By: Federico Franqui* – april 7 de 2010
When one gets to Santa Marta (Magdalena), no matters if one talks to a taxi driver, a police officer or a common pedestrian and starts asking about some of the districts located on the side of the Avenida del Rio (River’s Avenue) while waiting for the bus, always when you refer to those neighborhoods their immediate reply is going to be:
–
Yeah! So you ‘re going to Villa Paraco.
For me the fact of being forced to call that zone that way, I mean, by the name given to it by most people in Santa Marta fills my heart with kind of motherland’s pain, and also with such as horrible feeling that my voice trembled the first time I had to ask a taxi driver to take me back to ‘Boulevard de las Rosas’ neighborhood, the first neighborhood of the residential complex.
–
Excuse me! Can you take us to the village…
-To Vila Paraco?
Of course, it’s $4000! – said the taxi driver after a few seconds of silence.
According to what Pedro, my host in Santa Marta, told me, Villa Paraco exists around a decade ago. It started as a shantytown, created by taking land illegally, similar but not same as those funded by thousand of poor and homeless Colombian people, victims of the misery looking for survival. “I had taken part, together with the people, in illegal appropriation of no man’s land, here in the city in the past but the police always turned it all off ad we were forced to running away with the stuff we could save. However when the paramilitary performed this action everything was different”.
And actually it really was. Villa Paraco nowadays accounts almost five neighborhoods in its first stage. This is not a shantytown for the poor and the humble. This is not a set of shanties or huts made of cardboard nad other stuff one can use for making a shelter. In no sense it s similar to those huts where Pedro had to live more than once. It is not a popular initiative of the poor in the quest for a place to settle.
Villa Paraco is exactly what its name expresses, this is, a district founded by the
paramilitary groups of Santa Marta. Pedro remembers “when the police, some years ago, finally decided to get into the neighborhood with their patrols, threatening all the residents with trucks to sweep it all, then the paramilitary said. – let them in with their guns that we have ours as well- “ And this is how it was, although the paramilitary did not have the approval of the mayor of Santa Marta, they had all the weapons they used to cover all the northern coast of the country with blod, under the orders of Jorge 40, the paramilitary leader in charge of the political and military direction of these groups in the northern coast of Colombia.
Besides, the paramilitary and the drug dealer gangs who had taken these land illegally, by 2003 won an incomparable sponsor who will support them in their task to continue spreading Villa Paraco’s shantytown. Mr Trino Luna stood himself as the only candidate for the position of Governor of Magdalena department. He did not just turn a blind eye to the illegal creation of Villa Paraco but gives them the approval for the set up of all the public utilities and also the adaptation of the main access road, the Avenida del Rio. That is how Villa Paraco becomes ‘legal’ however no even Boulevard de las Rosas, one of the most representative neighborhoods conforming the district, appears in the description of the city’s communes presented in the official website of the Historical and Tourist District of Santa Marta.
Not even a shanty or a hut
Any traveler who decided to go visit Villa Paraco, while staying in Santa Marta, could state that the houses there are not in any sense modest or humble. Wherever you look at you will three-floor houses or buildings, with wide colored and decorated facades. All of the houses show the ambition to continue to expand themselves to get the fourth or even the fifth floor. “I pay a monthly rent of $ 350000 here but the apartment is really worth paying” Pedro points out and he is not wrong. The apartment where I narrate this story from has three big bedrooms, a living/dinning room, a beautiful kitchen, a washing room and a very comfortable bathroom.
“They came here, took the land illegally and divided it into plots. They even sold 80mx 80m plots for three million pesos […] about ten blocks from here
Pibe Valderrama’s mother-in-law lives” My host remembered while he pointed at a place in the distance with the same hand he was holding the beer, he had been served by ¨Mr Bean¨, the kind guy who works in one of the neighborhood’s store. In a city like Santa Marta, plots as enormous as the ones mentioned before can cost up to ten times more than the price they were sold. Nowadays they have not just become houses but commercial stores and even educational institutions, and enjoy a tacit “legality”
However, the price one has to pay for living there can be a very high one. “here there were people that went on vacations and when they came back, they found others living in the house that supposedly was theirs” states Pedro. Villa Paraco’s law is the domain of the strongest, and in the middle of this ‘para-titans’ war the most prejudiced of all have been the lessees and thw widows who have
appeared as a result of the clash between the ‘houses’ owners’ and the mafia leaders who do not just guide the daily destiny of the community but also determine how the parapolítica –paramilitaries promoting one candidate who represents them, also incluiding illegal armed intimidation over civilians– lang=”en-US”>electoral machinery has to work. They deny all the inhabitants even the minimal rights.
A strategy that keeps going on
This action has tremendous implications over the population’s control and has
become a tactic in the social, territorial and military aspects. The newspapers published and distributed in Santa Marta make it clear that all the neighborhood that comprise Villa Paraco have played an important role in the high levels of insecurity and violence in the city. Irma, one of the inhabitants of the zone, assures that so many crimes are committed and planned there and that the paramilitary expansion is growing very fast day by day, “the principal of Universidad del Magdalena was forced to order the university¨s general services workers to install a fence all round the campus otherwise they paramilitary would hace gotten in and nobody will be able to take them out after… Who could possibly take them out?”
I wonder if Villa Paraco will become totally legal and legally recognised one day, regarding that the strategy of taking land illegally, for them to create their own neighborhoods, in Santa Marta city continues. In this country something will happen in the end. However, there in the memories of all the people living in Santa Marta will remain the story of how the paramilitary took the land illegally, built houses up, rented them and created a set of neighborhoods just in front of the local, regional and national judicial system that judged them and submitted them to the ordinary law for all the crimes they committed, commit and unfortunately will continue to commit.
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