Bogota off the beaten track

Psychologist and politician Hernando Gómez takes tourists to places in Bogota where you generally are happy to stay far away from. His tours offer you a peek in the life of the city’s lowest classes. Article published on Colombia Passport.

After half an hour walking through the Santa Fe neighborhood in the center of Bogota it occurs to me that a man on a motorbike has been following us all along. When we cross the street he suddenly disappears. “He reached the boundaries of his territory,” explains Hernando Gómez (55), our guide this evening.

“Neighborhoods here are divided between different gangs, who all have their own armed ‘campaneros’ guarding the streets.” He points to the yellow taxis cruising down an empty street for the umpteenth time. “Obviously they are not here to score a ride, they are paid to serve as vigilantes.”

It’s the hidden side of Bogota street life which you are unable to see with an untrained eye. Before we entered this tricky ‘barrio’ Gómez had to ask one of our group of twenty to take off his baseball cap. It might have led to costly misunderstandings with Santa Fe’s gang members, who communicate using their baseball caps in a silent sign language only they seem to understand. And if the city’s homeless are suddenly sleeping elsewhere, Gómez knows there is ‘social cleansing’ taking place and it’s better not to enter a certain neighborhood.

Gómez, a psychologist who acquired some fame as candidate-mayor for Polo Democrático Alternativo in 2007, over the years already has shown thousands of people the harsh reality of the Colombian capital’s ‘barrios marginales’, in day- and nighttime. ‘The hiker of the city’, as he’s popularly known, is a man with a mission. Strongly sympathizing with the underprivileged, Gómez wants to show what’s life like on the dark side of Bogota. “About half of the Bogotanos live in poor neighborhoods, one million of them not even earning a dollar a day. Of the other half many either hardly know about their living conditions or simply turn a deaf ear on the problem,” says Gómez. “As wealthier Colombians we live next to a waterfall, but we generally don’t hear the noise of it anymore,” he adds metaphorically.

To make sure people do see and hear, Gómez takes students, foreigners and blue collar workers alike to the districts where the displaced live, where the gangs reign, or where sex-workers are being exploited. During the four to five hour walks it appears that every street corner has a story to tell. Funny stories. Sad stories. Horrifying ones as well, like the one he kicks off with when we’re strolling along Cementerio Central. Stopping in front of a row of ordinary-looking houses, Gómez informs us of their macabre past. “In the eighties this place served as an illegal funeral parlor. The bodies of victims of social cleansing practices mysteriously disappeared, until it came out that they were solved in acid.” It was also the time when car accidents would be used to get rid of dead bodies, explains Gómez, “by putting them between the victims of the crash.”

One of the continuing sad stories of Santa Fe is prostitution. Brothels, love motels and well-known clubs like La Piscina and El Castillo line up along the streets. Shadowy figures are monitoring the scene from dark corners of the street, while big-breasted women with heavy make-up sell their bodies on the pavements. Some of them are moved in packs between Bogota, Pereira, Cartagena and Medellin, never longer in one place than three months to prevent them getting rooted. Their cedulas taken from them, they are fairly limited in their movements.

While he is talking two young girls with way too short skirts for the cold rainy night are passing by. Street hookers looking for customers. They perform their services for prices as low as 3,000 pesos, Gómez knows. Santa Fe was declared ‘zona de tolerancia’ by the city government in 2002, which means that prostitution is tolerated here. It also means that the neighborhood has deteriorated badly and fallen into the hands of (former) paramilitary bands. As the Santa Fe barrio borders on the financial district and is on the nomination to be redeveloped in the nearby future, ground prices are high and attract a lot of foreign investment. Gómez points out the empty apartment blocks surrounding us. “Families are forced to leave their homes. If not for the bad security situation, it’s because they get threatened by the criminal syndicates to sell their properties for submarket prices.”

The bad parts of any city present themselves as an ‘erotic attraction’ to him, Gómez jokes. And yet another story follows. Once having to wait ten hours for a connecting flight in the Peruvian capital of Lima, he couldn’t resist the temptation of going uphill, ignoring the warnings of gang violence. Hardly after entering the barrio, he indeed got a gun pointed at him. “I said, you can have my twenty dollars or we can have some beers together.” Gómez ended up feasting with his attackers and almost missed his flight back to Colombia because they wouldn’t let him go.

His astonishing diplomatic skills also paid off in Ciudad Bolivar, in the poorer southern part of Colombia’s capital. There he was threatened with a knife while showing around Swedish embassy personnel. But to the surprise of the Swedes who already had taken their wallets out to hand over their money, the thief and Gómez ended up hugging each other. This evening in Santa Fe he also repeatedly demonstrates he gets along very well with the people on the streets. “I love them a lot,” he says with a broad grin on his face, after a chat with a homeless young man selling self-made art.

But even streetwise Gómez doesn’t get away with everything. Walking with a group of fifty people a few years ago, he ran into some armed thugs who robbed them of all their possessions. Seeing the terror on our faces, he immediately starts to play it down. “One armed robbery is not bad, considering the fact that I organized hundreds of excursions through several rough parts of the city.”
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Note: The walking tours by Hernando Gómez cannot be booked and are not always officially announced. He likes to ‘keep things informal’. Besides Santa Fe he regularly visits La Favorita, La Perseverancia, Las Cruces and various places in Ciudad Bolivar.