Bogota, Colombia – It’s a glorious Sunday in Bogota’s wealthiest enclave. Hundreds cram the sun-dappled grassy divider of its main thoroughfare. Beef sizzles on grills. People with good teeth admire the arts and crafts.
It could pass for a suburban street fair in southern California – until six soldiers in camouflage fatigues, Galil assault rifles slung across their chests, intersect the festivities on a routine foot patrol.
The scene in Santa Ana Oriental, on streets lined with acacia and eucalyptus trees, is emblematic of a city that by multiple measures has become safer, cleaner and more orderly than the kidnapping-plagued capital my family and I left in rather a hurry six years ago.
A civic, culinary and commercial renaissance has transformed Bogota into one of Latin America’s most livable cities – even as civil conflict continues to torture Colombia’s hinterlands.
It begins with a balmy climate 8,500 feet above sea level on a broad, fertile Andean plain. You go jacketless by day (when it’s not raining) and sleep under a blanket at night.
The city’s biennial theater festival is a little-known treasure – watching with an appreciative Colombian audience the National Ballet of Belgrade’s recounting of ex-Yugoslavia’s bloodletting in dance was an achingly rich highlight of this year’s 10th season. As for dining out, Bogota never had so many upscale options. Conde Nast Traveler recently placed the city’s Leo Cocina y Cava among the world’s top eateries.
Deft urban planning and infectious civic pride sown by a string of recent standout mayors have swelled chests in this metropolis of 7.5 million. Lauded globally are the six-year-old TransMilenio municipal bus system and an extensive network of bicycle paths unheard of elsewhere in Latin America.
Bogota’s recovery owes much to the soldiers that President Alvaro Uribe has poured into the streets and the freer hand he has given U.S. agents – from Special Forces military instructors to clandestine eavesdroppers – in helping him fight Colombia’s notorious gallery of outlaw armies.
Of course, much of the capital is neither safe nor orderly – or even has running water. Good teeth are hard to find in the southern shantytowns, home to an estimated one-fifth of the 3 million Colombians who have fled the violent countryside since the mid-1980s.
In the villages they left, the government has put leftist rebels on the defensive in what Uribe calls a “democratic security” buildup. He has boosted the number of soldiers nationwide to 247,000 from 181,000 when he first took office in 2002 (he was re-elected by a landslide in May).
Uribe boasts of nearly tripling police and military operations and more than halving the kidnapping rate. For helping him get such results, Uribe owes a lot to the people of the U.S. Embassy, a walled fortress that has grown into Washington’s largest diplomatic outpost after Baghdad. It has been channeling some $700 million a year to the Colombian government, mostly in military aid.
During our previous stay, extortion became rampant in the capital. Guerrillas or their allies would phone Bogota entrepreneurs from city prisons and demand hefty “tributes.” Our children would come home from school and recount how a classmate’s father had been kidnapped. Or a schoolmate seen in class one day would phone from Miami the next day, explaining that the family was being extorted and had to flee.
Laptop-toting leftist rebels would mount roadblocks in rural Colombia, stopping late-model cars and asking for IDs. If they found your name in their database you’d likely get marched up into the hills while someone in your car was sent for a carton of cash.
Those roads are now heavily patrolled by the army and police – I recently drove on one and was escorted for 20 minutes by soldiers in pickups and on motorcycles. Six soldiers rode tandem on the bikes, assault rifles slung over their backs.
Six years ago, my wife and I decided that the risk our teenage children might be kidnapped had become too high, so we left a year earlier than planned.
We flew our household effects out rather than ship them over bandit-infested roads to the ports. A pair of teachers at Bogota’s French school had just had their worldly goods hijacked on the highway.
Coming back this July, we shipped our goods by sea and flew into El Dorado, Bogota’s airport, where I was impressed to find signs warning visitors that to bribe a customs official is to invite a trip to jail.
El Dorado remains, of course, a transit point for outgoing cocaine from the world’s top producer of the drug.
Nobody bothers you coming in. But once you’re here, get used to being frisked for guns, even if fewer people are using them.
Bogota’s murder rate has dipped to 18 per 100,000, the lowest in 21 years. That’s double Philadelphia’s rate for 2005 but well below the 50 per 100,000 in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro.
Which is not to recommend strolling alone in central Bogota at night.
“See that corner?” former Chapinero district mayor Hernando Gomez gestured ahead to our group of 30 on a nighttime walking tour. “On that corner operates one of Bogota’s most successful bands of muggers. They work between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. and what’s curious about them is that they’re all women.” A few of the muggers, recognizing Gomez, called out to us. We crossed some of the city’s most notorious neighborhoods, including a block-long red light district and a street formerly controlled by rebels that is now spliced by a bike path.
Soon we were at Calle de Cartucho, or Cartridge Street, once a Dickensian den of child thieves, junk recyclers and drug addicts just three blocks from the presidential palace. It disappeared in a municipal cleanup during our absence and middle-income housing is planned for the area.
Cartucho’s denizens joined the internally displaced. Some now live, says Gomez, in underground sewers.
There’s plenty of despair in southern districts such as Bosa, where hundreds of refugees recently pulled all kinds of stunts – some burying themselves up to the neck, others battling riot police – to seek attention and permanent shelter.
After more than two decades of conflict, Colombia is considered by the United Nations to have the world’s worst internal refugee problem after Sudan.
Refugees beg for change on street corners outside the various new shopping centers that have opened in Bogota’s north in the past six years in a real estate and building boom underwritten at least partially with the laundering of profits from the drug trade.
Getting into those malls takes longer these days, however.
Guards search customers’ purses and briefcases, and check cars entering the garage with explosives-sniffing dogs. All this began after the February 2003 bombing of the elite El Nogal social club, in which 36 people were killed and 160 injured. The attack was blamed on leftist rebels.
Rebels and their right-wing paramilitary foes remain deeply destabilizing forces in much of rural Colombia. Life is far less tense in Bogota.
So we weren’t much bothered when the U.S. Embassy e-mailed its 2,000-odd employees on Sept. 21 barring them from northern Bogota shopping centers for a few weeks. The State Department said it had intelligence that leftist rebels were planning a bombing.
A car bomb did in fact explode almost exactly a month later in northern Bogota, injuring 23 people in a parking lot on a military base.
My wife heard the explosion, about a mile from our apartment, and initially thought it was thunder.
It is, after all, rainy season in Bogota.
