Life in Puente Nayero follows the rhythm of the tides. When it is not yet dawn, the fishermen set off. They take their canoes with them, which float on the water canals. There are no above-ground streets or houses in this area of Buenaventura. Strong and flexible Chonta wood piles hold the houses above the sea and maintain a complex network of bridges, alleys, friendships and walkways that form the most representative architectural and social typology of the Colombian Pacific: the stilt neighborhoods. The water level drops as dawn approaches, and then the fishermen can emerge from beneath the structures, dodging their pillars like a labyrinth towards the open sea.
The young people of Puente Nayero spend the afternoon at the lookout point at the end of San Francisco Street: Santiago Mesa
A metal grille door about four meters high separates this group of streets from the rest of the La Playita neighborhood and makes it clear from the start that this is not just any place: “Puente Nayero Humanitarian Space,” says the inscription at the top. “Protected by the precautionary measures granted by the IACHR,” it later says. A few armed police officers guard the entrance and seek shelter under a tin roof with their motorcycles.
On April 13, 2014, the community came together around a common goal. Together they collected the wood, put the pieces together and built a door as a form of civil resistance against the armed groups. It was like a baptism, a resurrection blessed by the bishop of the city. Originally the door, like everything else, was made of wood. “It was a big door. We built it among all the neighbors. It was not that no one could enter, but it was a symbol of declaring these streets as a humanitarian space,” says Nora Isabel Castillo, local resident and community leader.
Panoramic view of the Puente Nayero humanitarian space. Santiago Mesa
2013 was a difficult year for all of Buenaventura: there was a wave of disappearances, murders and forced recruitment of children and young people. These were the days of the so-called “Pique Houses,” places where anyone who resisted territorial control was tortured and dismembered. “Every day bodies were found in the sea and in the estuaries, stung, as we call them here,” says Nora Isabel.
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Although the largest paramilitary structures were demobilized between 2003 and 2006, residual groups remained. Authorities said that in La Playita, the sector where Puente Nayero is located, the company operated, the largest gang in the port and a stronghold of Los Urabeños, a rival organization with national reach. In Buenaventura’s more recent history, only the names have changed: in the dispute over control of the drug trafficking routes, guerrillas and paramilitaries initially faced off; today the Shottas face off against the Spartans. Nora Isabel warns: “If you leave the door, go there, there is no guarantee that nothing will happen to you, because your life is in danger.”
The architecture of the pile dwellings, with their peculiarities and their type of underground world, is suitable for the comadrazgo and for maintaining the connection of its inhabitants with the sea, but it also serves, says Castillo, as a hiding place and refuge for crime, giving access to the neighborhood below the houses had. “They did their things shamelessly,” the community remembers. The children learned quickly: in a mixture of fantasy and reality, they played with machetes and stick pistols between the piles of wood. And they looked for light bulbs to throw at and watched them explode like grenades.
On April 13, 2014, the Puente Nayero Humanitarian Space was founded in the La Playita neighborhood of Buenaventura, Santiago Mesa
Between November 2013 and September 2014, there were at least 80 murders in Buenaventura, according to data from the Interchurch Commission for Justice and Peace, a community-supporting NGO then led by Danilo Rueda, now the peace commissioner. Through this organization, the residents of Puente Nayero made a request to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to protect the lives and integrity of the 302 Afro-Colombian families who lived there at the time.
The aim of the petition was to put international pressure on the Colombian state to take special measures. After the gate was lifted, threats against neighborhood leaders increased. The armed groups took revenge on their neighboring strongholds in the Alfonso López and Piedras Cantan sectors. It wasn’t hard to imagine that hell would come if the person threatening to “stab” people was a paramilitary called “The Devil.”
Although Buenaventura was the most militarized municipality in the country at the time, “there was evidence that confirmed to us that members of the public authorities, through their actions and inactions, sometimes supported the criminal actions of armed groups.” September 15, 2014, with which the IACHR finally called on the Colombian government to protect the lives and integrity of the members of this community.
Young people spend the afternoon at a viewpoint in Buenaventura.Santiago Mesa
This protection, which is generally granted to individuals at risk, also applies to communities in certain cases. In Colombia there is the Embera Eyábida indigenous people in Antioquia and three groups of the Wayúu people, including in La Guajira. Puente Nayero is the country’s only humanitarian space in an urban context.
The ruling allowed the community to reach an agreement with the state so that there would be constant police surveillance at the entrance and that where the road ends, which leads to a small port, the navy would be stationed. Although the presence of the authorities initially caused slight resentment, not a single murder has been reported in the last nine years.
Forest, fishing, river and sea
When the tide rises, so does the trash: it floats in the water. As it sinks, it remains stagnant among the sediments. Nobody knows exactly where it comes from – on the nearby beaches it is said that the tide carries it away from the harbor; in the harbor coming from the nearby beaches. It seems endless. Even if cleaning days were scheduled, it would reappear the next day in the same quantity. The cart selling the seasoned bread enters the humanitarian space, “hot bread, rich, rich bread”; or a truck with a grill in the trunk offering Santa Rosa chorizo over a loudspeaker. But the garbage truck doesn’t dare pass. He waits at the door for a few minutes and then leaves.
Most of the area’s residents make a living from fishing. Santiago Mesa
In the 1980s everything was water. The land ended where the door is today. Until the people who migrated from the Naya River area – beautiful, wide and still crystal clear – arrived at the port and built in this place as on its banks: with houses over the water. With the advent of the port, they initially arrived looking for opportunities. Then he thought about how his children could learn. Until the beginning of 2000, a wave of forcibly displaced people arrived, first by the guerrillas, then by the paramilitaries of the Calima and Pacific blocs. There were more than 6,000, of whom very few returned. The road, which originally consisted of bridges they built themselves, became a new home for many of them. Therefore, it is known as Puente Nayero, where the “Nayeros” live, although its official name is San Francisco Street.
Nora Isabel was a child when her father Pompilio initiated an initiative to fill the canal. He was one of the first migrants, one of those who came of their own free will. “We start at the entrance. All the garbage that came to us was thrown here; and we litter. We filled, filled, it was a process. Rubble, gravel, sand, stones. Everything downstairs is rubbish. It will be about seven or eight meters deep,” he explains. In this way, San Francisco Street, as solid as any other, became the only one with solid land in Puente Nayero and the backbone of the network of alleys that lead to each other and form a community today. Since the self-proclamation of the humanitarian area, the population has doubled: there are 2,850 residents, 600 families, spread over almost 300 houses.
Orlando Castillo knows the numbers. This sociologist, son of Pompilio and brother of Nora, is a recognized social leader of the Naya and congressman of the Republic for one of the 16 peace seats intended to represent the victims of the areas most affected by the conflict. His credit includes 32 threats and three assaults. “What more can I ask for from life… but I tell myself if I stay silent it will get worse,” he says from a vantage point at the end of the road, from where you can see the ships arriving full of containers and cargo the cranes are waiting for you in the harbor. About 54,000 tons of goods pass less than a kilometer from Puente Nayero every day, one in nine goods entering and leaving Colombia.
A Marine security guard watches over the exit to the sea in the Puente Nayero humanitarian area. Santiago Mesa
As with trash, no one knows exactly where so much violence in Buenaventura comes from. “I remember,” says Orlando, “25 years ago, maybe 30, when I was very young, there was no violence here.” But to the extent that there was drug trafficking, arms trafficking, migration, “Northernism,” the privatization of the port were vaccinated, a breeding ground was created. “With one complicating factor, which was that there were no universities here,” he says. All of this would lead to the crime spikes of 2008 and 2014. And this year too, he claims.
For him, the lack of education, opportunities and access to goods and services is because “they built a port without community.” The community simply served as a labor force when needed. But no port has been built where both come together.” The other cause is corruption, the theft of contracts, which he believes comes from above. It begins in Bogotá, passes through Cali, the capital of the department, and ends in Buenaventura.
Nora adds a third factor: she associates violence in certain communities with the construction of megaprojects, “because wherever a megaproject is thought of, there is violence.” He assures that as part of the Buenaventura 2050 master plan, an extension of the promenade to this area as well as the construction of hotel chains and container warehouses. “Well, what’s going on? There’s a population in this place, because we build it, we fill it.”
View of Buenaventura.Santiago Mesa
Puente Nayero is at the same time a street, a neighborhood and a piece of Naya where its customs are preserved. They sing lullabies and make a novena for the deceased: before their funeral, they pray for them at home for nine days and an altar is built for them. Dance and music are fundamental and were the strategy implemented by María Yenny Quevedo, Cultural Coordinator of the Humanitarian Space, to distance children and young people from the old violent games. He teaches them dances, how to play the marimba and cununo. The past is now only a whisper: according to rumors, people were dismembered in the small white house in the background, and the story is told, merging with a myth, of a woman who was bound with stones and thrown to the sea .
That was a long time ago. Life went on. The population maintains its traditional activities, all linked to the sea. They cannot imagine being relocated to public housing far away. Many make a living from logging, although an estimated 60% of residents in this sector depend on fishing. The women do the same and, guided by the currents, go out at puja or high tide to collect molluscs. The force of the water carries the crabs and shrimps to the surface. In the afternoon, when the tasks are completed, the streets fill with life. Gone are the days of curfews when people would hide in their homes at dusk. The children come home from school, the women gossip and the young people go into the water. The men play pool or drink a beer in the shade at Her Memories street bar.
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