Exploring Bogotá’s Dangers

One of the strangest trips I took was to Bogotá in 1994, shortly after Pablo Escobar was killed. I was trying to write my first book, a thriller that took place there. I knew people from when I had spent a summer working with the YMCA in Bogotá after graduating from high school.

Chepe Laspina, one of my friends from those earlier days, devoted his life to helping street orphans. At that time there were more than five thousand kids who lived on the streets and in the sewers. The academics said that the cause originated from rural families moving to Bogotá to escape the guerrilla warfare going on in the country. earning enough money to live on in Bogotá was so hard that families fell apart and the fathers often abandoned them. The mothers had to provide for their kids and would take up with new men. These men would often kick out the children who weren’t theirs and those kids had to live on the street. Most were between the ages of five and fifteen. They formed gangs and would steal from street vendors, ride around Bogotá on the back fenders of busses, and even invented their own language. The residents hated them. Shop vendors would hire police to kidnap the kids, take them to the mountains, and kill them. They called this “rehabilitation”. My friend Chepe devoted his life to helping them.

I had known one of these street orphans since I worked with the Y all those years before. Now in his twenties, he had put together a taxi business and seemed on his way to becoming a successful entrepreneur. But his business partner stole his money and he could’t repay the debt he owed. Whoever had lent him that money put out a hit on him and he had to move away.  There were so many sad stories about these kids.

For research for my book, Chepe took me to a part of Bogotá where many street orphans hung out. It was called Cartucho and was in the southern part of the city. Drug dealers, prostitutes, vendors of illegal goods, and recyclers lived in the dilapidated buildings or in makeshift shelters. The shelters were made of plastic bags stuffed with newspapers. People addicted to bazuko (like crack) sat along the sides of the streets. There was a restaurant there and I remember seeing a girl waitress who looked about thirteen. She delivered some food to people in an outside patio. The girl saw me and gave me a stare full of nothing. It shocked me how young she was to be so filled with hate.

I was like a tourist and protected by Chepe and his friends. We walked among those people and I tried to  take them in without looking like I was staring. It was forbidden to take photos so I had to try to remember what I saw.

We came upon a police car with several men. One of them was dressed in an army jacket and taking pictures of someone lying on the street. It was a dead boy who appeared in his twenties. I didn’t look close enough to see where he’d been shot. I was struck at how reverently the photographer removed the boy’s jacket and folded it. He then went to the police car and said something to the policeman. They laughed. People passed by as if this were a normal day in Cartucho.

On that trip I also got to see an old friend I’d known from those YMCA days. Victor had become a prosecutor in Colombia. In the law enforcement system there, prosecutors did many of the functions that a police investigator would do in the U.S.. That made his job very dangerous. He was called a “faceless prosecutor” because no one was allowed to know who he was. Otherwise the criminals he was prosecuting might give him a “plata o promo” demand: “money or bullet.” Victor interviewed suspects from behind a one-way mirror in his office. and signed documents with a code name. He met me outside the building so no one could identify me going there. At one point he was sent to Medellín to hunt Pablo Escobar because law enforcement couldn’t trust the police in Medellín. Escobar also had spies in the phone system. That meant Victor wasn’t allowed to call his family. When he learned that Escobar was going to explode a bomb in Bogotá he couldn’t warn his wife.

Of course I used all of this in my book. It was never published.