Epilogue

In late August 2018 I witnessed an unlikely scene just steps away from Parque Tercer Milenio in the formerly infamous El Bronx, or La L, the roughly two blocks that had become a bustling drug market since the disappearance of El Cartucho in the late 1990s. The city administration had organized a cultural event dubbed Graffitón: Arte y Transformación (Art and Transformation), part of an ongoing effort to rebrand the area after its almost complete demolition in 2016. That year, more than two thousand law enforcement agents had stormed into the area by order of Mayor Enrique Peñalosa. The operation aimed to dismantle three microtrafficking organizations, or hooks (ganchos), and “rescue” hundreds of children and homeless drug addicts who had been allegedly caught in their grips. It was also the completion of what Peñalosa had begun years earlier with the demolition of El Cartucho in his first mayoral term.

The officer in charge of the takeover was a veteran counterinsurgency police colonel who had participated in emblematic military raids of guerrilla camps and cocaine laboratories in the countryside. Intelligence reports warned of the presence of the ganchos’ heavily armed foot soldiers (saiyayines), as well as an elaborate network of counterintelligence and underground escape routes. Authorities employed surveillance and drones for terrain reconnaissance, and special forces swooped into the area, hidden in unmarked commercial trucks. News coverage described a form of military swarming: “The official troops overwhelmed the zone in minutes and units Alfa, Charly, Bravo, and Delta concentrated on each one of the ‘ganchos’ and ‘Sayayines,’ while snipers and a team of special forces secured the area.”¹ Weeks later, a senior official explained to me that police had deployed “security rings” and the government had scheduled helicopter flyovers to “demonstrate overwhelming force.” But the police squads did not encounter gunfire, only unarmed crowds of destitute residents. Accounts of the confrontation were nonetheless thoroughly militarized. In a news interview, the city’s secretary of security (secretario de seguridad, convivencia y justicia) had remarked on the tactical use of debris: “Filling up the place with garbage was a strategy, using it as a barricade to isolate people, [especially] law enforcement.”² Protesters were portrayed as an army of addicts, social debris that had been weaponized by drug leaders. And the built environment became a target of military intervention: “criminal architecture,” as another newspaper put it.³ The consensus among city officials was that every building had to be demolished, that “a total physical transformation” was required to overcome the area’s history of violence and illegality.

By 2018, officials had designated two remaining historic buildings—La Facultad and La Flauta—and the street between them, La Milla, as the starting point for the rebirth of El Bronx. A temporary archway built with scaffolding announced this much at the entrance of the Graffitón event: “El Bronx is reborn and alive again [El Bronx renace, revive].” A group of city architects from the Empresa de Renovación Urbana (Company of Urban Renewal) had recently described the renovated area to me as an emergent node for a creative economy through which “vulnerable populations, the unemployed, people with a history of addiction, could be reintegrated into social life.” El Bronx: Distrito Creativo (El Bronx: Creative District), as it had been renamed, would be a hub for the creative and artistic industries allegedly merging social welfare and city branding agendas. Yet the paradoxes of this approach became uncomfortably visible during the evening of El Graffitón.

Officials carefully managed the entrance to the supposedly public event, which was cordoned off with a gate, as they distributed a flyer with punched-out holes that could be used as a spray-paint stencil. Inside La Milla, organizers had set up a tent with instructional material about street art, a stage with music equipment, and a large vehicle in the middle of the road wrapped in black fabric. El Graffitón was meant to be a celebration of street art, a practice that not only brought up conflicts associated with urban renewal but also pointed to the city’s entrenched police violence. In the previous years, Diego Becerra, a sixteen-year-old graffiti artist who had been shot by the police in 2011, had become one of the symbols of police abuse in Bogotá, his face now memorialized in murals on overpasses and walls. In what aspired to be a decisive shift, the city administration had now organized a public competition to select four graffiti artists for an art residence and a public installation during El Graffitón.

In the culminating act, organizers unveiled the shrouded vehicle: “a cool surprise,” a city functionary had told me earlier with a grin. Beneath the cover was a black armored vehicle, the kind used by the feared riot police Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios (Mobile Antidisturbance Squad), or ESMAD, and the same type that had been deployed to capture El Bronx and displace its inhabitants two years earlier.⁴ Graffiti artists and event goers—including children—spray-painted the antiriot vehicle as concert lights strobed and Los Angeles rock band Rage Against the Machine’s antipolice anthem “Killing in the Name” blasted through the street. Yet the irony of the scene was not lost on all the attendees. As a video of the event later showed, at some point one man stepped in front of the vehicle and scrawled a message on the pavement: “Everything wrong / I don’t give a shit about the graffitón / circus for rich people.”⁵ It was a blunt dismissal of the administration’s empty gesture: mostly middle-class people defacing the instrument of violence that had been integral to the destruction of El Bronx, in the name of a rebranded, palatable expression of urban marginality.

But as with the plans I have analyzed in the preceding pages, the remaking of El Bronx into a “creative district” was not seamless. The violent expulsion of its inhabitants and the destruction of its built forms did not eradicate the urban knowledges and politics that had animated what Amy Ritterbusch and El Cilencio call its “street-connected community.”⁶ And even events like El Graffitón did not fully co-opt local oppositional practices, nor did such practices become disentangled from the forms of governance they opposed. As programs to rebrand El Bronx continued in the following years, one initiative illustrated the contradictory relationship between planning initiatives and local critical knowledges and practices. A hip-hop collective, Free Soul, which had emerged from the streets of El Bronx, became a central activist movement after the neighborhood was captured and destroyed by the state. After being displaced, the group of young rappers received support from the city administration to embark on “memory work” around their life on the street.⁷ With the collaboration of more than 120 former inhabitants, they built a scale model of the area. A form of “social cartography,” the model salvaged the everyday experiences of violence and solidarity that had been erased through demolition and dispossession.⁸ In 2017, the miniature neighborhood was exhibited in the Museo Nacional de Colombia (National Museum of Colombia), where Free Soul also shared their stories with visitors, and it is now part of the museum’s permanent collection. As Andrés Góngora, a curator and anthropologist involved in the process, explains, the model was a “potent testimonial object” that contested “institutionalized memory.”⁹

But Free Collective’s interventions did not stop there. In 2019, the Foundation Gilberto Alazate Avendaño, the city agency in charge of cultural programming for El Bronx: Distrito Creativo, invited the collective to co-design a museum in the neighborhood’s last ruin.¹⁰ The building, known as the Esquina Redonda (Round Corner), became the Co-Laboratorio de Creación y Memoria (Co-Laboratory of Creation and Memory). It would be a space to counter dominant narratives about urban decay and marginality through “different memory and artistic practices” such as “guided visits through the ruins of El Bronx,” concerts that recalled the “street art festivals” that used to take place in the area, “local history workshops,” and “talks about drug prohibition, harm reduction, and the present circumstances of street inhabitants [habitantes de calle].”¹¹ Echoing the country’s post-peace-agreement projects of truth, memory and reparation, urban renewal in El Bronx had become a site of reckoning, opening “spaces for resistance and memory,” as Francisca Márquez and Andrés Góngora put it.¹² At the same time, these oppositional knowledges had been supported by the same state institutions that had destroyed the neighborhood. Subaltern critiques thus became entangled with the violence of urban planning.

While these destabilizing remnants and “provoking spaces” questioned official urban trajectories and brought to light silenced histories, they also took the form of a fetishized ruin-turned-museum within the elite makeover of the area.¹³ Yet in contrast to other contestations of urban renewal, it was precisely such materializations in the ruined landscape that gave force to former inhabitants’ epistemic engagements. Such ruinous knowledges had been integral to local imaginaries of El Bronx. Urban dwellers had not only traditionally referred to the area as “La L,” a reference to its physical layout, but had also called it simply “the piece” or “part [pedazo].”¹⁴ And it was precisely the attention to leftover fragments—both in material and epistemic terms—that brought to light submerged currents of urbanistic violence, made apparent the ingrained contradictions of city making, and ultimately opened a site for other ways of knowing and learning about the city.¹⁵

The kinds of critical knowledges embodied in Free Soul’s scale model and its ruinous museum surfaced forcefully during a series of historic protests that engulfed Bogotá and other cities across Colombia between 2019 and 2020 and again in 2021. The protests, known as the Paro Nacional 21N, started on November 21, 2019. Not since El Bogotazo and the civic strikes of 1977 and 1993 (see chapter 1) had the city seen such massive mobilizations. Unlike previous protests, the Paro Nacional 21N lasted for weeks at a time and brought together a diverse set of populations, and it rippled through urban spaces as never before. The protests began as broad opposition against right-wing President Iván Duque’s social and economic reforms and their deepening of stark inequalities, as well as the government’s sabotaging of the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC and the growing violence against community leaders and activists. Such structural undercurrents of state violence became even more central to the Paro after a critical event on November 23, 2019, which involved once again one of the country’s key vehicles of urban militarization: the ESMAD and its antiriot tanks. As downtown protests continued unabated, the ESMAD was deployed in full force to disperse the crowds. With the street now turned into a battleground, eighteen-year-old high school student Dilan Cruz was shot by an ESMAD agent as he ran away from the squad.¹⁶ Cruz’s death in the hospital two days later sent shock waves through the city. Thousands took to the streets to participate in cacerolazos, hitting pots and pans (cacerolas) as they marched.¹⁷

Mobilizations went on for weeks not only in the city center but also in working-class and middle-class neighborhoods across Bogotá. The crowds paid homage to Cruz as they centered their struggle against state violence and injustice. The ESMAD escalated its attacks on protesters in scenes that resembled urban warfare: youths running through streets and seeking refuge as police motorcycles and ESMAD tanks and agents corralled them in their own neighborhoods. Mobilizations continued in 2020 and surged again in 2021, with previous grievances now exacerbated by the economic crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and the state’s militarized response to both the protests and the public health crisis.¹⁸

The activist networks forged during months of protest continued to expand across geographies of class and race, within and beyond Bogotá. Afro-Colombian and Indigenous groups energized the uprisings and evinced the connections between the urban estallido social (social explosion), as the Paro became known in 2021, and the longer history of injustice and violence in Colombia. The Misak, an Indigenous community of the Cauca region in the Southwest of the country, emerged as a key force in this regard. Marching for days to the capital, the Minga Indígena—as Indigenous community action spaces are traditionally called—arrived for the closing of the 2020 Paro in October. The following day, the Misak descended on the city’s airport to denounce rising violence and displacement in their territories. The protest, they stated in a communication, was aimed at “calling for the unity of social, popular, ethnic, student, labor union, urban, and rural sectors against policies of war [políticas de guerra].”¹⁹

The social and political effects of the 2019–21 mass protests are still unfolding, as shown by the historic election in 2022 of former Mayor Petro as Colombia’s first leftist president after decades of bipartisan and right-leaning rule. While the significance of the country’s renewed forms of organizing and activism is the subject of ongoing debate and analysis, the mobilizations revealed something central to the arguments of this book: Urban materiality and infrastructure emerged as the medium for forms of knowledge and action inextricably tied to the country’s enduring history and politics of insecurity. The renewal plans described in the previous chapters showed how warfare shaped both expert intervention and critical opposition to speculation and displacement. This was a war waged in epistemic and physical terrains, and one that became easily occluded in the sedimentation and reassembling of urban space. With the protests, it was as if the undertow of urbanistic violence had risen and left tangible marks on the material contours of the city.²⁰

As in other historic urban protests going back to El Bogotazo, the destruction of certain infrastructures became central to the struggle against everyday inequities and violence. Besides financial institutions and government buildings, Transmilenio bus stations also emerged as key targets, with dozens dismantled and damaged during the protests. While the rapid-transit system had been celebrated as one of the city’s successes of the past decades, it had also become emblematic of the privatization of public services and its resulting sociospatial injustices. Like urban renewal, Transmilenio was predicated on a public-private alliance. The state built the infrastructure, and companies operated the buses, reaping the benefits of an essential public service. According to one report, the Paro came after years of “overcrowding, high fares,” and “large areas of the city underserved by public transit.”²¹

Also notable was the burning of one-third of the city’s small neighborhood police stations, known as Comandos de Atención Inmediata (Immediate Attention Commands), or CAIs, in 2020. Amid rising police repression, state forces had killed dozens of protesters and injured hundreds, while many remained disappeared or illegally detained. The destruction of the CAIs, a quotidian infrastructure of urban policing, became a tangible condemnation of police violence.²² But activists went further and reinscribed the material remains of the stations with memorials to those who were killed and with emergent visions of police abolition (one of the Paro’s main demands was the elimination of the ESMAD). In the hours after burning the stations, residents and protesters came together to transform several CAIs into people’s libraries (bibliotecas populares). One of these was in the working-class neighborhood of La Gaitana in the northwest district of Suba. Renamed by locals as the Cultural Center Julieth Ramírez—after an eighteen-year-old student who had been shot the night before, during the protests—the small command was covered with murals and signs, some of which read, “peace and education,” “life first,” and “a center for reclusion and torture turned into a center for creation and culture.” The boxy concrete structure, now without tinted windows and with its walls charred, became an open space where volunteers distributed donated books.

As scholars have noted, urban space and infrastructure took a new and central place during the Paro.²³ Mobilizations involved new modes of appropriating public space as well as the expansion of the city’s traditional “circuits and points of gathering and confrontation,” as Sergio Montero and Isabel Peñaranda describe them.²⁴ This included musical and artistic performances, street teach-ins, and neighborhood assemblies (asambleas barriales). As the remaking of the CAIs suggests, the urban character of the protests had a distinctive material dimension. This became apparent with the central role that street art, graffiti, and posters played during the Paro. Over months of protest, certain places in the city became critical nodes for organizing. In the sprawling working-class district of Kennedy, for example, protesters established a key point of gathering around a large Transmilenio bus hub, the Portal de las Americas, in 2021. During several weeks, people organized street assemblies, collective food preparation in “community pots” (ollas comunitarias), cultural events, and medical attention points. This is also where the ESMAD carried out some of its most violent attacks against activists and the so-called Primera Línea, a front line of protesters who protected others in the crowd with makeshift shields, helmets, and masks. Activists eventually covered the sign at the station’s main entrance with posters, renaming it the Portal de la Resistencia (Portal of Resistance).

Over the course of the Paro, as journalist Ana Puentes reports, “dozens of street artists backed by hundreds of youths launched into the streets to fill the ground and walls with urban art.”²⁵ Such “imprinting” on public space, and its transgressive qualities, was on full display at another main point of protest, the Monumento a los Héroes (Monument to the Heroes), in northeast Bogotá.²⁶ The rectangular stone monolith had been built during the dictatorship of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in the mid-twentieth century as a memorial to Colombia’s independence fighters and its armed forces. A large statue of the Liberator, Simón Bolívar, stood on the north side of the monument, its walls emblazoned with the names of independence battalions and battles. The tower was emblematic of a national, militaristic historical narrative, to the point that it had been originally designed to house a military museum—a project that never materialized.

So when thousands of protesters took over Héroes and covered it with murals, posters, and graffiti, they were collectively building an “antimonument,” as one of the activists put it.²⁷ Below the monument’s main metal sign, “Bolivar Libertador,” large red block letters of the same size now read “Oppressor.” Protesters set Bolívar’s statue on fire and partially toppled it until the city administration eventually removed it. Behind where the statue used to stand, street artists created a large mural that showed an Afro-Colombian woman, her hand stretched out and palm open, with a bloody inscription: “no más sangre [no more blood].” On the opposite end of the tower, another mural depicted a woman looking intently, a weapon visible over her left shoulder, and a black-and-red cloth covering the lower part of her face. Underneath the image was a large painted sign that read, “guerreras ancestrales [ancestral fighters].”

The murals were an inversion of the patriarchal history of independence struggles embodied in the monument. They unsettled the conservative and militaristic foundations of national projects and linked them to the present of state violence. On another side of the Héroes tower, activists painted a cadaveric portrait of former right-wing President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, framed by a large sign reading, “enemigo público [public enemy].” On the opposite side, below the names of historic battles, a version of one of the signature murals of the Paro stretched across the wall: “6.402 héroes.” This was a reference to the number of so-called false positives (falsos positivos): impoverished men executed by the military and presented as guerrilla fighters killed in combat. This practice was widespread during the Uribe Vélez administrations and had recently been investigated by Colombia’s Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (Special Jurisdiction for Peace).

For months, as activists overlayed posters, scrawled slogans, and painted murals, the monument became a canvas for both the grievances and the visions of the future that animated the Paro. One of the street artists involved in the making of the antimonument explained its political significance: “The Héroes Monument will remain in people’s collective memory, and it will make collective denunciations transcend: the understanding that people are tired of the war and that art has been a form of healing and a form of constructing truth and avoiding repetition.”²⁸ Yet the final fate of the monument was revealing of the limits of such modes of intervention in urban space. The political meanings that had been attached to Héroes—activists’ denunciations of violence and injustice through the very materiality of the city—would be undone through the banal workings of bureaucratic action and infrastructure development.

In late September 2021, a demolition crew started to take apart the tower, working from top to bottom, chipping away at the limestone with its decades-old engravings and months-old murals. The removal of Héroes had been planned since 2010 as part of the long-awaited construction of the metro system’s first line. In 2019 the city had launched a public competition for the design of a new monument connected to the metro station. The winning project envisioned a series of panels with an open space in the middle: It proposed the “void as monument.”²⁹ That same year, the city requested that only Bolívar’s statue be considered patrimony worthy of preservation and that the rest be demolished.³⁰ Earlier proposals within the administration to preserve some of the mural and graffiti-covered slabs of stone had been dismissed. Conservative sectors decried the idea of enshrining vandalism, while the pressures of the metro project and its promises of progress and valorization took precedence.

The final scene of destruction captured the essence of urbanism as warfare, of administrative violence and its perfunctory operations. If the figure of front-line protesters with construction helmets had been demonized during the Paro, as Manuel Salge Ferro and Luis Gonzalo Jaramillo E. point out, those same helmets, now on demolition workers, became potent signifiers of the “imperative of the administrative apparatus of the state.”³¹ The controversies over toppled and defaced spaces during the protests gave way to the seemingly uncontroversial attack on the antimonument and its critical knowledges of urbanistic violence. It was the creation of a void that, like the other voids of urban renewal, erased the footprints of the city’s sociomaterial battles.

Yet as I have shown throughout this book, Bogotá’s urban struggles—along with their echoes of the country’s larger violent conflicts and tentative moves toward reconciliation—continually rematerialize in subaltern epistemologies and progressive planning. And while these modes of knowledge and political engagement seek to move beyond security paradigms, they also remain uneasily linked to normative orders of governance, citizenship, and development, and their violent undersides. Such contradictions were again illuminated by the city’s new Territorial Ordering Plan (POT), finally approved at the end of 2021 after more than a decade of debate and failed proposals. Responding to the city’s history of displacement, segregation, and inequality, the new POT established concrete measures for the “protection of urban dwellers [protección a moradores]” amid Bogotá’s ongoing urban transformations. More broadly, it introduced the notion of care (cuidado) as one of the main through lines for the city’s policies, programs, and projects. Whether it was to address gender inequalities, health crises, or environmental degradation, the vision for a citywide system of care (sistema distrital de cuidado) emerged as a central planning epistemology that placed renewed emphasis on the production and location of vital infrastructures as well as the distribution of socioeconomic resources.³²

But here again, as in the progressive fictions I have analyzed in this book, it is yet to be seen how a Bogotá Cuidadora (Caring Bogotá), as planners have now called the city, can move beyond frameworks centered on territorial control, market-led development, and violent property regimes. Such contradiction was perhaps most clearly embodied in the figure of Claudia López, the city’s first woman and lesbian mayor (2020–23) and a well-known critic of paramilitarism in her career as an academic and congresswoman. Yet during the Paro, as Alejandra Azuero Quijano notes, it was as if the city had “two mayors.”³³ At times López’s incendiary tweets criminalized the protests and encouraged the ESMAD’s heavy-handed tactics. At other moments, she condemned the police’s use of excessive force and called for accountability. Most ironically, as the administration delegitimized the Paro’s vibrant forms of community organizing and mutual care, it also sought to institutionalize notions of care through the POT.

If anything, then, Bogotá’s planning epistemologies call attention to the intractable entanglements between progressive planning and the city’s sedimented histories of urban insecurity and its exclusionary regimes of governance, property, and citizenship. They take us back to the crucial question of how urban knowledges are grounded and take form: how the retrofitting of urban worlds and its political promises are both made possible and limited by the histories, materials, and experiential horizons within which they unfold. They compel us to reimagine planning beyond itself, certainly not as a practice of reordering and disciplining space, but also not as a reformist strategy to simply make the city more inhabitable and inclusionary. At stake here, in short, is the possibility of envisioning radical urban knowledges aimed at the dismantling of the colonial and securitized roots of planning—that is, at the very abolition of urbanism as warfare.³⁴