When you drive into a shopping center in Bogotá, the most likely thing is that a security guard, dressed in uniform, will ask you to turn off the engine and open the doors and the trunk to search it, with the help of a trained dog, to see. if it has a bomb.
“But what if it is necessary?” BBC Mundo asked a security guard at the Retiro shopping center, in the north of the Colombian capital, a few days ago.
“Well, don’t you see that up front (in the Andino shopping center) the guerrillas planted a bomb five years ago that killed three people?”
Colombian society is in a state of alert. It is not clear if it is due to a trauma inherited from the war, which had its peak in the 90s, because the war somehow continues, or because crime took over the social mood, as also happens elsewhere. Or if it’s a little of all those things.
In any case, the security measures that may be unusual in other countries in the region, also plagued by crime, are not limited to guard dogs: here it is common for them to search you to enter a shopping center on foot or for the Police stop you and do a random inspection.
It is also common to see soldiers armed with rifles patrolling the streets and highways. And the private security industry, which includes escorts and guards and monitoring systems, is larger than the police.
Today Colombia is not much more violent than other countries in the region. Although homicides increased last year, the figure of 26 murders per 100,000 inhabitants – the main criterion usually used to measure insecurity – is no higher than that of Ecuador or Mexico and is lower than that of Venezuela and Honduras.
In Bogotá, the figure of 12.8 homicides per 100 thousand inhabitants, similar to that of Medellín, is close to that of Uruguay or Panama and lower than that of Brazil or Guatemala.
Colombia, then, ceased to be an unusually violent country in Latin America. Especially in big cities. And yet Here you see measures that reflect a special feeling of insecurity, marked by a traumatic history and, also, by a huge private security industry.
“The war is over, but crime is not”
It is difficult to know which of these measures are unique to Colombia. Insecurity is a problem throughout Latin America and the solutions have been, in general, the same.
Guard and anti-explosive dogs, which in the cases of shopping centers live and sleep in the same building for years, emerged in the 80s and 90s, when the bombs of drug traffickers, first, and then the guerrillas, became relatively common in neuralgic sectors of cities.
Dogs like these also exist in Mexico.
In 2019, in that country, the presence of soldiers on the streets to combat crime was made official and regulated. In Colombia this occurred in the 1970s, amid a wave of emergency presidential decrees called State of Siege.
There is also the example of private security, industries that in both Mexico and Colombia represent 1.5% of GDP and are the largest in the region, although these figures do not count informal private security, which can be as large or larger than the legal one.
The legal industry, in any case, has 800 companies and 400,000 employees in Colombia: security guards, escorts, drivers, trainers. It is a quarter of the employees of the National Police.
José Rivera is a union leader at the Fortox company, one of the largest. Ex-military, he has been working as a security guard for 27 years. And for him, the measures are justified.
“The war is over, but crime is not and crime is also harmful,” he says. “I don’t see a problem with, for example, when entering a building they do due process to people, with the ID and registration.”
In Colombia it is common that to enter a building one must register with a security guard. Common in office buildings, even in universities, as well as in residential buildings.
But nothing is more difficult than entering as a visitor the closed residential complexes, a phenomenon that the architect and urban planner Fernando de la Carrera considers the most transcendental product of this “fear society.”
They swarm in rich and poor areas of cities, especially in Bogotá. They include several towers, are surrounded by bars and are monitored by cameras at each corner. They are managed by watchmen and guard dogs. They take up entire blocks.
40% of Bogotá’s 9 million residents live in a closed community. Only in Ciudad Verde, a neighborhood of gated communities in the south, 200,000 people live: it is a private city.
“The success of the closed complex model is fueled by fear and its growth coincides with the rise of violence that took over the nation starting in the 1980s,” writes De la Carrera in Rejalópolis, a study he published with the University of the Andes.
“Fear led us to sacrifice public space and the social and economic interactions that it generates,” he says. “The spatial segregation that motivates closed complexes increases the feeling of fear, isolation and fosters more of the same: mistrust, insecurity, more fear and more bars.”
Because extreme security measures not only speak of a violent present, but of a past that is relived every time there is an event of violence.. The past, that is, is lived in the present.
Escorts and Toyotas
The National Protection Unit is the State organization that ensures the safety of Colombians at risk: officials, congressmen, peasant leaders and a long list of vulnerable communities.
The entity has nearly 2,000 bodyguards and another 8,000 that it hires from private security companies, as well as trucks and weapons.
Around 10,000 formal bodyguards in the country is similar to what is reported by the Federal Protective Service, the similar body in Mexico, a country twice its size.
“Protection should be salvation from fear, but in reality it is a business,” says Augusto Rodríguez, director of the UNP. “And there are people who play with that, who move the risk up or down according to their interest, because fear is the breeding ground for corruption.”
Rodríguez has accompanied the president, Gustavo Petro, throughout his career: they were together in the guerrilla, in Congress and in the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá.
“Protecting life is the central political line of this government,” he says, to explain why someone so close to the president presides over a usually secondary entity.
Since he arrived, Rodríguez says he has found different corruption schemes: cars that are not used and are stranded and charge gasoline quotas, vehicles that traffic drugs, schemes for the sale of legal weapons to illegal groups and embezzlements in the salary structure of the officials.
“We want to de-Toyotize Colombia,” he says, referring to the Toyota trucks that arrived in the country in the 80s, they were a symbol of drug traffickers and today—almost always armored and white—they are a status tool.
Rodríguez does not believe that security measures are exaggerated, in general: “Violence persists because inequality persists, land problems persist (…) Many do not need security schemes, they have more of a problem of mobility than security, but the majority yes.”
It seems, in any case, that there is a discrepancy between the reality of crime, which today is less than before, and the measures that Colombians take to protect themselves, which only increase.
But for Luis Ignacio Ruiz, a criminologist and social psychologist at the National University, there is no such thing as “unjustified fear.”
“The fear of crime involves many other emotions that not only speak of insecurity,” he says. “In several studies we have found that people declare themselves insecure when their fear, in reality, is poverty, lack of education or hunger.”
“And to that you have to add that the insecurity figures are never complete, because they omit a number of crimes that are not reported, in addition to the fact that the media, which give priority to crime, and now social networks, generate an effect of repetition of the event”.
The majority of Colombian territory is no longer at war. But remembering it is not only a mental exercise: it has material implications in the present.
And it makes Colombians afraid. And they shield themselves from guard dogs to defend themselves.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/cer7e32ym99o, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-09-18 11:20:06
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