Colombia’s most dangerous city battles to bring down the murder rate.
Lunchtime in Siloé a hillside suburb of Cali, which from a distance has the whitewashed charm of a tumbledown Greek village but close up is more like Beirut in the bad days. The hum of traffic from the city below is punctuated by a pop pop pop of pistol shots, then shouts and sounds of people scurrying through alleys below, then a more sustained burst of gunfire, then silence.
Yolanda, our cheerful host, moves closer to the inside wall of her kitchen which is open to the elements and any stray bullets, but has a fine view over the city and the Cauca valley beyond. She shrugs. ‘It’s those moto-ratones are at it again, they’re fighting over territory’. A neighbour sipping juice at the table explains that moto-ratones (literally ‘motor-mice’) are motorbike taxis that transport people around the hillside but are also connected to the drug gangs. More shots ring out. ‘They carry on like that the police will be coming in to take away a body,’ says Yolanda.
The neighbour explains that police don’t normally venture this deep into the barrio unless to collect the dead. ‘Or to sell guns to the gangs’, someone else at the table adds. Surprisingly (or perhaps not if you have spent much time in Colombia) some state security officials have been accused of selling or even renting weapons to the same gangs they are supposed to be fighting.
Siloé (pronounced Sill-Oh-Eh) is what Caleños call zona roja (red zone), a no-go barrio that rises from the valley floor and spills up over the western cordillera, a City-of-God-like labyrinth of twisty roads criss-crossed by stone-step alleyways, perfect rat-runs for moto-ratones. Grand Theft Auto meets Snakes and Ladders.
Of course for Yolanda it is also home, but with a criminal class literally on the doorstep, in this case a tattooed youth struggling to light his pipe burning basuco and marijuana mix while school-kids wander past. Three doors up is a gang house, the door ajar for the constant coming and going of gangly teenagers in baseball caps. From the city below older residents labour up the steep incline with shopping from the market. They manoeuvre around other gang guys sitting on the steps. I am both intrigued and alarmed how these two worlds coexist, but Yolanda is more concerned about her knees giving out on the steep steps up the hill. ‘Once your legs give out you’re in trouble living up here,’ comments Yolanda, still sprightly for her advanced years.
Not all kids join the gangs and education is a path out, with many getting scholarships to the university, explains one neighbour. And perhaps surprisingly many graduate then come back to live in the community. Some even made it into the Cali´s classical orchestra and have played in Europe, she says. Tragedy, though, is often just a heartbeat away and the community is still mourning the death a few weeks back of 16-year engineering student, killed by a stray bulletwhen she opened her front door, bringing the Cali’s murder count to 1,366 for the year.
The violent death count is significant in a city with the 4th highest homicide rate in the world and a city mayor who is also a medical expert famous for treating the violence like a disease outbreak, and a track record of reducing the epidemic with bans on alcohol and guns.
I wonder though, how the mayor´s medicine is going down in Siloé where the gangsters puff cocaine on street corners and buy their Sig Sauers from corrupt cops, or even make their own simple firearms, called pachas, from metal pipe bought in the local hardware store. Peace — or rather suspension of conflict — is brokered on fragile pacts between teenage gangs raised on a nutty narco culture fed by the grupos grandes, sophisticated drug cartels with immense wealth which the locals refer to only in whispers and tangential references such as fuerzo oscuros, dark forces.
The larger drug gangs carve up the suburb into sub-gangs (called combos or micros) with names like the Playboys or Skull Warriors, locked into turf wars across invisible lines. ‘And the kids can’t easily cross the lines,’ remarks someone else sitting at Yolanda´s table. ‘If a guy has a girlfriend in another territory he can’t even go and see her without risk of being got at.’ ‘A bit like Romeo and Juliet,’ I murmur. As usual Shakespeare covers everything.
It is only a fifteen minute drive from crime-plagued Siloé to where I stay in San Fernando, a leafy barrio currently affected by an outbreak of pizza restaurants. The tropical heat is alleviated by tropical trees that line the streets, their boughs laden with bromeliads where birds squabble over nesting rights and frogs sing at night. Up the hill slightly is the Parque del Perro, the ´dog park´, a triangle of greenery fringed by cafés and restaurants, and some small street bars where you can sit outside with a fria and watch the world go by.
San Fernando is great for people-watching with bohemian types hanging around the dance academy , large families in the kerbside restaurants being watched over by burly bodyguards, a surgically-enhanced jogger bounces by, a foreign backpackers searching for his hostel befuddled by the street numbering, students meeting up for their evening trysts and on football nights large crowds pack the pavements for beers and cheers.
And like anywhere in Cali, indeed in Colombia, the barrio has its fair share of people living off the streets, beggars and pedlars that blend in so well to the cityscape to become almost invisible until at the opportune moment they pop out of nowhere and ask for a coin. But our local informal car parking attendant is anything but low-key, in fact everyone calls him ´Ay Ay Ay´ for the simple reason at least every other minute he shouts out ay ay aaaay in a clear ringing tone that echoes over the barrio, a surprising vocal achievement for such a small person.
One day I ask him his real name. ‘They call me El Duende,’ he says, which means Goblin. And before that? He shuts his eyes. ‘Pedro,’ he intones, after a few long seconds, like he has almost forgotten his own name. Since he operates mainly in the zone outside my office I have a good view of his daily routine waving cars in and out of the roadside parking spaces.
I discuss with a work friend one day the structured life of Pedro. From early morning he is out there, a whooping cowboy cajoling the bovine SUVs like cows in a corral, then darting off to the next street to check on his domain and make sure no driver sneaks off without paying his tip, defending his territory against interlopers and vetting the recicladores, street people who collect rubbish in carts and get cash for recycling. Only approved recicladores get past Pedro, the rest get sent packing with an ay ay aaaaay ringing in their ears.
‘To be honest it’s a serious job,’ suggests my friend, watching Pedro. ‘I mean it’s not like he can just take a day off when he feels like it. He has to be here every day. And he is keeping an eye on the barrio.’ We are both very aware that some months back he was stabbed and disappeared. Everyone thought he was dead then a week later he was back, with a slight limp to his swagger. In the afternoons he does slows down a bit in the heat and can often be seen under a tree with a can of beer. Some evenings he strolls the surrounding streets happily howling, his ay ay aaaysechoing in the canyons of luxury flats, ending somewhere around midnight when he returns to the park where he keeps a blanket hidden in a drain hole.
One day I make him a coffee and pass it through the office railings. Pedro tells me about his most recent stabbing. ‘Third time this year,’ he says proudly, pulling up his shirt to show an array of angry red scars on his stomach and chest. He claims some local residents are trying to have him killed. ‘Why would they do that?’ I ask. ‘I make too much noise,´ he replies, grinning. Maybe tone it down a bit, I suggest, shocked that Pedro’s vocals could cause a spike in the mayor´s mortality curve.
After that I am constantly aware of Pedro´s moonlit arias. I stand on the balcony of my fifth-floor flat and try and track his progress through the nearby streets. A luminous statue of Jesus floats above us in from the darkened hills. Is there someone out there with a knife stalking him? Will tonight be his last wild rumpus? But each next day he is alive and back on duty, bucking the trend.
The year is coming to an end and my time in Cali too. Yolanda invites me for one last visit to Siloé. The neighbours are there, along with some health workers who spend their days on the streets of the barrio. Their care-worn faces tell a story of Cali far away from the surgical smiles of San Fernando. They sit around the table eating chicharrón, pork scratching, and chewing over recent news.
A seven-year-old girl is shot dead while riding on the back of her father´s motorbike, and at a local hospital an 11-year-old girl has had 104 capsules of cocaine surgically removed from her stomach, drugs destined for Europe where sophisticated folk lively up their weekend with a line of charlie. Overall though rate of violent deaths has dropped, and there is optimism that 2014 will end 25% down on the previous twelve months. But any celebration in the Mayor´s office is short-lived. Five die violently on New Years eve with another 14 murders on January 1. So much for resolutions.
Finally before leaving I wander the streets of San Fernando for a last glimpse of Siloé brooding on the hillside behind. Someone has hoisted a massive blinking star at the top of the barrio, and with the palm trees and dark hills behind it could be Bethlehem itself in the Judean hills. I can´t help thinking: if anywhere needs a miracle, this is it.
