Carlos Mauricio Vega, journalist in Bogotá.
The hillsides of Ciudad Bolívar, around Bogotá, where over a million and a half people have settled in the last 40 years.
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For most men, war is the end of solitude. For me, it is infinite solitude. Albert Camus, French author (1913-1950) |
It isn't easy to persuade teenagers to abandon violence when their cultural environment is full of despair
Amid the
poverty and violence of a Bogotá slum, Victor Manuel makes videos to divert
young people away from guns and drugs
“The future for youths like me in Ciudad Bolívar is guns,” says
20-year-old Victor Manuel. “First you have to survive the gangs. Then you spend a
year in the army, hoping not to be sent to a combat zone. After that, if you want
to raise a family, you get a job as a security guard for a firm or a block of flats.
Or else you do dirty work for the militias or the drug lords.”
Victor is one of thousands of dead-end kids who grow up on the dusty hillsides of
Ciudad Bolivar, in the slums around the Colombian capital of Bogotá. Over
the past 40 years, one and a half million people have poured into the area—a fifth
of the city’s population.
Victor decided to steer clear of guns. He didn’t want to be a security guard, a soldier,
a smuggler or a gangster. He didn’t want to get into drugs either. “Taking drugs
is a form of weakness,” he says. “It shows you can’t face up to life. It’s the same
with violent crime.” Instead, Victor wants to make videos.
His new home is Ciudad Bolívar’s Youth Leadership School, a rather pompously
named association which was created by and for needy young people and which operates
from the basement of a four-storey building. Victor and his friends make big sacrifices
to pay the $100 monthly rent for these premises. With help from private universities
and a foundation run by a Colombian businessman, they are trying to set up a community
radio station and meanwhile produce videos about the lives of young people living
in the slums.
They believe communication is the only way to change the lives of future gang members—the
groups of street youths who hang out in houses or on waste ground where they meet
to compose rap songs and sometimes plan petty crimes.
The themes of the videos, which reflect life in Ciudad Bolívar, are worked
out together. Victor’s first production, A Taste of Evil, tells the story of a family
that fled from the countryside when they heard rumours of massacres. For the children
of this family violence was just that—a rumour of something that happened in the
next village. Then, when they got to Ciudad Bolívar, they encountered violence
on a daily basis, along with the lure of crime and drugs.
During the making of the second video, Dreams and Dreamers, a gang member from the
slum stole the equipment the team had painstakingly assembled. The boys at the Leadership
School were ready to revert to their old habits of gang fighting to get the material
back. But it wasn’t necessary. The local people protested and the gang members returned
the equipment. “They didn’t realize it was as if they had stolen something of their
own,” says Victor.
The Leadership School’s goal is to change the attitudes of young delinquents. The
filming, which involves about 50 youths, is a chance to establish a dialogue with
the street kids. The videos are shown in churches, schools, community centres and
at local festivals with the aim of trying to influence groups of youths by using
codes and symbols they are familiar with.
But it isn’t easy to persuade teenagers to abandon violence when their cultural environment
is full of despair. “Live hard and die young because there’s no hope,” say rock,
rap and heavy metal songs. “It’s also hard to compete when a kid can make 50 or 100,000
pesos ($25 or $50) in a 15-minute robbery,” says Victor.
The Leadership School offers no real job opportunities but it does provide one-year
courses which give youngsters experience in community management. It equips them
to contribute to the hundreds of small organizations and informal groups which spring
up in the slums and constitute the only collective response to poverty and neglect.
Forty young people have already graduated from this neighbourhood university where
Victor took a second shot at life.
