Edilma Henao and Fidel Martínez, the parents of a Colombian family, regret not having been able to get out of poverty after decades of work and effort.
Their apartment, in the immense and poor municipality of Soacha, south of Bogotá, has four spaces in a peeling-walled house: an uncovered clothing patio, a kitchen, a room with two double beds, and a living room with three armchairs, a makeup vanity, a television and a computer. of sound.
The street in front is unpaved, electricity cables hang and not far away there is a sports field where every so often, even when BBC Mundo was, fights break out between armed gangs.
In 1989, Edilma and Fidel left the field, where they worked as coffee pickers since they were children, to Bogotá. They were looking for a less informal life, that did not force them to move all the time and allowed them a stable future.
Today they live with their children, Sandra and Juan Diego, under the anguish of having to ration food before every fortnight and in the face of the emergence of a protest movement that calls for a less hostile country for people like them .
Everyone in this house supports the anti-government protests that shook Colombia since April and promise to resume this 20 July, the date that celebrates the country’s independence.
But not only poor Colombians like the Martínez-Henao march, but a multiplicity of sectors that unified in the most important cry of protest of the recent history of the country.
“One of the old men to go out to volle (throw) a stone is very hard (difficult)”, says Fidel, sitting and n the bakery on a bustling shopping street in Soacha. “But we support, of course, because in this country they always take away the poor, they always take advantage of it, they have always stolen it.”
From 61 years and next To retire, Martínez looks back and, while savoring a malt drink, assures that he could have been “smarter” in the short moments that he accumulated money to invest it.
“But it is very difficult,” he adds, “because one does not know how to think and there is no one to help one, don’t you see that here they have always done whatever they want with the poor? ? ”.
Life against “the system”
Juan Diego Martínez, the son smaller, of 24 years, it is part of the protest movement that hopes to retake the streets this Tuesday. It is not “front line”, as the members of the most radical wing call themselves, but it adheres to the marches with its presence and its symbolic protest methods: graffiti, assemblies and stickers that denounce abuses by the State.
“ The (National) Unemployment affected us “, says , “ because my spoon (mother) has problems to get to work , it has taken four hours to get home at night because of the roadblocks, and because food prices rose. ”
“But unemployment also gave me little painting jobs and helped me think better,” he adds, referring to political activism and a textile venture for rappers that reflects the aesthetics of the protesters.
Now he dreams of buying a house for his mother in the short term and then traveling the world painting – illegally – trains, subways and buses.
This is probably the best moment of a short life full of traumatic episodes.
To the 12 years, Juan Diego left private school to help his family when they were about to lose their home.
Then he entered another public school, and they got him out for a drug deal.
Without graduating, he went to work in a steel factory. Soon after, already an avid user of bazuco, the base paste of cocaine, he fell into depression when his girlfriend became pregnant with another man.
So he went to his parents’ homeland, the mountainous coffee region, to do the same job that they, before, wanted to leave.
There he worked 16 hours a day and consumed more drugs than ever because, he says, “the bosses wanted us addicted, in order to exploit us, do you understand me?”
When he returned to Bogotá, brought by a cousin who saw him skinny, pale and wayward, the search for that same girlfriend, who had lost her baby, led him to live for three months in the Bronx, a sordid red zone of consumption and prostitution.
Addicted, separated from his parents and persecuted by a group of friends with whom he had fought with a knife, Juan Diego decided to join the army, a common practice in young people v Ulnerable .
In a year he learned to swim and shoot and patrolled huge tracts of land on the border with Venezuela. That hardened him into the logic of an institution that was corrupt for him.
“There are mafias there for everything, from the provision of food to the role they put on it,” he says. “I managed, I got into it, I managed to get drugs in there, but the commanders still set it on me, tortured me with tests like filling buckets with a spoon, and that ended up breaking me again.”
Three years ago he was back on the streets of a Bogotá transformed by vigorous cultural and protest movements.
But his relationship of shock with “the system”, with the police, continues to be conflictive.
The fines add up to a debt of 11 million pesos (US $ 3. 000) to the State for graffiti public goods , not putting on a mask or sneaking into the transport service, practices that he does not out of necessity, but in the form of pro testa.
Juan Diego, noble of character but violent in his outbursts, is one of the few Bogota citizens that one sees without a mask, even wearing in the jaw. He omits it because, according to him, “the covid is a biological weapon to subdue ourselves.”
“And if I get vaccinated,” he adds, “it is to leave behind everything we have fought, it is to bend.”
One story among many
Achieve that Martínez-Henao opened the doors of his house for me, it was not easy. A dozen families in similar situations refused for fear of being prosecuted, persecuted by the police, punished at work or exposed in their true vulnerability.
In a society as class-oriented as that of Colombia, poverty is also usually a source of shame. Sandra, Juan Diego’s older sister, refused to talk to me because she didn’t want to “victimize herself”, because she doesn’t want to “feel sorry for anyone.”
But the story of her family is the story of millions. The same that inspires thousands to protest for a less exclusive country.
Fidel left the countryside full of hope to find a similar situation in the city: he left the informality of the walker, the workforce vulnerable to coffee, that like a miner goes from town to town earning and spending, to find the precariousness of the worker, who exposes his physical health in exchange for a salary that does not reach and a contract that does not protect him
.
“The only people that I have seen that protect workers in this country are, forgive me to tell you, the guerrillas, that when I was a walker at least they did not to force us to work 15 hours a day ”, he says.
During 17 years Fidel worked in a furniture factory from which, he claims, he was fired with the 50% of compensation. Then he spent five years in a dairy company where, he says, he cut his finger sealing milk bags and injured his back carrying boxes of up to kilos in a building that did not have an elevator .
He tried to sue the company, but the owners had their defense armored before the courts. And Colombia, remember, has practically no unions .
Today his life is spent in waiting rooms, doing paperwork to be able to treat and pay for his knee, hip, back and heart problems.
You can now start managing the pension, but you are concerned about the process because you cannot pay for a manager or a lawyer.
The anguish of not reaching the fortnight
Fidel and Juan Diego, although they sleep in the same room, are usually fighting . The father criticizes the son for being “rude” and “exposing himself and getting into trouble unnecessarily.” The son criticizes the father who does not understand his activism and dedicates so much time and money to gambling in casinos.
In the middle are Edilma and Sandra, who work in the same textile company and pay the household bills. At different times, sometimes in a continuous shift from Sunday to Sunday, the women of this house spend an average of four hours a day going to and from a company that sanctions delays of 10 minutes.
His strategy towards the future is not the confrontation and the complaint that dominate the discourse of men, but omit criticism and produce and live under the philosophy of pragmatism .
“Every two weeks I fear that we cannot reach the fortnight (payment date) with food in the fridge,” says Edilma. “Already today, which is 11 (July), one does not have enough to eat meat and begins to increase rice and potato and maybe an egg. ”
From 50 years and employed 22 in the textile factory, he does not see all this time as “wasted, because you learn and meet good people, but it is true that there has not been the possibility of getting ahead”.
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