colombia's outlawed organizations today. Would legalizing drugs, as Pres. Santos has suggested, deprive Colombia's violent groups of their fuel?

Old radios on a wall. I don't know what
these were doing there. 

Colombia's current conflict involving leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and drug cartels is only the most recent chapter in its domestic conflicts. Before that was the politically-driven La Violencia. Before that, other guerrillas and terrible civil wars.

A display details the number of
people killed and displaced
by the conflict. 

Certainly, the Centro Memoria is primarily a research organization. It participated in a recent report which documented hundreds of thousands of killed and millions displaced during recent decades of Colombia's conflict. But those studies will be read mostly by academics and NGO officials. The Centro Memoria provides an opportunity to tell the tragic story to a different audience, of students, tourists and casual visitors. But to do that well will require more dynanism and immediacy.

In fact, I was struck to find a bunch of colorful mobile exhibits about political activists assassinated in Bogotá left outdoors to be damaged by the wind and rain.

Capsules of soil imbedded
in the walls represent victims
of the conflict. 

As a sideline, it'd also be nice to have an exhibition about the archeological research done during the building's construction. Students from the National Unniversity excavated human remains and found evidence of witchcraft and other occult burial practices, as well as Bogotanos' lives during decades past. They did not, however, find remains of victims of El Bogotazo, the huge riots triggered by the April 1948 assassination of populist leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan in downtown Bogotá, when thousands were killed. Photos show bodies piled up in the Central Cemetery, and historians have long believed that victims were interred in mass graves on this block to the cemetery's west. Gaitan's assassination intensified a violent conflict between the Liberal and Conservative political parties known as La Violencia, which killed hundreds of thousands of people during the following decade.

The Centro Memoria is located just off of Calle 26, just west of the Cementerio Central. It opens every day except Sunday and is just a short walk from from the TransMilenio station of the same name. 

An 'Act of thanksgiving' from the faithful. A candelabra in a wall from the land's time as part of the cemetery.

The center's land includes this large, wooded field. What use will they give it?

These mobile exhibits about political activists and leaders assasinated in Bogotá have been left outside to be damaged by the sun and wind.

The Centro has two parking lots for cars, one of them underground, but no bicycle parking. 

Images of the now-empty mausoleums, once part of the Central Cemetery. A pair of artists stenciled images of dead being carried on stretchers, representing victims of Colombia's conflict. It was a huge project - there are some 9,000 tombs.

Empty tombs.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours