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Latin America and Beyond
Winter 2003
Bogotá
Arturo Ardila-Gómez
The sleek red bus zooms out of the station in northern Bogotá, a futuristic symbol of an (almost) transformed city. Nearby, thousands of cyclists of all ages enjoy a sunny morning on Latin America's largest bike-path network.
The TransMilenio, as the modern bus network is called, moves 750,000 passengers per weekday-almost 100,000 more than Washington D.C.'s subway system. And Bogotá's citizens are proud of their transportation, proud of their city.
That wasn't always the case. In 1988, during Colombia's first mayoral elections, a local radio station launched its own "virtual" candidate. The candidate's transport platform was simple: instead of fixing all the roads, why not remove the pavement remaining to level out potholes. Vehicles would then no longer have to "sink" into potholes-instead they would simply ride over the unpaved street.
...
The first time I heard anything about people in the sewers in Colombia was back at the beginning of the 90s when ABC Primetime Live did a piece about all the children living down there. It became a fairly big humanitarian story in the media for a while, with other networks in America and Europe sending in crews to cover it and folks setting up charities abroad. And rightfully so—the situation at the time was a complete fucking nightmare. The sewers were filled with packs of kids living waist-deep in shit and taking in copious amounts of glue and crack in order to cope.
This was at the height of Colombia's "Dirty War", and the whole reason the street kids had gone down into the sewers in the first place was to get away from the violence. But then the paramilitary death squads who had chased them off the street started to come into the pipes and shoot them or douse them in gasoline or rape them. Ten-year-old girls were giving birth and trying to raise babies in the middle of sewage (the early onset of puberty having been brought on by the constant molestation by adults and older kids as well as the general stress on their bodies). It was about as fucked as things get.