1
Downtown Ground Zero
In March 2009, excavations for the construction of Bogotá’s Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación (Center of Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation) uncovered a vast burial site on the western edge of the city’s historic Cementerio Central (Central Cemetery). The Centro de Memoria had been planned as a memorial, museum, and activist space dedicated to struggles for the historical memory of violence, accountability, and peace.1 As construction work came to a halt and forensic archaeologists descended on the cemetery, the scale and significance of the mass grave became clear: It held the remains of more than three thousand anonymous bodies spanning a period between the 1820s and the 1970s. The discovery came at a time when the unearthing of mass graves (fosas comunes) across the country had become a powerful symbol of both the viciousness of Colombia’s armed conflict and the elusiveness of a postconflict transition. But unlike the thousands of mass graves unearthed in remote towns terrorized by paramilitary, guerrilla, and state forces, this was a historic fosa común in the heart of the capital, linked to the very origins of Colombia’s civil war.
The area where the burial site emerged—two large lots (Globo B and Globo C) to the west of the cemetery’s stately mausoleums and tombstones—had been informally known as the Cementerio de los Pobres (Cemetery of the Poor). The overflowing bodies that did not make it to the main graveyard had been for years interred in six neoclassical columbaria, built in the mid-twentieth century, and their surrounding grounds. Importantly, the site had been the improvised grave for hundreds killed during one of Colombia’s most emblematic events of political violence, El Bogotazo: an urban uprising in 1948 after the assassination of leftist Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán that left parts of downtown Bogotá in ruins and marked the intensification of a period of widespread violence across the country—a period known as La Violencia (1948–58). By the end of the twentieth century, the entire area had been closed off, and bodily remains from the columbaria had been moved to the working-class Cementerio del Sur (Cemetery of the South). As a security guard told me in 2017, “They finally took the bones of the poor away.”
The cemetery’s recent history illuminates the difficulties of coming to terms not only with the afterlives of Colombia’s armed conflict but also with its haunting presence in Bogotá’s history of urbanism. In the late 1990s, then-mayor Enrique Peñalosa set out to demolish the two lots (Globo B and Globo C), including the columbaria, for the construction of a metropolitan park. By the end of the decade, the city government had razed the westernmost lot (Globo C), swiftly removing another vast collection of forgotten remains and creating a park tellingly named Parque del Renacimiento (Renaissance Park). The lack of any effort to identify the anonymous bodies and the absence of any acknowledgment of the history of violence that surrounded the mass grave—except for a small commemorative monument to Jorge Eliécer Gaitán hidden away at the very end of the park—epitomized a form of intervention that effaced the deep ties between contemporary urbanism and the country’s long-running history of violence.
The other lot, Globo B, continued to fall into disrepair until the Mockus administration took the first steps to reverse its fate. In 2001, the city government painted large signs on the empty columbaria’s facades that read “La vida es sagrada” (Life is sacred). The intervention was one of the many symbolic acts through which the administration enacted its calls—characteristically top-down and with civilizing overtones—for a citizen culture of nonviolence. Most significantly, it was a first move to “patrimonialize” the area and insert it into emerging discourses of memory and reconciliation.2 In response to the mobilization of human rights and victims’ organizations, the area was rezoned in 2005 as the Parque de la Reconciliación (Park of Reconciliation), a site for “the recovery of historical memory in the city of Bogotá.”3 In 2007, the city administration of Luis Eduardo Garzón (2004–7) commissioned renowned artist Beatriz González to carry out an art intervention on the crumbling columbaria. González created Auras anónimas (Anonymous Auras), a public artwork that involved the creation of nine thousand new gravestones displaying variations on an iconic figure of the armed conflict: carriers (cargueros) who transport the dead using plastic tarps, hammocks, and poles across war-torn villages and towns. The city administration would go on to back the creation of the Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación as well as the large-scale archaeological exhumation of the mass grave discovered at the construction site. The Centro de Memoria was finally inaugurated in 2012 during the Petro administration, just weeks after the start of peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), or FARC, in Cuba. The contrast with the neighboring Parque del Renacimiento—erected atop a mass grave and through the physical obliteration of historical traces—could not be starker.4 The columbaria and its surroundings—which now included the Centro de Memoria and a landscaped park dedicated to historical memory and repair—emerged as a critical component of a larger official plan of urban memorialization named Bogotá, Ciudad Memoria (Bogotá, Memory City).5
But the opaque connections between trajectories of urban development and histories of warfare were far from resolved, as was made apparent by the latest conflict surrounding the columbaria turned art installation. With the reelection of Peñalosa as mayor in 2016, the four funeral pavilions became once again visibly abandoned. Overgrown with weeds, gravestones missing, and enveloped by yellow caution tape, the site now looked more like a ruin waiting to be demolished. And that was precisely what the administration was hoping to accomplish as it revived Peñalosa’s old plan to build a second park on this remaining lot, Globo B. But as city officials worked to bypass regulations limiting interventions in the area, in February 2019 the national government declared the columbaria and González’s art intervention national heritage, mandating their restoration and preservation.
A debate ensued in major media outlets, with cultural critics and intellectuals celebrating the official decision to protect the “memory of all the people who were buried there from the very moment the Cementerio Central was built in the nineteenth century, including the anonymous victims of April 9, 1948 [El Bogotazo].”6 González herself stressed the importance of the columbaria as “a place of mourning.”7 As she explained in an interview, “Colombia just went through a period of a very long war and practically every family in Colombia is mourning because of that conflict. We need to recognize that experience to give the country some peace and tranquility.”8 Peñalosa in turn questioned the value of both the structure and the art installation and accused “intellectual elites” of depriving residents of nearby working-class neighborhoods of a “sports park.” Ironically, he also invoked the specter of violence in his response to the national government’s pronouncement. In a vitriolic flurry of tweets, the mayor mocked artists and intellectuals who, he imagined, “will explain at cocktail parties in London and Paris how their work … expresses the horror of violence … [but who] will not say that leaving thousands of children and youth without a park causes drug addiction and violence.”9
The Urban Residues of Warfare
While the dispute over parks and graves became a visible media spectacle through tweetstorms and news stories, the event pointed to a longer and deeper urban history: the ensconced entanglements between urban planning and warfare. Downtown Bogotá bears the marks of Colombia’s history of political violence. Its streets and buildings, parks and plazas, have been materialized in the crucible of war. Far from being merely a stage on which conflict occasionally erupted, the city center has been forged out of knowledges, practices, and materialities intimately tethered to the country’s long-running trajectories of violence and (in)security.
During the colonial era, cities in Latin America were held up as centers for the cultivation of order and advancement opposed to the allegedly unruly hinterlands. This is what Ángel Rama famously called the “lettered city”: an urban ideal fashioned after baroque sensibilities and principles of rational and systematic knowledge.10 After independence, nation-making projects, according to Rama, continued to portray “cities as civilizing nodes in a countryside capable of engendering only barbarism.”11 Yet the dream of modern civility and order was itself built on the logics of colonial and postcolonial violence. In Colombia, as Cristina Rojas argues, “the civilizing power of the nation’s capital” not only reproduced extant social and racial hierarchies but also entrenched a geographical imagination in which the enlightened Andean highlands dominated the savage lowlands.12 Urbanization was inextricably connected to the nation’s violent and exclusionary projects of capitalist modernity.
Yet as with the forgotten graves of the Cementerio de los Pobres, the violence of urbanism has been continually submerged, displaced, and effaced in downtown Bogotá’s transformations. As a layered accretion of fragments, this urban history has been “silenced” through power-laden narratives of urban civility and modernization, and literally paved over, demolished, and rebuilt.13 Such processes, however, have never been smooth. They are “urban palimpsests,” to use Andreas Huyssen’s term, that are shot through with fractures and crevices.14 They are catalysts of epistemic struggles and their attendant materialities: from planning expertise and its visions of territorial authority to grounded urban knowledges and their critiques of everyday insecurities and dispossession. In what follows, I illuminate two central aspects of this sociopolitical and material stratigraphy.15
First, far from scholarly and popular depictions that separate the urban from the rural and focus on violent struggles at the edges of sovereignty, I draw attention to how the logics of warfare have shaped the very heart of the capital city. While rural migration and violent displacement have long been recognized as critical forces in Colombia’s history of urbanization, cities have been typically conceptualized as preformed spheres—havens of urbanity—at the receiving end of such processes. In this view, the city has only partially been molded by such trajectories, at best, or deformed and tainted by outside dynamics, at worst. Such is the case of well-worn narratives of cities besieged and occasionally invaded by criminal gangs, cartel violence, and armed groups. Excavating the making and remaking of contemporary downtown Bogotá reverses this line of thinking and blurs the boundaries between the city and the country. It reveals how the conflicts over sovereignty and land at the core of Colombia’s rural war have been woven into the urban fabric. From this perspective, urban planning and development cannot be severed from the political economy of property in countryside, nor can urban governance and citizenship be disassociated from violent contestations over authority and belonging on the frontier. The city emerges here as a sign—inscrutable at times and manifest at others—of the violence of law, civility, and order integral to nation-making projects in Colombia and beyond.
This oscillation between the absence and presence of violence leads to my second main point: Downtown Bogotá is an urban landscape littered with the residues of war.16 At stake here is what Yael Navaro, Zerrin Özlem Biner, Alice von Bieberstein, and Seda Altuğ have theorized as the “residuality of violence, its afterlife and spillover effects, its material and immaterial traces, and its ability to be inflicted in social and political relations.”17 This perspective calls for an analysis of the “reverberations of violence” across time and space that recognizes the critical mediation of both human action and imagination as well as stubborn materialities and sedimented traces.18 Political violence and its “lingering effects” and shifting forms emerge in this sense from the interplay between knowledges, practices, and things.19 The trajectories of downtown renewal in Bogotá show how urban planning and design have been imbricated with the country’s histories of violence. As urban scholars have argued, cities are not merely the background on which human actors and collectives exercise violence. Rather, architecture, infrastructures, and the very things that make up urban worlds can themselves become privileged media for the articulation and propagation of violence and (in)security.20
As a form of expertise centered on physical space, planning has performed a key role in this context, and not only in terms of instrumentalizing the built environment in contests over territorial control. In Bogotá, I argue below, planners have regularly reified urban materiality as both the cause of and the solution to sociopolitical conflict and insecurity. In doing so, they have both obfuscated political accountability and partially erased the sociomaterial contours of entrenched warfare. In this sense, planning has at once enabled and occluded what anthropologist Manuel Delgado calls “urbanistic violence”: the interconnected violence of urban planning, real estate, and finance.21 At the same time, the contentious remains left behind have continually resurfaced in urban dwellers’ daily experience, shaping critical urban knowledges and modes of political engagement. This chapter explores some of the fault lines of downtown Bogotá’s transformations since the mid-twentieth century. I aim to bring together histories that are often kept apart: the trajectories of city planning and its projects of urban reconstruction, on the one hand, and broader patterns of political violence and social mobilization, on the other. Putting these narratives in the same frame and locating them in the materiality of urban space sheds light on the elusive yet enduring force of violence and insecurity in the making and remaking of the city center.
I begin with El Bogotazo, that critical event of urban destruction in the 1940s that became a foundational myth in modern Bogotá and a milestone in the history of political violence in Colombia. While much has been written about the episode—primarily as an explosive fracture of the body politic and of the city’s sociospatial structure—I explore El Bogotazo as part of an ongoing struggle over urban sovereignty shaped by national and global security currents, from Colombian class and land warfare to Cold War imperialism. The chapter then follows the lasting yet submerged aftereffects of such urban battles through an analysis of planning policy and insurgent urbanisms between the 1960s and 1970s. I turn here to urban development and inner-city densification plans and their clash with a landscape of housing activism and struggles. My aim is to draw attention to the entanglements between progressive planning and counterinsurgency tactics supported by the US Alliance for Progress program during those decades. Finally, I conclude with an exploration of Colombia’s rising security state in the late 1970s and 1980s and its close links to a downtown shaped by military repression, urban protest, and violent destruction. I focus on an unfinished renewal plan and the ruined landscape it left behind. The razed area, which has remained barren for decades, mirrored the state, insurgent, and criminal violence that erupted in Bogotá during these years and would continue to haunt residents’ imaginations and officials’ interventions for the years to come. At stake here, as in the other plans detailed in this chapter, was the materialization of state security anxieties and the ongoing efforts to cement officialdom in the space of downtown Bogotá.
Counterrevolutionary Urbanism
The traces of the urban destruction of April 9, 1948—a date that is fixed in Bogotá’s memory perhaps like no other—can be adumbrated in the streets and walls of the city center. In addition to the thousands that were killed that day, one of the casualties of the violence following the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was the city’s old streetcar (tranvía). The streetcar had been constructed in the late nineteenth century and became a vital connection between the city center and Bogotá’s expanding working-class neighborhoods. As the multitude took to the streets during El Bogotazo, lynching Gaitán’s alleged murderer and unleashing their fury on official buildings and commercial establishments, several streetcars were also burned and damaged. Almost immediately after the events, newspapers and officials rushed to declare the death of the streetcar with alarmist reports about the extent of the damage. Yet as historian Jacques Aprile-Gniset documented in his essential work on the urban impacts of El Bogotazo, the number of streetcars destroyed was modest by most counts. Most importantly, the streetcar had already been the target of a concerted “offensive” led by politicians, local media, and the private sector since at least 1947.22 As a municipal transit system that provided a relatively efficient and affordable service, it had become a roadblock for the profitable and rapidly growing business of private urban buses. According to Aprile-Gniset, there is evidence to suggest not only that some of the attacks may have been carried out by employees of private bus companies but, most importantly, that the demise of the streetcar actually gained momentum after El Bogotazo.23 Through disinvestment and the removal of key transit nodes in the city center, along with the stimulation of bus imports from the United States and the creation of new bus routes, authorities and politically connected operators effectively dismantled the streetcar in the years that followed.
Parts of this history can be pieced together going back to the Séptima, downtown’s main artery. Although the city moved quickly to pave over the streetcar infrastructure in 1950, some rails remained visible at the intersection where Gaitán was shot. With the 2012 transformation of the avenue into a pedestrian walkway, other stretches of the railway emerged. The revitalization project itself was mired in delays, cost overruns, and difficulties associated with the protection of archaeological remains—in addition to the streetcar rails, other colonial and republican vestiges such as old piping, wells, and cobblestone surfaced during the process.24
As the project dragged on, anxieties mounted. By 2017 the improvised planter pots that the administration had used to close the avenue were gone, and construction work was in full swing. One afternoon that year, I took pictures of recently uncovered rails to the north of the Avenida Jiménez, only to be turned away by a site manager, who, visibly uncomfortable, pulled up a green tarp and declined to comment on the project’s progress or the fate of the rails. It was only in 2021 that the roughly fifteen blocks of the pedestrianized Séptima were completed. Significantly, the final design included an “open air museum” in the first section of the walkway. Through thick and opaque windows on the sidewalk, passersby could now see the shadowy remnants of the railway. A slab in between contained a map etched in stone of the tranvía system in 1933 and a description of its importance for working-class neighborhoods (barrios obreros). All this stood only two blocks away from an older memorial to Gaitán on the wall next to which he had been murdered; the memorial featured his image above stone plaques commemorating his death and a lengthy passage from one of his momentous speeches.
The juxtaposition of these residues—the memorial of the political martyr next to the obliterated infrastructure—gestured to the deeper currents of violence before, during, and after El Bogotazo. The popular insurrection, on the one hand, was about more than the death of Gaitán. It pointed to the sustained onslaught of working-class spaces in the city center and growing partisan violence under the Conservative national government. The urban transformations that preceded and followed El Bogotazo, on the other hand, were not simply about modernizing and reconstructing downtown. They constituted counterrevolutionary plans, with distinct class and racial overtones, aimed at purging the city center of its unruly crowds at a time of rising US imperialism in Latin America. Like the demise of the streetcar, large-scale demolition and reconstruction in downtown Bogotá from the 1940s through the 1960s tell a story about planning violence deployed against the urban poor and aimed at expanding elite control over urban land and capital.
These broader conflicts have been typically occluded in historical narratives about El Bogotazo. Accounts of the uprising are rife with images of maddened masses and indiscriminate destruction. Yet the multitude’s actions that day were far from arbitrary. The multitude was a “political crowd [muchedumbre política],” as Medófilo Medina puts it, that blurred the boundaries between mob violence and revolutionary action.25 The destruction of bureaucratic and luxury artifacts took on particular significance from the beginning of the upheaval. Downtown streets became littered with mounds of official documents and typewriters, office desks and chairs, and burning merchandise.26 As one protester screamed, “We have come here to destroy, to end everything, not to steal!”27 The uprising would then besiege the city’s official architecture. It targeted the presidential palace, Congress, national ministries, and the palace of the archbishop, among other buildings. Ultimately, the crowds had aimed to overturn the city’s social and political order by “systematically destroying the symbols of power, inequality, and exclusion that had once been so easily accepted,” as historian Herbert Braun writes.28
Yet perhaps nothing illustrates the deeper significance and reverberations of El Bogotazo than the presence that day in downtown Bogotá of two central figures in Latin America’s revolutionary and counterrevolutionary history: Fidel Castro and George Marshall. A young Castro traveled to Bogotá that April, eleven years before the Cuban Revolution, as the organizer of a Latin American student conference against imperialism. Castro and student representatives met with Gaitán days before his murder, and they were supposed to meet with him again on the fateful afternoon of April 9. While Castro was walking to the appointment, El Bogotazo erupted, and he swiftly joined the multitude as protesters stormed a police division to seize weapons.29 Now armed and on the front line of a nascent urban insurgency, Castro took part in the urban combat that followed until a truce was reached by the Liberal and Conservative Parties the next day. Recounting his experience during El Bogotazo decades later, Castro recalled the hours he spent as the only foreigner barricaded with insurgents in a police division waiting for an assault by the army that never happened. At some point he questioned his place in the uprising, but then he had an “internationalist thought,” as he put it, and decided to stay in the struggle, realizing that “the pueblo here is the same as the pueblo in Cuba, the pueblo is the same everywhere, this is an oppressed people, an exploited people.”30 Witnessing firsthand “the spectacle of a popular revolution,” Castro reflected, had a definitive impact on his political consciousness.31 “Revolutionary sentiments” had gained material and historical concreteness during El Bogotazo. Significantly, this was a battle waged both in the geopolitical register of hemispheric imperialism and in terms of control and conflict over the city itself.
This dual nature of urban warfare was further evinced with the visit of US Secretary of State Marshall to Bogotá that same week of April. A few blocks from where Gaitán was shot, Marshall was presiding over the ninth International Conference of American States, or Pan-American Conference, an event that led to the creation of the Organization of American States and the expansion of anti-Communist military doctrine in the region. Here again, imperialist designs took form in the space of downtown Bogotá and would continue to shape the social and material contours of the city center in the decades to come.
The positioning of Colombia as a leader of hemispheric cooperation under the aegis of the United States was already visible by the mid-1940s, when authorities launched urban beautification projects in Bogotá in preparation for the conference. Large-scale restoration, demolition, and infrastructure projects, according to Aprile-Gniset, generated “durable speculation and the aggravation of the living conditions” of downtown residents, and particularly of its working-class inhabitants.32 In some respects, this was the continuation of plans launched in the early 1930s, some of them with hygienist overtones, such as the “cleaning” (saneamiento) of the Paseo Bolívar, which led to the displacement of hundreds of residents from impoverished settlements on the eastern hills of the city center.33
By the late 1940s, the wide-ranging urban interventions for the Pan-American Conference were more firmly grounded in the tenets of modernist planning.34 They included the expansion of avenues, the removal of traditional markets, and the construction of mid- and high-rise buildings. These reforms made deeper inroads into downtown’s working-class neighborhoods (barrios populares), ravaging the areas where many of Gaitán’s followers lived and worked. Displacement and rising costs of living provoked unrest and catalyzed vigorous opposition well before the Pan-American Conference and El Bogotazo took place. Residents filed lawsuits against the city administration to counter evictions and increased taxes associated with beautification projects. In some cases, protests turned violent, as in one episode in 1947 recounted by historian Micah Oelze, where people rioted in front of the presidential palace after the government demolished several downtown houses. At least one man fired a shotgun at the state building.35
Most famously, Gaitán summoned a march on February 7, 1948, to protest increasing state violence in the countryside under the Conservative government of Mariano Ospina Pérez. Known as the Marcha del Silencio (March of Silence), the mobilization brought nearly one hundred thousand people to the streets of downtown Bogotá. In absolute silence and holding black flags, the crowd streamed into the Plaza de Bolívar for Gaitán’s speech and then returned solemnly to their homes.36 It was a demonstration of the power of the political mass and of the grievances simmering under the city’s recently embellished surface. As a grassroots leader explained years later, this was the kind of “silence that could later transform into a storm.”37 Arguably, the protest had been directed against both state violence in the countryside and urban deprivation and expulsion. In this sense, the years leading up to El Bogotazo illuminated the layered nature of the city’s conflicts. Thousands of migrants arrived in Bogotá fleeing rural violence only to encounter renewed displacement under urban modernization plans linked to the rise of Cold War imperialism. Not surprisingly, Marshall was quick to blame the events of El Bogotazo on a Communist conspiracy, an accusation that was picked up by President Ospina Pérez and disseminated in the media.38
Counterinsurgency and post-Bogotazo plans melded in the following years. The uprising had invigorated ongoing infrastructure and property-development projects as matters of national security. Experts and officials seized on the episode of ruination to accelerate their aggressive plans of reconstruction and expulsion. Media and authorities magnified the extent of the destruction to justify the need for the radical reconstruction of the city center.39 Architects who had long decried the backwardness of peasant markets and downtown tenements went so far as to celebrate the riots, declaring that “Bogotá’s urban problem … had been frankly cleared and partially resolved.”40 With the ashes of El Bogotazo still settling, one columnist applauded the administration’s ambitious reconstruction plans, calling for the creation of a city that would be “more beautiful, more welcoming, and more secure and protected against the possibility of horrors such as those of the black Friday [of April 9].”41 The built environment became the central target and medium for the expansion of state power and for a full-scale “business offensive.”42
One of the most significant projects of urban control and speculation was the construction of the Carrera Décima, a forty-meter-wide and eight-kilometer-long avenue. The avenue cut through the heart of the city, displacing thousands of residents and severing the west side of the city center from the administrative and cultural districts of the east side. The Carrera Décima became Bogotá’s “road to modernity,” concentrating most of the city’s new developments and architectural innovations.43 At the same time, it proved to be a strategic space for the deployment of security forces. Mirroring the nation’s larger efforts to develop transportation infrastructure and conquer what Marco Palacios describes as the country’s deep “social and regional fragmentation,” the downtown road project constituted a spectacle of state building and of territorial control.44
On the legal front, a battery of ordinances opened the terrain for counterrevolutionary urban operations. Immediately after the uprising, President Ospina Pérez decreed a state of siege, advancing a series of controversial measures to quell the insurrection and initiate the reconstruction. One early governmental measure ordered the expropriation of several houses near the presidential palace to install emergency state offices and army troops. It invoked a “state of abnormality” and called for the centralization of military power.45 Through extraordinary legislation, Ospina Pérez created commissions for the assessment of the damage and the emergency planning of a new civic center. Other decrees authorized an urban reconstruction credit line with the United States as well as the issuance of reconstruction bonds and higher property taxes.
Most significant was the creation of Colombia’s first condominium law by presidential decree only twelve days after the riots. This legal framework was presented as a definitive step toward urban reconstruction and one that would “solve in satisfactory fashion the problem of middle-class housing.”46 The promotion of modern real estate—particularly apartment buildings—was an attack on the fractioned, small-scale ownership arrangements that had characterized inner-city districts and that elites had associated with moral decay and revolutionary dispositions. According to Aprile-Gniset, the securitization of property regimes ultimately laid the groundwork for the displacement of urban smallholdings (minifundios urbanos) by urban estates (latifundios urbanos) with increased rents and firmer control over land. High-rise rental buildings (edificios de renta) replaced subdivided houses and tenements (inquilinatos), both concentrating ownership and eliminating overlapping property claims.47
Urban destruction and reconstruction during El Bogotazo can be viewed as the tentative materialization of an urban “securityscape.”48 The technocratic war over downtown Bogotá was an irregular and incomplete process that took material form in the city’s bureaucratic and physical infrastructure. Most visibly, this brand of counterrevolutionary urbanism was materialized in the modernist high-rises and avenues built in the years following the uprising and reached new heights under the military dictatorship of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953–57).49 As the US expanded the commercialization of military technology in the region, it also increased the export of construction materials and expertise. A new urban landscape of steel, glass, aluminum, and concrete emerged in close connection with this nascent military-industrial order. Modernist planning blurred into a mode of “strategic-military urbanism” that continued to reverberate in downtown’s sociomaterial transformations for decades.50
Counterinsurgent Housing
Although later visions for a renewed city center were apparently not as belligerent as the Bogotazo reconstruction plans, in the 1960s and 1970s downtown planning became more firmly embedded in Cold War renderings of development as counterinsurgency. The promotion and management of urban densities emerged as a central strategy to absorb rural migrants, quell their potential rebelliousness, and transform them into middle-class citizens bound to the promises of capitalist development. In his work as mayor between 1961 and 1966, for instance, architect Jorge Gaitán Cortés stressed the need to respond to the city’s explosive demographic growth—now intensified due to increasing violence in the countryside—through plans “to stimulate the densification of the main commercial sectors and adjacent residential areas.”51 In contrast to the real estate reconquest of the city center that was launched in the early post-Bogotazo years, he called attention to the importance of rehabilitating working-class neighborhoods (rehabilitación de barrios obreros) and building social housing (vivienda social). For Gaitán Cortés, the key issue was devising mechanisms to insert rural migrants into the modernizing city. “The fundamental problem that our cities confront,” he declared, “resides in the need to receive, absorb, and incorporate into the monetary economy those 2,400,000 inhabitants that come from an agrarian economy.”52 The crowd—in the form of dispossessed rural masses—emerged as a potentially insurgent force, a destabilizing urban density. For Gaitán Cortés, however, the main challenge was to create technical instruments that would address the shortage of housing, services, and jobs in order to enable the urban integration of the “wretched conglomerate of displaced persons.”53
A longtime adviser for the national government, the Canadian development economist Lauchlin Currie, became a central figure within these emergent planning frameworks. Working alongside Gaitán Cortés, under succeeding mayor Virgilio Barco in the 1960s, and later as presidential adviser in the 1970s and 1980s, Currie spearheaded studies aimed at the planned densification of Bogotá and other urban centers in Colombia. He firmly defended the idea that intensive urbanization, along with large-scale agricultural production, was the route to accelerated economic growth.54 His views tacitly aligned with the country’s US-backed counterinsurgency strategies, which held up socioeconomic progress as a critical measure to defeat Communist insurgencies.55 Yet instead of addressing entrenched inequalities and the concentration of rural land—which was the government’s initial yet ultimately failed reformist path—Currie proposed to draw peasants away from the countryside and transform them into productive urban residents through wide-ranging housing development policies.56 In a broader sense, the redesign of urban densities and property regimes was aimed at promoting a “mode of urban life,” as Currie put it in one study, and its far-reaching social and cultural effects, including family planning and education, ultimately “breaking … the vicious circle of underdevelopment.”57
Here again, urban planning mirrored broader political junctures as Colombia entered a period known as the Frente Nacional (National Front) from 1958 to 1974. This was a power-sharing agreement struck by the Liberal and Conservative Parties to usher Colombia into the allegedly peaceful path of democratic reform. Rather than overt demolition and expulsion, as in previous years, urban interventions would be directly tied to agendas of socioeconomic development. As A. Ricardo López-Pedreros explains, the Frente Nacional pivoted on a “hierarchical vision of democracy” and its ideals of middle-class citizenship. With the ascendancy of John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in Colombia and its tenets of development and anti-Communism, this “classed and gendered definition of democracy” ultimately “legitimized imperial rule on a transnational terrain.”58
Yet planners’ technocratic ethos, coupled with their class- and race-inflected assumptions about urban living, inevitably clashed with the city’s politicized landscape of urban housing. Since the late 1950s, radical leftist housing organizations—most notably the Communist-founded Central Nacional Provivienda—had successfully coordinated land invasions in both central and peripheral urban areas, becoming the frequent target of police repression. The history of Policarpa Salavarrieta, a neighborhood located only a few blocks from the presidential palace and named after the iconic nineteenth-century independence revolutionary, became a forceful demonstration of the violent undersides of the city’s reformist plans.59
In 1961, Communist militants and downtown tenement dwellers, many of whom had been violently displaced from the countryside, took over vacant land owned by the Instituto de Crédito Territorial (ICT).60 The ICT was a national housing lender that had been created as part of an agrarian reform initiative in the 1930s. It had been charged with financing campesino housing, and as peasant migration to the city accelerated, it became a centerpiece institution within urban housing and formalization policies from the 1940s onward. In the very same year that Policarpa founders set up the first wood, tin, and asphalt fabric houses, the ICT was launching Ciudad Kennedy, one of its most ambitious housing programs on the western periphery of Bogotá. The massive housing project was based on state-backed mortgages and wide-ranging plans for auto- and progressive construction. Supported by the Alliance for Progress and visited by Kennedy himself in its first year, the growing suburb became a symbol of anti-Communist development. Importantly, as historian Amy Offner argues, it was primarily middle-class bureaucrats and workers who were able to access property ownership through the plan. Provivienda and other critics, Offner writes, “denounced ICT developments as manifestations of the National Front’s clientelism and disregard for the poor.”61 Not only had Ciudad Kennedy failed to include the most marginalized residents in its designs, but as the district grew and new residents became wary of newcomers and nearby squatters, it also reproduced “the very inequalities, social animosities, and political conflicts” that reformist housing policies had intended to address.62
It was thus meaningful that those who did not fit into the ICT’s plans would take over a piece of land owned by the agency. Moreover, unlike most of the ICT’s developments in urban peripheries, Policarpa would carve out a space for hundreds of families in the city’s core. The ICT’s and local authorities’ response to the invasion was no less telling—it offered a glimpse into the enduring violence of urban housing plans. In what would become a protracted battle over the following years, the ICT stationed police to halt construction and harass locals, and it eventually constructed walls sealing off the neighborhood’s entrances. Authorities intimidated residents, threatening to exclude them from future housing applications if they did not vacate the zone and, at one point, hiring agents who allegedly set a community toilet on fire. Military authorities surveilled and detained Provivienda leaders, some of whom now lived in Policarpa. One police commander made explicit the government’s anti-Communist sentiments: “Invaders are directed by professional agitators and with people from the countryside foreign to Bogotá.”63
In his detailed reconstruction of Policarpa’s foundation, Alfonso Torres Carrillo describes how residents gained ground every year by skirting official control and repression. Drawing on their tight-knit organization and leadership, Policarpa residents issued public demands and mobilized political support for access to utilities and services. They smuggled construction materials through checkpoints and devised stealthy building techniques. Most famously, they deployed “walking houses”—light structures that could be carried by a few people—which “ran” across fields and populated blocks in a matter of minutes.64 Authorities were at pains to respond to the rapid and covert mode of urbanization of these moving houses, which acted as extensions of the bodies routinely expelled from downtown. By 1965, residents had strengthened their position. They had resisted several evictions and eventually took over a police station that had been installed by the ICT and transformed it into the barrio’s first school. Tensions came to a head in April 1966 on what became known as Viernes Santo Sangriento (Bloody Good Friday). After a round of unsuccessful Provivienda invasions to the south of the city center, several families took refuge from the police in Policarpa. Within a month, residents had decided to house the newcomers in one of the remaining vacant areas within the neighborhood—the soccer fields. Aware of this new plan, the police responded in full force with cavalry and the riot squad, while locals repelled the attack with gasoline, sticks, rocks, and other homemade weapons. By the end of the day, the urban battle left one resident dead, hundreds injured, and more than seventy detained. Police retreated, and “although the barrio was destroyed and they put many compañeros in jail,” one longtime resident recalled, “we kept the land. After the Viernes Santo Sangriento the police did not come back to Policarpa.”65
The battle for Policarpa was a conflict between models of middle-class propertied ownership and collectivist working-class housing. Reformist urban policies would thus reveal their anti-Communist undercurrents and, most importantly, their tacit contribution to the forceful displacement of downtown’s poorest inhabitants. At a public seminar on urbanization and marginality in 1968, one of the country’s leading military counterinsurgency experts, then–army colonel Alvaro Valencia Tovar, made these connections explicit when he called for the “eradication of urban shantytowns [tugurios]” as a matter of national security.66 Valencia Tovar had participated in key operations against insurgent groups, served as military commander in the city of Bucaramanga in the 1960s, and was later chief of the armed forces in the 1970s. Describing a plan spearheaded by the military in Bucaramanga, he called tugurios “black zones” and decried how they “precariously harbor[ed] an unstable promiscuity of beings predisposed to swell the criminal ranks or currents of social perturbation.”67 For Valencia Tovar, housing policy was closely connected to the destruction of shantytowns and their “demagogic, rebellious, and resentful” sociality.68 Backed by the ICT and implemented by the army, the Bucaramanga plan became the militarized version of self-help development models. It was also a harbinger of the increasingly securitized atmosphere that would shape urban development in the following years.
Security State Spaces
Calls for the densification of the city center continued apace during the 1970s and 1980s. In a national climate marked by the end of the Frente Nacional (at least nominally, as bipartisan power sharing continued) and calls for market liberalization and state privatization, urban planning in Bogotá shifted decisively toward what Alberto Saldarriaga Roa calls the “real estate city.”69 Echoing only minimally the principles of Currie’s “new design of urban growth”—which included the promotion of class integration, diverse land uses, and the “capture [of increasing values] for social purposes” in denser urban cores—new developments in central Bogotá emerged as stripped-down versions that facilitated real estate speculation and privileged middle-class property and values.70
In one sense, urban boosterism during these decades deepened existing patterns of expulsion and segregation and catalyzed forms of social mobilization. An oft-cited case in this regard was the so-called Avenida de los Cerros (Avenue of the Hills), a road planned in the early 1970s that would cut through the eastern hills of downtown Bogotá and displace thousands of working-class families that had lived there for decades. Fierce opposition from residents, however, along with financial and management issues, ultimately led to the demise of the Avenida project.71 Importantly, the organized mobilization became a milestone in the history of urban protest in Bogotá and laid the groundwork for the contentious years ahead.
More broadly, behind the official veneer of progress embodied by new high-rises, avenues, and malls was the militarization of everyday urban life and the intensification of violent conflict. Emblematic of the ties between capitalist development, reformist agendas, and an emergent security state was the first post–Frente Nacional administration, that of Alfonso López Michelsen (1974–78). While López Michelsen had been elected as a progressive left-leaning Liberal candidate—he had cofounded the dissident Movimiento Revolucionario Liberal (Liberal Revolutionary Party)—his administration not only favored the elite sectors that he came from but also expanded the state-of-siege powers of the government, attacked union and labor rights, and criminalized protest across the country.72 This period marked the intensification of Colombia’s late twentieth-century regimes of violent capital accumulation as well as the state and paramilitary assault on working-class political organizing.73
By the end of the 1970s, the Liberal government of Julio César Turbay Ayala (1978–82) decreed the Estatuto de Seguridad (Statute of Security), which further institutionalized the state’s exceptional powers to police everyday life as well as wide-ranging measures to criminalize and repress social mobilization. With the pretext of combating threats to the state and reestablishing the public order (orden público), while continually invoking the specter of leftist guerrillas, the statute ushered in a “constitutional dictatorship” that had lasting effects.74 In 1979, human rights lawyer Gustavo Gallón Giraldo mordantly portrayed a bleak future in his study of the state of siege in Colombia. “The military apparatus will continue to consolidate positions as a branch of public power,” he predicted, adding that, as large-scale capital and illegal economies thrive, “popular sectors will continue to bear the brunt of this flourishing paradise with the disposal of their primary liberties and the product of their labor and at the expense of the progressive degradation of their conditions of survival.”75
During this period, downtown renewal plans centered more decisively on the notion of “decay” (deterioro), an official discourse that mapped closely onto elite anxieties about the loss of control over central spaces. As Samuel Jaramillo has noted, the talk of decay was integral to a class-inflected attack on the “centro popular”—the working-class downtown of tenements, rural migrants, and street commerce.76 Critiques of urban reconstruction and displacement such as Jaramillo’s, however, have focused primarily on the political-economic agendas behind redevelopment initiatives, selective historic conservation, and the so-called “recovery” of the city center.77 Yet the destruction and emptiness left behind by urban development was both the result of the fight for the control of downtown and a manifestation of the ravages of warfare. In looking back at the contemporary struggles over the city center, it is thus imperative to uncover the ways in which the broader currents of militarism and security ran through the remaking of downtown Bogotá. The bluntness of urban reconstruction speaks little of such residues of violence, leaving them instead buried under the immediacy of real estate battles and projects of sociospatial control. At stake here, ultimately, is the recovery of the everyday knowledges and materialities that have punctuated urban conflicts and that are often muted in the dominant narratives about urban transformation in Colombia.
Take, for instance, an apparently banal incident reported in Alternativa, an avant-garde political magazine led by leftist intellectuals, including writer Gabriel García Márquez, and closely aligned with the nascent M-19 urban insurgency.78 In its distinctly irreverent tone and exemplifying its aims to “divulge popular struggles” and “counterinform [contrainformar],” the magazine published a short note in 1974 titled, “How to Discover Letters from the ELN Inside a Mattress.”79 The story was a powerful indictment of the opaque links between heightened political persecution and urban development. The author recounted how city officials and the police had attempted to frame Carmen de Rodríguez during an eviction process. Not only was de Rodríguez a well-known human rights activist, but she had also become a visible leader in the movement against the Avenida de los Cerros on the east side of the city center.80 Two police officers, a judge, and functionaries from the Instituto de Desarrollo Urbano (Institute of Urban Development) showed up at her house two weeks after she had left. “The unusual police deployment” was even odder as the house was vacant, yet the “move [jugada]” that authorities had “staged” soon became apparent.81 Police entered and “opened a mattress with some papers attached to it.”82 When the judge saw the postscript “ELN”—the initials of the leftist guerrilla organization Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Freedom Army)—he quickly concluded that it was “subversive material.”83 Yet “the provocateurs who so grossly attempted to fabricate evidence of the crime of rebellion,” the Alternativa journalist continued, “had left behind a saw which they had apparently used to open a hole and enter the abandoned house.”84 According to several neighbors, the saw belonged to the Instituto de Desarrollo Urbano, whose workers moved quickly to demolish the house, even before the judicial expropriation order had been signed. In this manner, police stratagems to “repress the people’s fighters [luchadores del pueblo]” converged with state-backed displacement—in this case for the construction of a parking lot for new real estate development.85 The case of the letters in a mattress was thus both about militarizing social life and about “crushing the right to housing of the urban poor.”86
Far from exceptional, this incident can help bring new light to downtown interventions during those decades and to their tacit entanglements with expanding security agendas. Such is the case of Nueva Santa Fe, an emblematic downtown renovation project that started to take shape in the 1970s. The plan, which was partially implemented by the late 1980s and early 1990s, involved the state-led demolition of nine blocks of the historic Santa Bárbara neighborhood on the south side of the city center. Only three lots were developed as commercial and apartment buildings, leaving several other spaces vacant and abandoned to this day. Nueva Santa Fe has come to embody many of the contradictions and conflicts of downtown renewal. Not only did it lead to the expulsion of hundreds of families, but it also created a middle-class enclave severed from its surroundings. More broadly, Nueva Santa Fe exemplified the contested politics of official discourses of decay and historic preservation. While the neighboring La Candelaria was protected as architectural and historic patrimony, the less affluent Santa Bárbara was slated for demolition despite its equally significant colonial and republican past. In this sense, and as scholars have noted, Nueva Santa Fe is representative of the power-laden deployments of urban value, historical worth, and deterioration at the core of downtown renewal in Bogotá.87 Less often acknowledged, however, are the security and military roots of the plan.
Critically, one of the first moves to target the area was directly tied to the security of the presidency. During the administration of López Michelsen, the office and residence of the president moved from the Palacio San Carlos to the nearby Casa de Nariño on the south side of the Plaza de Bolívar. According to economist Rodrigo Botero Montoya, a government minister involved in the restoration of the new presidential palace, the project was quickly reframed as an “integral intervention in the area.”88 “As we toured the Casa de Nariño we found a depressing situation,” Botero Montoya recalled years later, “not only because the building was in ruins, but also because … the surrounding blocks had become a slum [tugurio].”89 While Nueva Santa Fe would be remembered mainly as a housing project, its original impetus had been “national security,” as renowned architectural historian Germán Téllez noted years later.90 “The worst thing that can happen to a neighborhood in Bogotá is to be located close to power,” a journalist in El Tiempo commented after Santa Bárbara had been demolished and Nueva Santa Fe was under construction. “Conservation and preservation,” the author continued, “gave way to the thesis of constructing modern buildings to elevate the socioeconomic level of the area and thereby create a security cordon [cinturón de seguridad] to protect the Palacio de Nariño, the Ministry of Finance, and other buildings of the central power.”91
Most tellingly, buried in a piece of legislation leading up to the renewal of the zone was one of the plan’s key objectives: the “construction of the barracks of the Presidential Guard Battalion.”92 The date when this law was signed was particularly meaningful: December 15, 1977, just three months after a historic urban protest had erupted throughout the city and successfully confronted the government and its increasingly authoritarian leanings. Since El Bogotazo, a popular mobilization had not shaken the official establishment as much as the Paro Cívico Nacional (National Civic Strike) of September 14, 1977. The Paro Cívico was the culmination of years of labor and urban activism, and it resulted from the wide-ranging coordination of leftist movements and neighborhood organizations. What started as a general labor strike, historian Frank Molano Camargo explains, led to a “gigantic explosion of urban popular sectors.”93 The ongoing struggle against capitalist exploitation, government repression, and worsening labor and living conditions had taken its distinct shape in the space of the city. “The shared interests of homeowners, tenants, small store owners, high school students, informal workers and, of course, blue-collar workers,” Molano Camargo argues, “became interwoven in the urban space of the capital.”94 During the protest, thousands of working-class residents flooded city streets, blocked main avenues, and shut down factories. Cars were destroyed, company filing cabinets were burned on the street, and large stores were looted.95 Authorities issued a citywide curfew, and police and military intensified attacks on protesters. By the end of the day, state forces had killed at least twenty-five people, injured more than five hundred, and detained more than three thousand. According to reports, several of the dead had been executed.96
Urban renewal in the vicinity of the presidential palace and in Santa Bárbara was thus integral to the conflicts made visible during the Paro Cívico. In one sense, and following Molano Camargo once again, Nueva Santa Fe—with its displacements and its favoring of financial and class interests—represented the “hegemonic urban model” that had driven sociospatial segregation and galvanized working-class mobilization.97 In another sense, and as the plans to build a military garrison and enforce security around state buildings illustrated, downtown renewal was closely imbricated with the expansion of the militarization of everyday urban life. Prior to the Paro Cívico, the administration of López Michelsen had refused to respond to the demands of labor organizations, deploying instead “counterinsurgent prose” and calling the strike a “subversive paro.”98 The day before the Paro Cívico, the government implemented the so-called Plan Tricolor, which involved the militarization of barrios such as Policarpa, the prohibition of public gatherings, and the arrest of organizers.99 It is not surprising, given this context, that Nueva Santa Fe had been launched with the construction of a security cordon around downtown’s governmental district, which included the acquisition and demolition of nearby working-class neighborhoods for the creation of the Presidential Guard barracks.
The militarized undersides of the demolition of Santa Bárbara, the renovation of the presidential palace, and the creation of the middle-class enclave of Nueva Santa Fe reverberated once again in one of Colombia’s most spectacular scenes of urban warfare. On November 6, 1985, an M-19 guerrilla command captured the Palacio de Justicia (Palace of Justice), a modernist building that housed the country’s main courts and that sat across from Congress and the presidential palace on the north side of the Plaza de Bolívar. Following its media-savvy style of urban sabotage—which had included stealing independence leader Simón Bolívar’s sword from a museum in 1974—the M-19 insurgency had planned the takeover as an armed demand before Supreme Court magistrates to carry out a “public trial [juicio público]” of President Belisario Betancourt for the violation of a recent ceasefire agreement.100 Significantly, the guerrilla unit organized and deployed from a nearby house in the Calvo Sur neighborhood to the south of the Plaza de Bolívar and a few blocks from Santa Bárbara—which at the time was an active demolition site for Nueva Santa Fe.101
If the guerrilla operation had literally sprung from the rubble of urban renewal, the state’s overwhelming response had also been materially anchored in the remaking and securing of downtown spaces. The recapture (retoma) of the Palacio de Justicia, remembered by some as a state massacre and temporary coup d’état by the military forces, was launched from the barracks of the Presidential Guard built during the first phase of the Santa Bárbara project.102 Any prospect of negotiating with the insurgent group or rescuing the more than two hundred hostages vanished as military tanks, helicopters, and thousands of soldiers stormed the palace. Within hours the structure was engulfed in fire, and by the end of the siege, more than a hundred people had died, eleven had disappeared, and seventy-five had been injured.103 A new ruin had been created by state forces deployed from what had recently been itself a demolition site—the new barracks behind the presidential palace—and as displacements and construction for urban renewal in Santa Bárbara unfolded just blocks away. The devastated structure was a forceful embodiment of the state violence that would consume Colombia in the following decades. It was the tangible materialization of the rising security state that had also led to the razing of Santa Bárbara and the creation of Nueva Santa Fe.
The afterlife of the renewal site and the ruined building further illuminate the threads tying them together. At stake here is something similar to what Hiba Bou Akar, in her study of urban warfare and development in Beirut, calls the “doubleness of ruins.”104 In Bogotá, both the razed lots left behind by the partially constructed Nueva Santa Fe and the burned remains of the state building were “the product of overlapping conflicts” around urban space and (in)security.105 Both of these urban residues, however, gradually dissolved, ultimately submerging the undercurrents of violence that had shaped them.106 The years following the destruction of the Palacio de Justicia were revealing in this regard. The ruined structure stood in the Plaza de Bolívar for three years while experts and officials produced and debated designs for the reconstruction. The plaza took on the “appearance of tragedy, ruin, and void,” architecture critic Tania Maya Sierra argues.107 The wreckage, moreover, was a stark reminder of how state violence had obliterated justice and legality both figuratively and materially. For decades the fate of the disappeared persons remained unknown, and military and government officials evaded responsibility for the atrocities committed during the recapture.
As an artifact of state violence, the burned palace channeled impulses to “repress memory” and “forget history,” Maya Sierra explains.108 During the visits of Pope John Paul II and President François Mitterand in 1986, for instance, the government covered the scorched structure with an enormous flag.109 The ruined building had become a tangible reminder of the so-called Holocausto del Palacio, the brutal violence orchestrated by the military against civilians, and the rising persecution of leftist movements across the country. This was brought to light forcefully in 1987 during the funeral procession of Jaime Pardo Leal, leftist presidential candidate for the Unión Patriótica party. Pardo Leal was among the thousands of the party’s militants killed during the 1980s by state and paramilitary forces in what is often described as a political genocide. When a multitude descended on the Plaza de Bolívar after his death, a group of students broke into the palace’s ruins as riot police responded with tear gas. “From the ruins of the Palacio de Justicia, monument to ignominy,” Arturo Alape would later write, “from all its floors came a vertical rain of stones, the students had taken over its smoky ruins in conscience.”110
Finally, in 1988, the government removed the “unbearable vision” of the palace.111 Rather than using explosives or heavy machinery to demolish it, which might have stirred memories of the siege, “the building was taken apart, piece by piece, as through an act of sorcery [una operación de sortilegio],” according to one reporter.112 Far from any commemoration of the victims or gesture to the violent destruction, an entirely new, monumental building was raised on the site between 1993 and 1999.113 The new Palacio de Justicia—a neoclassical-inspired monolith wrapped in yellow limestone—projected, according to Maya Sierra, a sense of “accessibility and transparency” with its columns, ample portico, and walkways.114 Yet as Maya Sierra argues, this apparent openness ultimately “masked” a radically securitized design integral to its construction materials and surveillance technologies, as well as to the “separation of the building’s interior spaces from its facade, the management of circulations and fixed points, and the disposition of accesses and separation from public space.”115 The new palace not only embodied the erasure of downtown’s overlapping histories of warfare and urban transformation but also epitomized the materialization of ideals of state sovereignty and territorial control under the semblance of democratic public space. Such an approach would be amplified in the following years, as I show in the next chapter, with the construction of a monumental park in the vicinity of the Plaza de Bolívar.
Urban Traces of Violence
Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that the material traces of events—from buildings to graves—“embody the ambiguities of history.”116 “Their concreteness,” he notes, “hides secrets so deep that no revelation may fully dissipate their silences.”117 In downtown Bogotá, the concrete and tangible immediacy of built forms has partially hidden an ongoing story about security, warfare, and popular struggles. Tracking the city’s submerged historical processes thus challenges taken-for-granted narratives about urban planning and renewal. In Bogotá, demolition and reconstruction were as much about the unfolding of capitalist development as about counterinsurgent violence, territorial control, and the consolidation of a security state. A central question here, one that I take up in the following chapters, is how the logics of warfare infuse everyday knowledge practices, urban materialities, and experiences of city life. More broadly, I ask how security becomes a key lever in conflicts over the remaking of urban space.
The trajectories sketched out in this chapter reveal both how state violence underpinned twentieth-century urban plans and how it was gradually paved over and obfuscated. Counterinsurgent ideologies seemingly faded away in what would simply become the construction of an avenue, the creation of affordable housing, or the remodeling of a presidential palace. At the same time, however, urban dwellers and activists opposed such material transformations, making apparent their continuities with the broader violent conflicts engulfing the country. As I argue in the remainder of this book, such struggles left traces in people’s epistemological and experiential orientations toward the very materiality of the city.
Furthermore, as the horizon of a postconflict era started to become visible in the first decades of the twenty-first century, a retracing of Bogotá’s violent undersides gained renewed urgency. An apparently minor yet telling episode around the historical narrative of the takeover of the Palacio de Justicia illustrates such battles for urban memory. In November 2012, a group of relatives of the victims of the siege and recapture of the palace gained the support of the Petro administration to install a granite plaque on one of the exterior walls of city hall, the Palacio Liévano, on the west side of the Plaza de Bolívar. The names of the eleven disappeared persons, along with the 2010 convictions that found former military officers Alfonso Plazas Vega and Armando Arias Cabrales responsible for the crimes, were etched on the stone. After the Supreme Court absolved Plazas Vega in 2015 due to insufficient evidence, however, city council members from the right-wing Centro Democrático party called for the removal of the plaque.118 Here again, as with the controversy over the urban cemetery that opened this chapter, the dispute over history and urban space echoed through mayoral politics. Soon after being elected for a new term as mayor, Enrique Peñalosa granted the request and ordered the removal of the plaque in 2016. As with other inscrutable remnants of the violence of urbanism, all that was left were the marks of its absence—a faint rectangular contour where the memorial had been attached to the wall.
The plaque was just one attempt at making visible the ties between urban space and the country’s history of warfare. The Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación—the new hub for memory work inaugurated in 2012 next to the restored columbaria and the exhumated mass grave—had led a more ambitious project that followed the “traces of memory [huellas de memoria] in the streets, plazas, and constructions in Bogotá which rememorate the history of political violence and struggles for democracy and peace.”119 Drawing on the work of human rights activists, historians and journalists, and victims’ organizations, the aim was to “piece together a sort of puzzle of the fragmented maps of our violence,” as writer and poet Juan Manuel Roca put it in the government-published book Bogotá, ciudad memoria, which showcased the project.120 Very much a reflection of the country’s moves toward truth, justice, and reparation programs, at stake here was the uncovering of silenced pasts, or what Roca described as a “collective memory that is always in rough construction [obra negra].”121 While Bogotá, ciudad memoria centered on emblematic events and political figures, it also called attention to ordinary people’s experiences of violence and insecurity and how they are mapped onto the “streets, roads, and avenues that make up the city’s urban fabric [entramado urbano].”122 It is these everyday mappings of Bogotá as a terrain of warfare—figurative and literal, epistemic and material—that I explore in the following pages.