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Columbia :: Dancing in the dark Colombia's third largest city, Cali, is known as the salsa capital of the world. It also has a more grim claim to fame- it is the country's most violent city - 'more violent than Iraq'. This article by Isobel Fonseca was first published in The Guardian Review. There are six murders a day in Colombia, where homicide is the first cause of death for men between 14 and 44; where, in Cali, just three in 10 men make it to age 30 - leading to the ominous ratio of six women for every man. For the first six months of this year 1,225 assassinations were recorded in Cali (and for every homicide, seven others are wounded). "More violent than Iraq," says Antonio da Silva, head of the Colombian mission of Médecins Sans Frontières - and he is referring not to the political violence that has engulfed the country for 40 years, but to social, urban violence, which in many parts of the country has become normal. The project's method of dealing with this combines basic doctoring with psychiatric help, as well as physiotherapy; most important, perhaps, the doors remain open after the visible wounds have settled. Médecins Sans Frontières, which sends volunteer doctors all over the oppressed world, has significantly expanded the concept of "health care" - so that, for example, one murdering Caleño, 22-year-old Pablo, got shot, got through the program and hung up his holster; now he's selling roses instead. Over the past six years 2,764 victims of violence have received treatment from Médecins Sans Frontières, situated in the pounding heart of the Aguablanca district of Cali. Many people here were, a generation ago, desplazados, displaced Colombians fleeing their country's interminable, complicated, armed conflict (the term "civil war" lends a legitimacy none of the combatants can claim), and the District, as it is known, still has the feel of a world apart. Residents speak of "going to Cali", even though their area and its 600,000 inhabitants occupy nearly a third of the city grid. As if physical violence weren't enough, they face a harder-to-treat structural violence whereby no one will hire anyone from el distrito - there is no getting out (and it is not so easy getting in: no taxi driver will take you there.)
Justine Simons, the Australian coordinator of the Aguablanca project and herself a psychologist, says "the main achievement of this project is the confidence and proximity gained with a traditionally suspicious and inconsistent population". Violent gangs supply much of this population. Aguablanca has 130 barrios [districts], and each of these supports two or three gangs - with names like El Palo, the stick, La Gallera, the cockfight corral, and Los Simpsons. Reserved for elderly hoodlums (say, 25 year olds) is a gang called Los Abuelos, the grandfathers, but, remembering the figures for early death as well as for early parenthood (I met several 15-year-old mothers), the name may be entirely without irony. At Maroquín Cauquita, the city-run health centre that is now taking over the Médecins Sans Frontières project, opposite the clap-happy church of Cristo Señor de la Vida, the survivors of violent attack undertake their physiotherapy. The quadriplegic in the yellow football shirt, I later learn, is a contract killer and ex-trafficker, who killed his first man (and his first woman) at 12. But there are not only very bad boys here. On the day I visit, side-by-side on the mats with the bad boys, there was Luz Mary, a middle-aged woman hit through both hips by a stray bullet; Alvaro and Manuel, a shopkeeper injured during a robbery; handsome Jorge, a 30-year-old quadriplegic who has no one to look after him and who doesn't know why he was hit or by whom; and there was Bryan, a shy 10 year old come to physio with his father, who patiently brushes the boy's withered limbs (for stimulation). Bryan was shot in the head by another 10 year old: his friend, who was angry that Bryan didn't want to play with him anymore. Rejection is a strong mover among the perpetrators of violence - though not always so plainly as in the case of Lady, a 17-year-old quadriplegic, shot in the back by the boyfriend she spurned. Sometimes there is reunion. One of the most effecting sights in the rehab ward is of these cut-down hard men aided in their exercises by a woman, usually their mama. And they are in for the long haul. In Brazil, gangs shoot to kill, according to Antonio da Silva, himself a Brazilian; but in Colombia, they aim to maim, and spinal injuries prevail. At current rates, Cali, "salsa capital of the world", is set also to host the world's greatest concentration of disabled people. Nike brand clothes, the only necessity rival gangs agree on, might be persuaded to sponsor this army of the fallen. And they'll have to rebuild the city: not a ramp in sight as you drive around, dodging car accidents and starving horses, wondering at the magnificent tropical blooms that flourish amid the rubble; there is no wheelchair access anywhere, a fact that speaks of the invisibility of this population. Outside the rehab centre, going to visit other survivors of this unremarked war, we (I am heavily chaperoned at all times and not allowed in el distrito after 5 pm) pass through the pathetic "territories" of the various gangs: one or two city blocks of unrendered brick or breeze-block houses - unfinished houses like so much unfinished business here. Only the ironmonger is getting the job done: almost every humble front yard in Aguablanca is caged. Safe at home, we find Ana Milena, a pretty, slight, young-looking 25 year old, and her daughter Geraldín Emilse. Ana Milena was stabbed in the stomach and neck by her partner in the middle of morning traffic, witnessed by dozens of people, including Geraldín Emilse, then not quite three. Colombia's controversial president, Alvaro Uribe, claims the violence is down, even if workers in the field beg to differ and the local press is crammed with contrary statistical evidence. But the desire to wish the violence away is, apparently, profoundly human. Geraldín Emilse, her hair bunched in elastics decorated with tiny trainers, has always insisted to psychologists that her mother was hit by a bus, not by her father. Even a shining survivor like Ana Milena - articulate, unembittered, afraid (in triumphant recovery of appropriate emotion, uncommon amid all this numbing violence) - tends to downplay the depth of violence in her world. It wasn't until after I met her that I learned her younger sister had also been hit, by a neighbour's gun. That sister, a quadriplegic as a result of the attack, subsequently died. Aguablanquinos are victims of poverty and exclusion, with no protection (though here police do sell protection: guns as well as drivers' licences), and very often the family has fallen away - four of the quadriplegics who were helped by MSF have died in the past six months because their families couldn't manage the minimum, to turn them every two hours. That night I went to a party far from el distrito , on a starlit rooftop in Cali, looking across to the fairy lights of a different deadly neighbourhood, and I danced a vallenato with a charming colonel of the Colombian army. Everyone in Colombia is charming, and everyone, despite everything, can dance a vallenato (and cumbia, salsa, merengue, tropical, bolero, pasodoble and chirimia); the combination captures the martyred, curiously romantic atmosphere of a place engulfed by deeply unromantic dramas. Why is Colombia so violent? "This is a land of privilege, not rights," explains Antonio (the discretionary dispensation of emergency medical care is one proof). To be sure, violence is the means by which people have always made themselves heard, protected their territories - usually greater than a few inner-city blocks. People blame cocaine, but it goes much further back: to the independence wars, the dozens of civil wars, the countless uprisings, the coups d'etat, the wars with Ecuador... but also, you will hear, it is down to a rugged ter rain other guerrillas can only dream about (the FARC, or should we say los abuelos, is the oldest guerrilla movement in the western hemisphere). A whole chunk of Colombian history (1948-64) is referred to as La violencia ; one ticket into today's parliament is a bloody revolutionary or paramilitary past.
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