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Escalating Drug Wars Turn Buenaventura Into Colombia's Deadliest City

"Although Bogotá, the capital, and other cities have become secure and prosperous enough that it is possible there to forget about this country’s four-decade-old civil conflict for a while, Buenaventura is a different story.

Killings in this city of about 300,000 climbed 30 percent last year, to 408, giving Buenaventura the nation’s highest homicide rate at 144 per 100,000, more than seven times the rate in Bogotá and four times that of Medellín. And this year, the police say, 222 people have been killed here.

A vast majority of the killings are the product of a narrow territorial conflict over control of the edge of the city’s slums, acres of wooden shacks built on stilts over the sea. From these makeshift wharves, police and naval officials say, fast boats depart with cocaine for points north. Buenaventura’s geography, crucial in connecting Colombia to the global flow of trade, also holds strategic cachet for drug traffickers.

Despite receiving more than $5 billion in antinarcotics and counterinsurgency aid from the United States this decade, making the country the largest recipient of American aid in the hemisphere, Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer and the supplier of 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/world/americas/22colombia.html

By miamimike on May 24, 2007, 00:26 in Friendly Talkzone.

jay1234 says on May 25, 2007, 15:32:

Interesting article I thought there were two points that are noteworthy in this article. One is the issue of whether the enofrcement failures there have to do with racism (80% of the population of Buenaventura is Afro-Colombian). Whether it is overt racism, with the government not making this city a priority, or just a case of "whack-a-mole", with efforts in the larger more well-known cities leaving a vaccuum in the lesser known cities is an interesting question. Regardless, I think given the geography of the area, with ready access to the Pacific Ocean, this frontier would have a drug problem.
The second point that caught my attention was the effect of privatizing the port and the resulting loss of jobs, plus the fact that Buenaventura didn't get any benefit from the privatization. With a 28% unemployment rate, the flourishing of the drug trade seems like a natural result.

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Leeroy says on May 25, 2007, 16:42:

I don't follow the "racism" argument here, why would enforcement failures have to do with the population being black?

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jay1234 says on May 25, 2007, 17:04:

What I mean is whether the government is only putting a half hearted effort to combatting the problems in this city because of the population being black. Sort of the argument in the US that inner cities with large black population only get lip service to addressing problems rather than a concerted effort to help the people there.
A problem in separating out whether or not this is true is the issue that Buenaventura is not one of the top tourist destinations, plus trying to separate out race vs. economic status of folks. Look at what is happening in Cartagena. Even though there are very poor people there (as well as a sizable Afro-Colombian population, that based on first hand observation, I didn't do any research on this point), because it is a popular tourist destination, there are very vocal efforts to combat crime.

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