Across Colombia, red flags of despair fly as harsh Covid lockdown is
extended for a third time
Colombias infection rate is relatively low, but its ruthlessly enforced
lockdown is causing hunger and nationwide anger. In the working class
districts of Bogota, signs of desperation are everywhere.
By Nash Landesman
Bogota, Colombia Red flags hang draped from the doors, rooftops and
windows of Bogotas impoverished southern neighborhoods. They symbolize the
suffering wreaked by a now thrice-extended house-arrest and quarantine
policy purportedly aimed at containing the Coronavirus. While the pandemic
has infected only a few thousand people out of a population of more than
thirty million in Colombia, the quarantine has caused prolonged
unemployment, a wave of housing evictions, and rioting; fueling scourges
like domestic violence while pushing many to the edge of starvation.
Colombias tragedy mirrors those of the many developing countries which
followed the strict lockdown polices promoted by the W.H.O. and its
second-largest funder, the mega-billionaire Bill Gates. The precarious state
of existence for many citizens of global South countries has nothing to do
with infectious disease, but with policy.
The U.S.-friendly government of El Salvadors President Nayib Bukele, for
example, has formalized baseball bat gang beatings as a means to impose
quarantine. While no peer-reviewed studies have been conducted on the novel
method of enforcement, many scientists would likely conclude that systematic
bat-beatdowns could pose a greater public health risk than the virus.
In Chile, which is ruled by right-wing billionaire Sebastian Piñera, riots
led by informal sector workers erupted this May as a result of food
shortages caused by the shutdown in Santiago.
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Meanwhile, in Colombia, a total lockdown of the economy has resulted in the
spread of starvation as people are stripped of their right to work and
public handouts fail to meet targets due to widespread corruption. Hunger is
spreading by the day.
In Bogota, the lockdowns, which include informal business closures, are
enforced by large fines and hair-trigger detentions insisted upon by the
mayor, Claudia Lopez. Revealingly, Lopez has not followed her own quarantine
policies, recently causing a minor public scandal by entering a grocery
store with her partner, thus ignoring the ban she imposed on people entering
stores with accompaniment.
Residents of Bogota hang red flags from their homes to symbolize their
desperation, anger, and the looming sense of death provoked by the lockdown
Those who face the most risk under Colombias lockdown policies are members
of the informal sectors of the economy like urban street vendors. As a
public administrator named Oscar Oviedo, who is active in the opposition
movement to president Duque, explained to me: [President] Duques
right-wing ruling party is not interested in protecting the popular or poor
classes; rather it wants to protect private business and big capital. The
informal sector in Colombia is invisible to public policies. It has no
social benefits, nor security, nor are they eligible to receive state aid
such as money transfers. Duque does not represent the poor. Duque is the
Trump of Colombia.
For neoliberal leaders like Duque, the advent of Covid was a lucky break, as
it forced people off the streets and into their homes, just after mass
global protest movements against right-wing regimes like Chile and
Colombias reached their peaks. The timing of this disease certainly helped
to prevent any remaining embers of dissent from being re-lit.
In global South countries which did not reflexively heed public health
advice from Bill Gates, the U.S. or the W.H.O., challenging the faulty
predictive computer models on which so many lockdown policies were initially
based, the situation is considerably better. In Nicaragua, for instance, the
Sandinista government refused to lockdown, likely because its base among the
rural poor and informal labor sector in the cities would have been driven
into destitution.
Despite a spate of unfounded accusations made by anti-Sandinista mouthpieces
in the US, which have falsely claimed that Nicaraguan President Daniel
Ortega has declined to take action and might have even been dead the
country has so far disproven its critics.
As Nicaragua-based journalist John Perry wrote in the health journal, The
Lancet, Accusing the Nicaraguan Government of an erratic response to the
epidemic, violating the human rights of its citizens, is both inaccurate
and unfair. In criticizing Nicaraguas response to the coronavirus disease
2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, [such critics] fail to note that the country has
the lowest level of infection in the Americas
The government is genuinely
attempting to balance the fight against COVID-19 with the economic needs of
the population. To impose an untimely lockdown would not only cause huge
resentment and hardship but could be counterproductive.
It is in Colombia and in other less developed countries that followed the
global consensus where the impact of Covid has proven the most deadly.
According to a model developed by the Actuarial Society of South Africa, the
lockdown imposed in Colombia will lead to twenty nine times more lives lost
than the harm it seeks to prevent. A walk through one of Bogotas
red-flagged neighborhoods reveals how such morbid math might play out.
It is impossible to continue quarantine because people need to eat, argues
Caesar Diaz, a social activist from the Usme district in southern Bogota.
People need to have the minimal conditions, which are absent during the
lockdown. With time, these social conditions are going to produce a crisis
because people dont have access to minimal life conditions. They need to
obtain these conditions one way or the other and right now is the wrong
waywith violence. What we have is a social time bomb waiting to explode.
David Beasley, head of the UN World Food Program, also confirmed that, as
the lockdown continues, millions can be expected to starve to death.
Millions
face being pushed to the brink of starvation, with the specter
of famine a very real and dangerous possibility, he wrote. Due to the
Coronavirus [lockdown policy response], an additional 130 million people
could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020. Thats a
total of 265 million people.
Colombia serves as a microcosm for how a multi-tiered, highly-fractured
society might fare during a period of extended lockdown, now thrice extended
and set to lift gradually starting in June. People live at the edge, day by
day, Diaz, the activist from southern Bogota, said. They cannot stay in
their homes because they cannot pay rent without working for two or three
weeks or longer. It is impossible to set money aside for food water,
medicines. So people are in the streets. Theyve been evicted. There is help
in theory but it is very difficult to access because of bureaucracy and
corruption. Here corruption has grown out of the coronavirus.
Confining people to their homes by force for months on end has also been an
obvious recipe for family crisis. One of the principal problems [to arise
from the coronavirus lockdown] is domestic violence, Diaz added. Combine
people in a confined space for a long period of time with the poverty, the
lack of employmentand violence emerges naturally under these lockdown
conditions.
Or, as a doctor from an urgent care clinic in Usaquen, Edgardo Enrique,
explained: We have seen a major spike in domestic violence during this
lockdown, in addition to increasing signs of emotional disturbance, stemming
from the anxiety and depression caused by forced isolation and the
insecurity it brings. This can be manifested in alcoholism or suicide. The
doctor added that he was strictly forbidden from discussing anything related
to Coronavirus.
Colombians are determined to survive nonetheless. Instead of white flags to
indicate surrender, there is a sea of red, the color of alarm, urgency and
bloodwhich organizations like the WHO will have on its hands if and when
the consequences of this lockdown are finally tallied.
That red cloth (red cloth) means that there is no food to eat, there is no
support, no work, Usme resident, Miguel Quiroga, said. It is hard to
endure. We already owe three months of rent because we dont have a job or
anything like that. I was about to sign a work contract before this all
started. I have a little daughter. We have not received any help from
[Bogota Mayor] Claudia Lopez. In this house live four families and we have
not received no help from Lopez. From nobody, honestly from nobody.
We are Pailas, Miguel continued, using a slang term for in the dumps. He
then cupped his head in his hands and broken into sobbing.
Riots have erupted sporadically since Bogotas unpopular mayor visited Usme
with promises of food aid. The mayor came here and told people to go home,
to comply with the isolation, that she was going to solve the food issue
here, recalled Yourman Rojano, a young Venezuelan immigrant living in Usme.
She [the Mayor] said they are going to give us mealssome bags of food,
some bags with products, which have not arrived. So people are a little
rowdy about it because they have promised to bring it and they havent
brought it. We are not getting that help, neither food, money, or anything.
Here we solve it with our own hands. That is principally why the protests
have taken place. People are confined and frustrated that promises are being
broken, by a quarantine with no end in sight.
Yourman is 21 years old and lives with his mother, father, one year-old
daughter and four year-old sister. His mother is the households lone
breadwinner, cleaning houses in the North; while his father has been barred
from doing his job as a coffee vendor in the streets. He the damage from
this lockdown will last a lifetime.
In regard to my sister, she is a very active girl and the confinement is
affecting her severely. Obviously this is affecting her in all respects, at
a crucial stage in her development. Even if she does the activities and
tasks sent by her school, she has a lot of free time and she is locked up
here almost without being able to vent all that adrenaline she has, Yourman
reflected. She wants to be playing, wants to be running, she wants to be
doing something, and shes not able to do it; so it is already a potentially
lasting psychological and emotional impact for her.
Another Bogota resident I spoke to, a young portly college student with a
red flag hanging from his window, opened his door to explain the meaning of
the flag. I am a university student so I have no income, he said. My
parents worked in clothing making T-shirts, but many companies have broken,
the work decreases a lot. That is whats going on. Hopefully this quarantine
will end soon, just as many companies have gone bankrupt and employment
disappears. I needed to travel. Instead Im strung up with no mobility.
Businesses in the affluent North have also begun buckling under economic
pressure caused by the lockdown. The owner of an upscale hotel, Casa 93,
Felipe Holguin, explained, The economy is finished. It is not coming back.
They ruined it. I cant make payroll; I cant pay my employees, Im behind
on my expenses. Its a total nightmare.
With only three guests staying at the fifty-plus room hotel, a worker named
Lisa Nieto hustled back and forth between the kitchen and the front desk,
grilling a steak for a customer in the restaurant while checking guests in
and out and answering phones as the steak sizzled. Like most other employees
of the hotel, the chef who normally ran the kitchen was on furlough.
Nash Landesman
Nash Landesman is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Telesur,
The Pulitzer Center, The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Deadspin, Foreign
Policy Journal, UrbanDaddy and elsewhere. He can be reached at
NashLandesman1@xxxxxxxxx
