Housing Solution Needed, Not Tear Gas and Fire

26.06.06

www.ipsnews.net
Helda Martínez

BOGOTÁ, Jun 23 (IPS) – While the Canadian city of Vancouver hosted the third World Urban Forum this week to discuss ways to improve the lives of the world’s one billion slumdwellers, in Cali, Colombia the police forcibly evicted a group of homeless families twice after negotiations for a solution fell through.

At 4:00 AM on Jun. 16, some 900 police officers began to evict families who numbered between 600 (according to the newspaper El Tiempo) and 1,200 (according to non-governmental organisations), who had been squatting for the last four months on public land in the district of Aguablanca, a poor suburb on the east side of Cali.

Thirty years ago, in 1976, the Vancouver Declaration created the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN–HABITAT) with the mandate of promoting socially and environmentally sustainable human settlements, towns and cities.

And 30 years ago, Cali—the capital of one of Colombia’s wealthiest provinces, Valle del Cauca, 500 km southwest of the capital Bogotá—saw the arrival of the first residents of Aguablanca, which has grown into a sprawling impoverished neighbourhood that is home to nearly one-quarter of Cali’s 2.5 million people.

Many of the residents of the slum district are people who have been displaced from rural areas by Colombia’s decades-old armed conflict, and who are either unemployed or eke out a living in the informal sector of the economy.

Families live in makeshift shacks or in cement block or brick houses without basic services, usually in overcrowded conditions.

To pressure the authorities to provide them with a housing solution, the group of homeless families occupied public land next to the Isaías Duarte Hospital, where they built precarious camps and cut down the trees and brush for firewood.

The authorities rejected their request to stay on the marshy land, which is to be made into a nature reserve, but negotiations were launched with a view to finding an alternative solution.

Marta Ascuntar, regional coordinator of the Committee for Solidarity with Political Prisoners (CSPP), said the families turned down a government public housing proposal offering between 120 and 150 housing units, because the dwellings would not have been completely free of charge.

But according to spokespersons for the Cali city hall, no such proposal was ever made.

At any rate, the city government set a Jun. 16 deadline for the families to move out, of their own will.

“It is painful to leave families homeless, which is why talks were held before the eviction with the provincial government, the Isaías Duarte Hospital, the metropolitan police, and (Catholic priest) Father Alfred Walter, in order to cut short an occupation of public land next to a hospital,” Cali Mayor Apolinar Salcedo said in a communiqué.

Ascuntar told IPS that officials with the ombudsperson’s office were present when the eviction began, but that when they left, army troops and riot police were called in.

Some of the families packed up their belongings and moved out. But when other families failed to do so, the riot police fired tear gas and set fire to the camps built with guadua bamboo.

Six-month-old Luis Ángel Riascos was taken to the emergency room of the Carlos Holmes Trujillo Hospital, where he was treated and discharged on Jun. 18. However, he died the next day.

The cause of death is being investigated by forensic doctors.

Ascuntar maintained that even if the cause of death is ruled as malnutrition, the real cause was smoke inhalation and poisoning by toxic fumes.

She noted that the fumes had a strong impact on the weak, malnourished homeless children, who suffered vomiting and diarrhea after the eviction.

Other children were also taken to hospital emergency rooms and nearby health centres. A week after the eviction, a seven-month-old baby, José Miguel Burbano, remains hospitalised.

And a little girl, aged one year and nine months, is recovering from a blow to the forehead that she sustained when a riot police officer tried to hit her mother, according to witness testimony gathered by the CSPP, a group that is active in the defence of human rights nationwide.

A number of adults were also injured in scuffles with the police and soldiers, and were temporarily taken into police custody.

After the eviction, some of the families took shelter in the homes of friends or relatives. But around 500 people who had nowhere to go ended up returning to the plot of land next to the hospital—only to be violently evicted once again when the police returned and burned down their camps in the wee hours of Thursday morning.

Around 100 of them are now camped out in the square in front of the Cali municipal administrative centre, to pressure the authorities to do something.

City officials and the security forces are studying the situation, to come up with a solution to the families’ plight—one that would recognise their right to decent, affordable housing.

Participants in the five-day World Urban Forum, held this week under the theme “Our Future: Sustainable Cities – Turning Ideas into Action”, debated ideas and projects and exchanged experiences aimed at making cities a better place to live for the one billion people around the world living in slums.

UN-HABITAT warns that due to the urbanisation of poverty, the world’s slum population will double within the next 30 years if current trends continue and adequate solutions are not found. (END/2006)

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