Questions: How have Colombia’s civil wars affected Bogotá? How has Bogotá been impacted by urban warfare and violence?
Unlike other cities, Bogotá is not a city where international or global conflicts have inflicted damage on the city. Internal wars, however, have affected the physical, demographic, and social memory of the city and its inhabitants. Through the twentieth century, Colombia saw several civil wars come and go, with one unresolved conflict leading to the next. As the economic and political center of Colombia, Bogotá did not endure much direct action between armies or organized large-scale attacks. Bogotá experienced the civil wars of the last 60 years in different ways, with small yet destructive acts of violence and terrorism edging themselves into the city’s memory, while the city became the largest urban terminus for internally displaced persons that turned Bogotá into a cosmopolitan urban center without much international immigration.
Herbert Braun’s The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia investigates the history of Colombia before El Bogotazo, the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the subsequent riots, and the immediate social consequences of the riots. Braun’s analysis of the event follows a path of social memory, remarking that El Bogotazo, or el Nueve de Abril as it is better remembered in Bogotá, is burrowed deeply into the collective memory of the city, even for those born outside the city or after the event (Braun 1986, 200-204.) It is important to discuss the social memory of el Nueve de Abril, as the event kick-off La Violencia (The Violence), a civil war that engulfed Colombia from 1948 to 1958, leading to the displacing of millions and has an estimated death toll of 200,000. Braun’s discussion of El Bogotazo also dives into the destruction of the riots. El Bogotazo commenced as news of Gaitán’s death spread through the city center, with the cries of “Mataron a Gaitán” (They killed Gaitán) ringing through the city center (Braun 1986, 132.) The ensuing violence occurred because of Gaitán’s popularity with the working class of Bogotá, as his progressive policies and passionate personal style of politics lit fires in the hearts of many (Braun 1986, 132, 200-203.) In total, the riots damaged 157 buildings, of which 103 were completely burned down, with government buildings making up a majority of them (Braun 1986, 164.) Property damage extended beyond buildings. Trams, the city’s public transportation system, were also heavily damaged. According to “El tranvía de bogotá, 1882-1951”, an article written by Juan Santiago Correa Restrepo, Santiago Jimeno León, and Marianela Villamizar Bacca, the riots saw an estimated 34 tram being damaged or completely destroyed by fires (Restrepo, León, Bacca 2017, 222-223.) The authors of “El tranvía de bogotá, 1882-1951” include the political and economic issues that caused the trams to be targeted. The authors assert that the locations of 17 to 18 destroyed trams coincide with the most heavily damaged areas of the city center (Plaza de Bolívar, Santander Park, on the Avenida Jiménez, and on the 7th Carrera in front of the offices of Gaitán.) The other 15 to 16 tram cars were destroyed in surrounding areas of the city center, not near the main flashpoints of violence. The authors include evidence of the main accelerant in the fires, gasoline, and of the then ongoing rivalries between the electric trams and the gasoline buses, with the trams garnishing more support from the middle and lower classes and the buses being supported by the city’s upper and elite classes (Restrepo, León, Bacca 2017, 222-225.) In the immediate aftermath of El Bogotazo, the lost trams were replaced by gasoline-powered vehicles in an effort to return to normal operation. These efforts were countermanded by Mayor Mazuera, who began a project to remove the rail lines used by the trams in favor of expanding private bus services (Restrepo, León, Bacca 2017, 225-226.) The trams of Bogotá were fully phased out by June 1951 in favor of privately owned and operated buses (Restrepo, León, Bacca 2017, 226-227.)
El Bogotazo endures as a turning point for Bogotá. The city’s physical appearance is a clear example of how El Bogotazo forever changed how the city existed before and after the 9th of April, 1948. Following the destruction of the city center, the city and national government began to rebuild and rethink the city as a whole. Part of the rebuilding plan saw the widening of several roads that crisscrossed the city center. The Carrera Séptima (Seventh North-South Street) became the focus of the widening project, as this road runs perpendicular to the central plaza, the National Cathedral, the Palace of Justice, the National Capital, and the Presidential Palace (de Urbina González 2009, 157.) Government and military buildings destroyed in the riots of El Bogotazo were rebuilt closer to the central city plaza, creating a more concentrated seat of government within the capital and closer to the presidential palace (de Urbina González 2009, 157.) This widening project is directly attributed to the violence of El Bogotazo, with the city’s government becoming concerned over the likely eruption of violence in the future and the difficulties of deploying police and military force from the periphery of the city to its governmental center (de Urbina González 2009, 158.) These physical changes to the city’s layout coincided with a demographic shift in the city’s center. Amparo de Urbina González’s “Impacto de ‘El Bogotazo’” utilizes telephone directories to showcase the flight of upper and elite classes from the city center, attributing the violence of El Bogotazo as the primary cause for this change (de Urbina González 2009, 163.) González’s argument is supported by census data from 1946 and 1956. The 1946 census shows a concentration of upper and elite family units in the city center, where El Bogotazo was to take place two years later (de Urbina González 2009, 161-162.) By 1956, the concentration of family units in the upper and elite classes shifted from the city center to the city’s northern neighborhoods, following the corridor created by the widened Carrera Séptima (de Urbina González 2009, 162-163.)
In the aftermath of El Bogotazo, the population of Bogotá increased dramatically. Following El Bogotazo, the whole of Colombia became consumed by the civil war known as La Violencia. After El Bogotazo, the internal armed conflict became a largely rural conflict, as the violence of El Bogotazo discouraged the belligerent Liberal and Conservative Parties from arming their supporters. Furthermore, the political and economic importance of Bogotá ensured that the military remained in control of the city following the riots, creating an atmosphere of uneasy security (Braun 1986, 132, 200-203). The violence in the countryside pushed over a million Colombians from their homes and into the relative safety of the cities, of which Bogotá became the destination with the most significant number of internally displaced persons. As noted in Carrillo’s La Ciudad En La Sombra, Bogotá’s population increased from 660,000 in 1951, to 1,130,000 in 1958, when La Violencia officially ended (Carrillo 2013, 30.) By 1964, the population had increased to 1,730,000, of which 850,433 inhabitants were born outside the city, a near majority of the city (Carrillo 2013, 34.)
La Violencia ended in 1958 with unresolved grievances and several armed groups in the countryside retaining land they had captured during the civil war. In 1964, the government attacked the remaining armed rebels, sparking the current civil war in Colombia. The renewed violence saw further rural-to-urban migration, with Bogotá’s population growing from 2,877,000 in 1973 to 3,500,000 in 1978; most of this population increase came from people born outside the capital (Carrillo 2013, 30.) The current civil war is marked by conflicts between several armed groups such as communist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, private armed forces, drug traffickers, and the national armed forces. This conflict has seen the displacement of an estimated 7,000,000 people and the deaths of 300,000 over a near six-decade period. From this conflict stemmed several attacks and acts of terrorism, with the Siege of the Palace of Justice (1985) and the bombing of the DAS building (1989), two examples etched into the social memory of the city.
The Siege of the Palace of Justice was an attack by the M-19, a predominantly urban communist guerrilla group born out of the civil war that started in the countryside of Colombia. The siege saw the deaths of 44 combatants and half of the justices of the Colombia Supreme Court (Rieken 2020, 187). Iris Medellín Pérez’s La gente del sancocho nacional is an important sociological study of the aftermath of the Siege, examining how the M-19 combatants joined the movement and were trained and indoctrinated, and presenting oral testimony of the relationship between the M-19 and the neighborhoods they operated in and how the process of demobilization affected the individuals of the M-19 (Medellín Pérez 2018, 38-39). These testimonials reveal the sort of neighborhoods targeted for operations, as the M-19 attempted to expand their social networks beyond students, academics, and priests (Medellín Pérez 2018, 282-285.) Medellín Pérez discusses the different experiences of demobilizing M-19 members from low-income neighborhoods from those recruited from medium and upper-class neighborhoods. Members of the M-19 who resided in low-income neighborhoods endured more difficulties in attempting to rejoin general society, with issues stemming from discrimination to becoming targets of assassination (Medellín Pérez 2018, 285-286.) The M-19 movement is remembered mainly for its action in the Siege of the Palace of Justice, which has a complicated narrative attached to the social memory of the city. The violence perpetrated by the M-19 and the national armed forces creates divergent memories. Rodríguez’s El Papel de La Antropología Forense En La Identificación de Las Víctimas Del Holocausto Del Palacio de Justicia, Bogotá, Colombia (1985) reveals significant differences between the official narrative of the government, the memory of the city, and a reality of forced disappearances and mistrust in the government. Rodríguez shows this by focusing on the thirty bodies of civilians and guerrillas exhumed following the convictions of several military members who served during the Siege. The exhumed bodies were subject to genetic testing and other forms of forensic analysis in an attempt to accurately identify all of the people buried from the Siege. The divide between apparent truth and reality created by the civil wars of Colombia is not an issue with an easy answer. To address the issues of lies and crimes perpetrated by the government and other armed groups, the creation of a truth commission became paramount. In the fifth chapter of the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica’s “¡Basta Ya! Colombia: memorias de guerra y dignidad” the issue of social memory is discussed. The goal of ¡Basta Ya! is to create transparency for future generations to heal from the civil wars. This is a crucial endeavor for the people of Bogotá, as the city’s population has been made to witness and experience countless acts of violence from within and outside the city’s borders.
The lasting effects of over half a century of civil wars are visible in the streets and people of Bogotá. Social issues mounted as the city’s population grew to nearly 8 million inhabitants by 2018. The role of Bogotá as the primary destination for internally displaced persons remains the same as it was in 1948, with a large share of the migrant population being young women escaping sexual and political violence. 2,420,887 women were internally displaced between 1985 and 2013 (Cadena-Camargo 2019, 2.) The legacy of the civil war in Colombia and its effects on contemporary Bogotá are also visible in the nature of policing and the recent police reactions to protests in the city. As the people of Bogotá began to protest a reform to the taxation and revenue collection laws, the national police responded with deadly force, killing and disappearing several people in the capital city (Turkewitz 2021.) As the police have been trained to see a constant state of war, which has existed in Colombia for generations, the tactics of the police are to treat all possible threats with deadly force.
Although Bogotá has not been the center of the large-scale battles seen in Berlin, Stalingrad, or Changsha, the city has changed due to two civil wars. The nature of transportation, the city’s demographics, the size of the streets, and the nature of policing are all rooted in the wars largely fought in the country’s rural regions. Bogotá’s experience with sieges, embassy takeovers, bombings, and other forms of terrorism have forever changed the nature of the city and the people who call the “Athens of South America” home.
Bibliography
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