Forrest Hylton

Classes were cancelled at the Universidade Federal da Bahia for a couple of days a few weeks ago because two neighbouring favelas, Calabar and Alto das Pombas, were both at war, leaving at least ten people dead. Both areas were occupied by Military Police (PM). Dozens of families fled. One of my students apologised for missing our online class: he had been trapped at home listening to gunfire and helicopters for two full days; unable to read or concentrate, he had fled the city.

It couldn’t last. Having found a house removed from danger – for the time being, at least – thanks to childhood friends (and missionaries), Víctor Peña had, at the age of 41, begun university at the Colegio Mayor de Antioquia, to study planning, social development and community administration. Doctor Z’s orphaned daughter had begun high school near where she lives with Víctor in a rural area outside Medellín, with plans to go on to study medicine at the Universidad de Antioquia.

Under a vaulting blue sky, the Sunday morning before last, in Porto da Barra, beside the wooden deck where people practise yoga or capoeira in the morning, and in the evening watch the sunset over Itaparica and the Bahia de Todos os Santos, a young man’s body was found next to the rubbish bins, stuffed in a large Styrofoam cooler, of the sort the barraqueiros on the beach – the people who rent out beach chairs and umbrellas – use to keep beer, soft drinks and coconuts on ice.

Last Friday, I received news that Dr Z had died in hospital from kidney cancer. Two months ago his daughter was still in school, living at home with her family. Now she is orphaned and on the run from the narco-paramilitaries who targeted her family because her father protected the displaced Zenú cacique Víctor Peña after they warned him against it. 

After a honeymoon period of perhaps six months, President Gustavo Petro’s government – the first ever to make protection of social movement leaders a priority, at least rhetorically – has gone from struggling to embattled. In 2022, Colombia tied with Syria for the highest number of internally displaced people in the world (6.8 million), notably in the departments with the highest Indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations; forced displacement reached a ten-year high. Murders of social movement leaders, many of them Indigenous or Afro-Colombian, continue unabated. For now, peace with either the narco-paramilitary AGC or the nominally Marxist-Leninist ELN lies beyond the horizon (the ELN and the government have signed a bilateral ceasefire agreement that may or may not hold).