Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá
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Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822374183 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/19/2016 |
| Series: | Global Insecurities |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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Endangered City
The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá
By Austin Zeiderman
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7418-3
CHAPTER 1
APOCALYPSE FORETOLD
Omayra's Grave
In 2010, Colombia was inundated by the worst rains in recorded history. The resulting floods and landslides displaced hundreds of thousands of people, took several hundred lives, and affected over 4 million people. Amid the deluge, President Juan Manuel Santos presided over the twenty-fifth anniversary of another catastrophic event: a volcanic eruption in 1985 that set off massive mudslides and buried the town of Armero, killing over twenty-five thousand people. In his commemorative address, he urged Colombians to apply lessons learned from the earlier disaster to the current one in order to avoid falling into "victim syndrome" (síndrome del damnificado). Santos encouraged those affected by the recent storms to adopt "an attitude of mutual collaboration and solidarity" and to follow the example of the thirteen-year-old girl whose struggle for survival, though ultimately unsuccessful, had come to symbolize the calamity: "Omayra Sánchez, daughter of this town, who gave us a lesson in strength, in temperance, in courage" while "fighting against death ... with complete dignity." Moreover, he signaled that "among the lessons this great tragedy left behind is the importance of being provident [la importancia de ser previsivos] and of doing everything possible to prevent tragedies." In the case of Armero, he recalled, "it may have been possible to prevent many of the deaths. ... This is an important lesson ... if only the warnings had been heard." Santos then reminded his audience that this event had given birth to Colombia's national institutions of disaster prevention, which have since saved thousands from a similar fate. To this day, the Armero tragedy continues to shape the politics of security and risk in Colombia.
This chapter is an ethnographic and historical account of the constitutive relationship between authority, responsibility, and foresight in the realm of the political. It begins with the Armero tragedy and the tragic fate of Omayra Sánchez. Omayra (as she is commonly called) perished in 1985, but twenty-five years later her story has not faded from national memory. In the aftermath of the catastrophe, her name came to symbolize both the state's responsibility to protect vulnerable lives from threat and the citizen's duty to endure hardship with grace. People often asked me whether I had visited her grave when I mentioned my interest in the catastrophe that took her life. The question always made me feel as though I would not truly understand the significance of this event until I had made a pilgrimage, as many Colombians do, to the site where Omayra was buried. And so I eventually boarded the crowded bus that descends from the high altitude of Bogotá to the dry, sweltering plains that once surrounded Armero. I arrived in Guayabal, the adjacent town that due to a geographical accident was spared the horrible fate of its neighbor. From there, I hired a taxi to take me a few miles down the road to the site of the disaster.
As I approached Armero, signs of the event came into view. Land that once supported cotton plantations lay fallow. The road was elevated above its surroundings as though rebuilt atop the previous one. In the town itself, ruined shells of buildings peered out from sunken pits. Only the top floor of the hospital was visible; the lower ones remained interred. The devastation was still palpable.
We turned off the main road toward the center of town, entering what is now called the Parque a la Vida (Memorial to Life). The only life visible there, aside from the odd Popsicle seller, some rough vegetation, a few stray cows, and the occasional visitor, was a microscopic mosquito called el jején. They swarmed and bit incessantly as I wandered paths signed to indicate, for example, where Eleventh Street used to be. The mud was removed to make it possible to discern the remains of the Church of San Lorenzo. Its original tile floor and brick altar beckoned, while a simple Christ figure hung from a makeshift cross. I strolled silently through the memorial, visiting graves scattered about the young forest. Before long, I returned to the taxi and asked to be taken to my real destination, the memorial's centerpiece, which my driver had saved for last: Omayra's grave.
The tomb itself was simple: a slab of white marble, propped upright, topped with a wooden cross bearing her name and the date of her death. White plaster walls surrounded a devotional shrine adorned with white candles, plastic flowers, and religious figurines. Unlike the rest of the memorial, which was solemn and desolate, a steady stream of people came and went. Some gazed silently on the grave, paying tribute to the girl known far and wide as the human face of the tragedy. But others performed a more active ritual. Next to Omayra's tomb was a rudimentary structure of wooden posts connected by metal wires from which visitors to the shrine hang all manner of personal objects: necklaces, ribbons, baby shoes, bracelets, even sunglasses (figure 1.1). Beneath the offerings stood a white metal box with a hole in the top inviting one to leave peticiones (or requests) (figure 1.2). "Make a donation and ask for something in return," a woman standing nearby advised. On a small corner of my notebook I wrote: "I ask that there always be health and well-being in my family." I then tore it off, folded it up, and dropped it in the box.
Stepping back from the shrine, I began to understand the significance of the walls that surrounded it. They were covered by small engraved plaques — close to a thousand, I would guess. The plaques were acciones de gracias, or "thanks givings," commemorating favores recibidos (favors received) or milagros concebidos (miracles granted). Most bore the name of individuals or families (Jaime Palacio or la Familia Gomez), although some were donated by towns or even private companies, such as the Bolivariano bus line. The concrete pavement had begun to accommodate the overflow. Omayra's religious significance was clear.
I have since read newspaper articles about those petitioning the Vatican to recognize her as a saint. The pastor of the small congregation remaining in Armero opposed the canonization campaign, recommending that people refrain from praying to Omayra or asking her to perform miracles. "He who performs miracles is God," he told El Tiempo. But there are many who disagree. Among them is the Colombian ambassador to Portugal, Germán Santamaría, a journalist who witnessed Omayra's death while covering the Armero tragedy. He declared: "Although I'm not much of a believer, I do believe that Omayra is a saint. There is no Colombian who has shown such spiritual valor in confronting pain and sacrifice. What would be better than for Omayra, in her magnanimity, to become the first Colombian saint?"
Exhausted from the heat, devoured by bugs, and overwhelmed by the solemnity of the place, I told my driver I was ready to leave. The Memorial to Life faded into the distance as we turned back onto the highway. I gazed out the window at the few billboards that dotted this dusty stretch of country road. One belonged to the Ministry of Defense, and it depicted a humble family articulating a simple demand: "We want a Tolima without guerrillas." (Tolima, the surrounding region, was still rojo, "red," or caliente, "hot": an area, that is, where the FARC retains a strong presence.) Since it was the national security apparatus and not the tolimenses who erected the billboard, its rhetorical effect came from the way it structured an imaginary conversation between the state and its subjects — the state hails the subject to turn around and, in return, to hail the state in a particular way. As such, it reflected the political imperative to protect life against a range of threats. The family depicted did not demand progress, development, justice, equality, or prosperity. They did not ask for schools, jobs, hospitals, rights, or roads. When the state is seen (and sees itself) as protector rather than provider, the only conceivable and recognizable demand is simply: more security.
The significance of the Armero tragedy in contemporary Colombia was not immediately clear to me in 2008 when I began fieldwork on disaster risk management in Bogotá. Although I sought to historicize how risk became a technique for governing the city, at first it was difficult to engage my informants in this pursuit. There was an obviousness surrounding the set of assumptions I wanted to examine: that life was sacred, that the future was uncertain, that the city was a space of danger, and that protection was the state's ultimate responsibility. All of this lent disaster risk management an aura of inevitability: it seemed natural to expect the state to govern in anticipation of future threats. When I asked people to consider what may have motivated such initiatives, they often returned to the year 1985. For my informants, this conjured up two of the most unforgettable events in recent memory: both the volcanic eruption that claimed so many lives in Armero and the siege of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá by M-19 guerrilla insurgents, which occurred the very same week. To comprehend the emergence of risk as a technique for governing the city, many suggested, I would first have to understand how these catastrophic events came to define the state's responsibility to protect life from potential harm.
This chapter follows repeated suggestions to that effect by exploring the constitutive relationship among political authority, responsibility, and foresight in Colombia. This domain is specific to places where security is the dominant logic structuring the relationship between state, territory, and population, such that concerns for how to anticipate and govern dangers looming on the horizon are shared across the political spectrum. These concerns became central to the politics of security in Colombia after the converging catastrophes of November 1985. Framed as "apocalypse foretold" (apocalipsis anunciado), as the journalist Daniel Samper Pizano succinctly put it, these coinciding tragedies gave shape to political rationalities organized around the imperative to foresee future dangers. Examining the pivotal role of these events over the past three decades lays the groundwork for this book's central concern — the emergence of risk as a technique for governing cities and urban life. Pace Reinhart Koselleck, who argues that rational prognosis displaced religious prophecy as the paradigmatic conception of futurity in the modern period along with the secularization of political authority, here we find no clear separation of the two. The "year of the tragedies," as it is sometimes called, did not precipitate such an epochal shift from one governmental paradigm to another, but it did shape shared sentiments of how life should be governed and lived in the endangered city. The converging catastrophes of 1985, and their actualization thereafter as "events," created the conditions of possibility for the politics of security and the government of risk in contemporary Bogotá.
"Yesterday, Men ... Today, Nature ..."
On November 6, 1985, thirty-five members of the M-19 guerrilla group attacked the Palace of Justice in central Bogotá and took hundreds of hostages, including twenty-four Supreme Court judges. President Belisario Betancur rejected their demand that he come and stand trial for accusations that he had betrayed a previously negotiated peace accord, and instead ordered the army to storm the building. In the ensuing battle between the Colombian armed forces and the rebel gunmen, more than seventy-five hostages were killed, including eleven of the federal justices trapped inside. Exactly one week later, a volcano eighty miles west of Bogotá, the Nevado del Ruiz, erupted suddenly. Warning signs of imminent danger had been ignored, and over twenty-five thousand people died as a massive mudslide buried the nearby town of Armero. The coincidence of these two tragic events marked a turning point in Colombian political rationality. Governmental problems and their proposed solutions began to be increasingly understood within a security framework oriented toward the protection of life from a range of future threats.
These two events were inevitably conjoined in public and political discourse. Speaking a few days after the Armero tragedy, President Betancur referred to the two "difficult tests" that Colombia had just faced:
One emanating from the violent and irrational action of men, whose objective was to undermine our legal institutions and to destroy the rule of law, was overcome thanks to the self-sacrificing members of our armed forces in charge of defending order and to the courage of the citizenry, but not without leaving an irreparable trail of death and destruction in our justice system and in our community. The other, a terrible blow from nature, we are overcoming with the solidarity of our people and with the support of the entire world, a gesture for which we will be eternally grateful.
A similar framing appeared in an editorial published in the newspaper El Espectador, titled "Yesterday, Men ... Today, Nature ...," while political cartoons also juxtaposed the two events (figures 1.3 and 1.4). But not only were these tragedies routinely discussed together, as would be expected; they were also seen as requiring a similar response. To address the two catastrophes, President Betancur convened an emergency summit of both Liberal and Conservative ex-presidents to discuss a range of concerns, such as public order, the peace process, and the legal system. While the siege of the Palace of Justice and the Armero tragedy were disasters of different types, they were both seen as threats to human life, national security, and institutional stability and could be dealt with accordingly.
Meanwhile, media voices began to assign blame for the casualties in both cases to governmental negligence and a lack of foresight. A week after the Armero tragedy, El Tiempo published a cartoon simultaneously asking and prescribing: "When will we learn that it is better to prevent than lament?!" (figure 1.5). Two days later, an influential columnist for the same newspaper, Daniel Samper Pizano, authored a scathing reproach under the heading "Apocalypse Foretold." One of Colombia's most renowned journalists, Samper reminded readers of the range of tragedies that had recently struck the country: "massacres of judges and hostages, assassinations of government ministers, floods, earthquakes, and to top it all off, volcanic eruptions." His point was not to mourn these calamities, however, but to cite evidence demonstrating that they should have been foreseen: "We have become the land of tragedies forewarned, of prophecies that come true, of prognoses that materialize."
Samper cited evidence that the M-19 plot to attack the Palace of Justice was discovered in October of the same year and that special security measures were installed and then prematurely lifted. He linked government negligence in this case to the 1980 siege of the Embassy of the Dominican Republic in Bogotá by the same rebel group, which also materialized despite advance warning. Samper then demonstrated the amount of information that had forecasted the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz — what he called the "most recent catastrophe announced, predicted, foretold, warned, and notified." He cited prior warning by the U.S. Geological Survey, a thorough investigation by a Colombian journalist, a public plea made by a local congressman, and even a civic demonstration planned by the residents of Armero to draw attention to the imminent danger. And he concluded with a call to action: "Once the emergency has passed, it will be unavoidable to prosecute calmly but severely the authorities who had it in their power to avoid the largest tragedy in the country's history, and instead allowed the most apocalyptic of prophecies to come true." Referencing both scientific and religious modes of foreseeing the future, Samper demanded the state be held accountable for what could have been anticipated and, therefore, prevented.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Endangered City by Austin Zeiderman. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface viiAcknowledgments xv
Introduction. The Politics of Security and Risk 1
1. Apocalypse Foretold 33
2. On Shaky Ground 63
3. Genealogies of Endangerment 93
4. Living Dangerously 131
5. Securing the Future 161
Conclusion. Millennial Cities 193
Coda 209
Notes 213
Bibliography 247
Index 269
What People are Saying About This
"Extraordinarily well-grounded in ethnographic research and urban and social theory, Endangered City makes a significant contribution to debate about the ways that contemporary urban governance is shaped by actual and discursive engagement with the notion of risk. It will appeal to a wide range of scholars who study the rapidly transforming cities of the global South and to urbanists concerned more broadly with citizenship and governance."
"Endangered City offers a compelling and critical analysis of how concerns with security and risk have displaced other rationalities of government—such as development, democracy, and welfare—in contemporary Colombia, rearranging the field of political possibilities. Austin Zeiderman combines masterful ethnographic and archival research to reveal both the mundane practices and the various modalities of power that intersect in the management of life-at-risk. Taking us well beyond Colombia, Zeiderman's bold theorization considers the problems of framing urban and political life in terms of threat."