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MEDELLIN, Colombia (AlertNet) – It is 10am in the upper reaches of one of Medellin’s toughest neighbourhoods – a sprawling mountainside slum known as Comuna 13 – and the narrow streets lined with tin-roofed shacks are eerily quiet.
Grocery shops and bakeries are open but there are no customers inside. There’s hardly anyone using the new $5 million electric escalators that run through the slum ferrying residents up and down, saving them the 30-minute climb up concrete stairways.
Children play on swings and an old lady sweeps the pavement outside her one-room brick shack. These are the few locals out on the streets.
Standing on a street corner, one teenager appears to be checking who enters and leaves the neighourhood. He communicates in whistles to another teenager leaning out of a window in a nearby house.
The calm on these usually vibrant streets bears witness to the wave of drug-fuelled violence rocking gang-controlled Comuna 13 in recent weeks. The slum’s 135,000 residents are simply too afraid to venture out, especially at night.
Last month, two 11-year-old boys were abducted by armed men. The police discovered their dismembered bodies stuffed in sacks. Allegedly, they had crossed a so-called invisible border – this is a boundary that divides gang-controlled territories and crossing it is reason enough to get killed here.
In one weekend alone this month 25 people were murdered in Medellin, Colombia’s second city. As of 13 March this year, the murder tally stands at 335 – 36 more than during the same period in 2012.
It’s this high level of drug-fuelled violence in Comuna 13 and other gang-controlled ghettos across Medellin that is forcing hundreds of people to leave their homes every year – they stay within the same city but move from one slum to another.
Up to now, most people displaced within Colombia were driven from their homes in the countryside and sought refuge in slum areas of cities like Medellin and the capital Bogota. The 260,000 or so displaced people living in Medellin fled the rural violence that has characterised the country's armed conflict. Now they are being joined by people who are uprooted from within the city itself.
It’s a growing trend, according to Rodrigo Ardila, the city’s top human rights official. Last year 9,941 people were forced to leave their homes in Medellin – 1,507 people more than in 2011. The exodus is greatest from Comuna 13 where 611 people fled their homes last year, according to Ardila’s latest report.
Displacement within the city of Medellin is something Ligia Vasquez had to go through four years ago. After her 32-year-old son was killed by gang members, she decided her family had no other option but to leave their one-room rented shack in Comuna 13 and move to another neighbourhood in the city.
“My son didn’t want to get involved with the gangs. That’s why they killed him. We left Comuna 13 because of threats from gang members. You would hear gunshots at night. It just wasn’t safe for us anymore,” Vasquez, 55, said.
Nine years prior to her son’s murder, another of Vasquez’s sons, aged 16 at the time and walking through Comuna 13, was hit in the face by a stray bullet which left him with partial vision and hearing.
Vasquez now lives in another deprived slum area, Comuna 9, where she says she feels much safer. She earns enough money selling homemade maize cakes and pies in a downtown Medellin square to pay the monthly rent.
Because she was displaced, Vasquez has received $2,875 in government subsidies since 2010, money she has spent on cooking equipment.
“The government has helped me and I’m grateful for (that) but there are many displaced families who have no idea about their rights and are unaware they're entitled to government subsidies.”
GOVERNMENT CRACKDOWN
To quell the wave of violence, the city’s mayor is sending more elite police officers and military units into troubled areas. Around 300 gangs operate in the warrens of mountainside shanties surrounding Medellin, working under powerful organised crime networks involved in the drug trade and extortion rackets, according to local rights groups.
Heavily armed police on motorbikes and on foot can been seen patrolling the steep hillside slums carrying out spot checks. But beefed up security does little to abate the pervasive fear felt in Comuna 13 and other slums.
Unemployed youth make easy prey for drug gangs looking to recruit messengers, informants, drugs and arms couriers. Gangs impose unofficial curfews at night, demand payments from nearly everyone including street vendors and shopkeepers, and sometimes force residents to take gang members into their homes which are used as lookouts.
Fear is the driving force behind people on the move in Medellin. And living with fear is part of daily life here.
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