The benches of the Plaza de los Estudiantes in Cartagena are busy this Friday night in February. In one, several young people drink cans of beer. In another, a man appears to be waiting for someone. In the most hidden one, three women sit looking forward. This third scene makes the police uncomfortable and four officers approach to force them to stand up. Two of the young women jump up, but the last one talks on the phone without flinching until a police officer grabs her. The woman thrashes around, screams and flails. Since January, the fight against sexual exploitation in the historic center forces prostitutes to never stop. Police on motorcycles disperse them by sounding their sirens. The plan to remove them from the epicenter of the most touristic city in Colombia involves making them circulate. They are the eternal walkers of the night.
Almost dragged, the woman on the phone is taken to the police station. This Friday she will sleep in prison while, her companions say, her youngest children will wake up alone at home. The other two women get lost on Candilejo Street lamenting their bad luck. In reality they have only known each other for a few hours. One of them moves from Bucaramanga to Cartagena for a few days every two months to earn money on the streets to support her daughter and she is very clear about the golden rule: “I always try to be invisible because for the police we we are nothing”. She arrived in Colombia from Venezuela five years ago, she is 24 and this is her only source of income.
For the new mayor Dumek Turbay, the plan called Titan 24 for the “restoration of public order” is proving a success. The closure of numerous stores and the police siege have visibly reduced prostitution in the city center. The Secretary of the Interior, Bruno Hernández, proudly explains that last Holy Week, Cartagena received “family, religious and sports” tourism, although he recognizes that prostitution neither disappears nor is it eradicated, it simply moves to other areas where it is less visible. . “The peeled ones [una forma de referirse a las jóvenes en Colombia] They say that in one night they can make up to five million pesos [1.200 euros]”There is no job that is comparable to that,” the official reasons.
The image of an American entering a hotel in Medellín with two teenagers a few weeks ago went around the world as an intolerable scandal, but the scene is repeated daily in places like this Caribbean city divided in two by inequality. Much has been said about clients or exploiters, but the most dramatic reality is those women or girls who are born marked with the wounds of racism, marginalization and the need for everything. Those who are prohibited from sitting on a park bench because they spoil the idyllic postcard that the colonial city wants to sell.
Beyond the Cartagena of the colorful facades, the jasmine balconies and the streets decorated with colorful pennants that visitors upload to Instagram, there is a world of poverty. 43% of a population of almost a million inhabitants with problems deeper than the urban aesthetics of the center. Victims of segregation, violence or hunger who live on the margins of society and who, in some cases, find in prostitution the only way within their reach to integrate into a city that revolves around tourism and seems to have forgotten they.
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The infantile abyss
From the street you can barely make out a dozen pairs of open eyes that look like owls. It's a Friday in April and the music breaks through the iron bars of the entrance gate. Some hands braid colorful bracelets on their knees amid voices and some adolescent laughter. 50 boys and girls aged 10 and older live temporarily in this house. They are victims of sexual violence in a program of the Renacer Foundation, which seeks to restore their rights and cure them of the horror inside and out. Some have suffered abuse in their family environment, others have been victims of exploitation – rescued from any hole – and others come from vulnerable families in which prostitution is accepted and taught, sometimes for generations, as a way to make money. to home.
The work behind closed doors is exhausting: escapes, returns, relapses, withdrawal syndromes, guilt, sadness, anger… The team that accompanies the minors, supervised by the Colombian State, provides constant accompaniment and at the same time has the help from psychologists to lighten the enormous burden that they try to remove from children and put on their shoulders. “The most difficult thing is those who, no matter how much affection they have for them, are sold or exchanged by their mother or father,” explains one worker. Phrases like “go out and search for yourself, if you don't win you don't eat” or “even go suck it, but bring money” have lost their meaning in too many homes on the Caribbean coast. The married couple of sociologists Raúl Paniagua and Rosa Díaz, 74 years old, with a lifetime dedicated to Cartagena children, know this well.
In this area of Colombia, as in others in the country, the father figure is very weak. “The prevailing idea is that women are boars.” [fuertes] and they raise their children while there is a certain tolerance for men not responding to their obligations,” explains Paniagua. For generations, children were raised by a network that exceeded the mothers: a grandmother, a godmother, a neighbor with a more comfortable economy. The Paniaguas, without going any further, had one blood and nine “foster children.” Rosa's mother, in a García-Marquian image, raised 20.
The city was then a bucolic place that breathed salt and history – in 1984, the 11 kilometers of wall were declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO – until developmentalism and lazy urban planning plans fragmented the city into sectors with realities as conflicting as foreign nations. The money grew in the heat of international tourism and the Bogotá elite who renovated colonial mansions to have their recreational place on the coast.
Cartagena is today for many the city within the walls and the surrounding neighborhood of Getsemaní, with a periphery that neither counts nor exists beyond the brief view that return the windows of the plane when it searches for the landing strip. “It was in the midst of this idea of hiding the poorest and most difficult reality that values were lost,” continues Paniagua, “children also became invisible and many came to be considered a productive means with the consent of their parents.”
Rural Cartagena
In the town of Arroyo Grande, 40 kilometers from the city, a year ago a man began to be seen whom everyone refers to as Abroad. About 10% of the Cartagena population lives in these rural areas, in villages and townships in which between 80% and 90% live in conditions of poverty or extreme poverty.
In the northern area, to which Arroyo Grande belongs, mass tourism is not yet visible but hotel chains and real estate projects are making plans for what are traditionally places of settlement for black communities. Airlin Pérez Carrascal, activist of the Black and Neighborhood Women Movement, warns of the vulnerability of this population that has always lived outside the institutional radar: “Inequality finds its most notable place in the body of the black woman and girl.”
The Stranger, an American man whom no one calls by his name, has become popular in this corner where tourists are not used to seeing. Sometimes he arrives, gives the girls clothes and “takes them out for a walk,” says a local woman suspiciously. The method is repeated in other areas hand in hand with poverty. In the Olaya Herrera neighborhood, with the highest crime rate in the city, it is common for the activists who work there to spot girls who in two months change their way of dressing, start wearing designer tennis shoes, and bring the best cell phone to school. and they get into private cars or taxis, generating more envy than scandal in their wake.
Titan 24, municipal plan
The image of the historic center on a Friday in April no longer resembles that of February, when a young woman left the police station heading to prison accused of attacking authority while her children were waiting for her at home. The presence of prostitutes, which in recent years was massive at any time of the day, could be said to be almost imperceptible. “We have eradicated this problem in that area by 75-80%,” says the Secretary of the Interior, Bruno Hernández, who assures that no minors have been located in the municipal operations carried out since January. The municipal action has been applauded by many politicians, neighbors and tourists.
From the beach neighborhood of Bocagrande, the City Council's Titan plan carries out several operations tonight with Hernández at the helm. In just a few meters of road, the team made up of several officials, firefighters, police and members of the army close a 24-hour store and a hairdresser/travel agency for not having the documentation in order. The objective, explains the secretary, is to recover quality, sustainable and family tourism for the city – it is understood that from families not broken by life.
A few years ago, a police officer impregnated three girls in the same neighborhood. Rosita Paniagua visited her homes to encourage parents to report. None did. One downplayed it because the youngest “was already used,” another because the agent gave them a small weekly payment and at the home of the third, who was still pregnant, they prayed that the baby would be born a boy. Perhaps then, the man who had raped her decided to stay with her and her life could become somewhat more comfortable for everyone.
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