The Occupation of Public Space in Bogotá

Colombia, Internal Displacement and Land Reform

Questions of public space have become central concerns for socio-legal and critical lawyers. There is a growing engagement with how it should be conceived and its relation to the public sphere, in the face of protest movements which take to the streets and squares. We would like to suggest that one approach to this spatio-legal question is to look at alternative understandings of public space and its relation to the political. This article examines the struggle of internally displaced people (hereinafter IDPs) in Colombia who have used the tactic of occupying public space to challenge their depoliticization, or perhaps better, their political invisibility. We suggest that, while there is much that is particular to the situation of IDPs in Colombia, there remain certain logics of public space that are evident more generally. Thus, we seek to balance an analysis of their situation with more generalizable ideas of public space and the legality and politics of its occupation.

In the first half of this work we will give an account of the occupation of the Parque Tercer Milenio, and explore the manner in which the legal framework on displacement relates to the IDPs’ claim of invisibilization. The article then looks at three approaches to the construction of public space. The first approach emerges in the hegemonic political response to the occupation of the Parque Tercer Milenio. It sought to ‘protect’ the space for the public to use, but also from the public in the sense of the IDPs. The second corresponds to the Colombian Constitutional Court’s idea of a rational balancing of interests when it comes to allegedly improper uses of public space and fundamental rights. We will contrast these authoritative constructions to the protestors’ idea of public space as manifesting the wound at the heart of the social. We suggest that the IDPs’ action challenges the hegemonic constructions of space by ‘improperly’ manifesting their everyday life of displacement in the space ‘properly’ given over to the public. In this, they sought to demonstrate their expulsion from or at least invisibilization in the public sphere.

To begin, it is necessary to provide some context for the problem of displacement in Colombia. From the 1960s and intensifying throughout the 1970s, the Marxist guerrilla forces of FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) and the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional) among others, challenged state control and authority through guerrilla warfare. Over the period, the state has responded with various strategies, from full military counter-insurgency to negotiation and ceasefire. The 1980s saw the emergence of major paramilitary groups which gathered together under the umbrella organization the AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia) in 1997. They aligned themselves against the guerrillas and have demonstrated a repeated willingness to exercise the most violent means. The 1980s also saw the emergence of the tactic of displacement. With the declaration of a ‘comprehensive war’ (Carroll, 2011: 16) on the remaining guerrilla forces in the early nineties, this tactic became increasingly widespread and intense. Thus, for nearly 30 years the terrible humanitarian crisis of displacement has ravaged Colombia, victimizing nearly one-tenth of the population as armed paramilitary groups, guerrillas, and the national military battled for territory and control (e.g. Amnesty International, 2009; Easterday, 2009: 64). While figures are disputed, the government estimates that there were 3.8 million people displaced between 1997 and 2011 (CODHES, 2011b: 4; IDMC, 2011c; SIPOD, undated). CODHES (Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento), who began counting displacement significantly earlier, estimates that between 1985 and 2011, 5.2 million people have been internally displaced (2011b: 3). Today, ‘internal displacement affects [between] 8 to 11.6% of the national population’ (IDMC, 2011a: 25; also CODHES, 2010, 2011b), with 280,041 people newly displaced in 2010 alone (IDMC, 2010b).

Although a comprehensive account of the history of conflict in Colombia is beyond the aims of this article, it is necessary to note that the question of land ownership and the control of territory lies at the heart of the conflict. In this context, displacement is not simply a means of attacking the opposing ideological grouping, but also an end in itself. Valencia-Villa insists that the fight for land is ‘the central social conflict of Colombian history’ (2010: 18–19). Gutiérrez-Sanín explains that ‘the displacement of peasants and the usurpation of their land … [has become] both an outcome of confrontation and a strategy [in itself] of some armed actors’ (2010: 215). Whilst estimates vary, the scale of this land appropriation following displacement is shocking: Acción Social, the Presidential Agency for Social Action and International Cooperation, estimates that people have been forced to abandon 6.8 million hectares (IDMC, 2010: 10, cf. Comisión Seguimiento, 2011). Gutiérrez-Sanín points out that such an usurpation and accumulation of land amounts to ‘a gigantic agrarian counter-reform’ (Gutiérrez-Sanín, 2010: 216). The significance of such an insight cannot be underestimated. It means that displacement is not simply a byproduct of conflict, but at times it becomes the very object of the conflict itself – facilitating land redistribution from peasants and small-holders to larger landowners and corporations.

Historically, the majority of displacement has occurred at the hands of the paramilitaries, although the guerrillas and government have also been involved (IDMC, 2011c: 21–22). Displacement begins with actual or threatened violence; whether direct threats or actual assassination and massacre of friends and family. In the face of such violence people flee their from their homes, often ending up in major urban centres. However, this initial flight from their locality leads to a second displacement. The initial displacement itself is the cause of a secondary dismissal to the margins of the city (Howe, 2009). This dismissal occurs for economic, political and social reasons. The IDPs often arrive into quite destitute communities, where more people competing for the same limited resources may not be tolerated. Equally the IDPs may become associated with the conflict in a form of tacit blame distribution: the presumption often being that they were displaced due to sympathies with one or other of the conflict’s actors. They must then settle in the slums surrounding most Colombian cities, where their existence becomes increasingly precarious, constantly subject to further victimization at the hands of the actors in the conflict or the many various narcotics gangs. Most IDPs cannot return to their original land because of continuing insecurity. Instead they remain in limbo; out of place, isolated and without a political voice.

The Occupation of the Parque Tercer Milenio

The purpose of this article is to explore the IDP strategy of occupying symbolically significant space. In Colombia, this has been a crucial tactic since the late 1990s, when ‘a church, the interior ministry, the presidential department responsible for the question of displaced people, [and] the offices of the UNHCR’ were all occupied (Agier, 2008: 98). However, the most important of these early occupations occurred in December 1999 when several hundred displaced people occupied the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) – in an exclusive and fashionable area in Bogotá, the Zona Rosa.

Two weeks after the arrival of the first occupiers, over a thousand desplazados [displaced] had established themselves in the ICRC building and the street outside. This street, rapidly closed to traffic by the forces of order, was claimed by the occupiers, who set up plastic tents, did their cooking on wood fires … and began to live there as they might have done in a formalised camp. After a few days, the ‘invasion’ was encircled by the police, who controlled all the exits, and the comings and goings of the occupiers. Between two and three hundred thus remained as ‘prisoners of their own occupation’ as they themselves put it, until the beginning of 2001. (Agier, 2008: 98)

This tactic of occupation continued throughout the 2000s. The first significant occupation of public space occurred when more than five hundred families occupied Bosa’s main park on 14 July 2006. More famously, almost two years later on 31 July 2008, two hundred IDPs entered the ‘Park of the 93rd’ within an exclusive sector of northern Bogotá. Again on 8 September 2008 this park was occupied (CODHES, 2008; El Espectador, 2008; El Tiempo, 2008). These occupations were used to protest against governmental failure to assure humanitarian help for IDPs, but also to challenge the politico-legal constitution of displacement.

For the purposes of this article, we will focus upon one of the largest and most recent occupations of public space by IDPs in Bogotá. The occupation of the Parque Tercer Milenio in 2009 underlines the utility of occupation of public spaces, as well as demonstrating the public discourse which gathers against such an intervention. The occupiers gathered in the middle of February in Plaza Bolivar and Parque Carvajal in the centre of Bogotá. Initially made up of 200 internally displaced families, they came from all over Colombia in search of ‘visibility’ ( El Espectador, 2009c). On 3 April, they moved to the nearby (although far less visible) Parque Tercer Milenio, where they would reside in terrible conditions until the end of July. The protestors made a call to IDPs from across Colombia to join them and collectively make their presence felt. Given the number of IDPs in Colombia, the call to join together represents something quite radical in terms of base political power ( El Tiempo, 2009a). The protestors made it very clear that their only strength or power lay in their visibility.

By the end of May (25) the number of displaced in the park was estimated at around 1800, although it fluctuated. There were two lines of dialogue between the community and the government. Firstly, the community wanted to engage with Acción Social (the Presidential agency in charge of the National Comprehensive Assistance System for the Displaced Population). However, Acción Social refused to engage with the protestors because they did not use the formal channels. They rejected the occupation because it used what they called ‘de facto means’ (via de hecho). Acción Social’s coordinator in Bogotá said that they would not give ‘any privileges to the displaced groups adopting de facto means such as the unlawful occupation of public space’ ( El Tiempo, 2009b). The community had a second line of negotiation with the office of the Mayor of Bogotá. To a degree, the office of the Mayor was sympathetic with their demands and on 25 May they offered an initial settlement. This consisted of 400 construction jobs, ‘economic incentives’ for 450 people, emergency housing and future negotiation on the major questions of resettlement, etc.

The majority of the IDPs rejected the local government’s offer. Only 300 of those who were most in need of support accepted the offer of emergency shelter. The remaining IDPs explained that once they left the park they would again become invisible ( El Espectador, 2009c). The majority argued that the help offered by the local government was entirely insufficient. In particular they objected to the potential emergency housing being in the building that was previously the ‘Permanent Justice Unit’ (Unidad de Justicia Permanente). This is where the Police and Army used to bring drunks and drug addicts, incarcerate and often (allegedly) beat them. Nini Soto, a leader of the community, demanded that they deserved dignified treatment and sought talks with Acción Social. The protestors, along with a number of NGOs, insisted that the emergency accommodation offered by the local government was in fact a manner of silencing the voices of the displaced. They suggested that it would ghettoize the community, moving them all out of sight ( El Espectador, 2009a). Alongside this political observation that they could not attain their broader political objectives from within the IDP system, the community also expressed a very real fear that they would be targeted by paramilitaries, the state or others involved in the conflict. Once they left the park, they would become invisible once more, and so even more precarious.

Between early June and mid-July the story faded from the newspapers. There was less and less coverage of the camp as it became a part of the political furniture. Ironically, in their quest for visibility, the IDPs were once again disappearing. In late July, the media reported a rising fear amongst the IDP community ( El Espectador, 2009f). In particular, they feared the state forces whose security cordon was being drawn increasingly tighter. The occupation had been fenced in and was being patrolled by the police, like those who had occupied the ICRC headquarters a decade before ( El Tiempo, 2009c). At the end of July, the Parque Tercer Milenio reappeared in the headlines of the national newspapers, with the circulation of a video showing a police recruit raping a 13-year-old girl in the presence of five other police recruits. His audience watched and beat drums in ‘accompaniment’. The video was filmed by one of the participating police officers, as they ‘guarded’ the area occupied by the displaced ( El Espectador, 2009d; El Tiempo, 2009e).

In the same week the Mayor of Bogotá announced a sanitary emergency, with the suggestion that Swine Flu had broken out ( El Tiempo, 2009d, 2009f). This implication, however, was subsequently withdrawn by the district under-secretary for health, who blamed journalists for ‘misinterpreting’ the announcement (Martinez, 2009). Nevertheless, the ‘sanitary emergency’ allowed the authorities to enter the camp and undertake a census. They found 1939 residents, from regions as diverse as Chocó (the Pacific coast), Huila (in the south-western centre of the country), and Metá (the eastern centre of the country) ( El Espectador, 2009e, 2009f). In a country the size of France, Germany, England and the Benelux countries combined, such a wide distribution is very interesting. It demonstrates either the extent of dispersal following displacement, or potentially the distances that people were willing to travel to get to the occupation. The agreement to vacate the park finally came on 30 July. It contained provisions for humanitarian help, the promise of an (unspecified) amount of money for ‘productive projects’, and the continuance of negotiations about housing, relocation and security (especially for the leaders) once the park was vacated. This short-term humanitarian success is important. As Agier says, the occupations ‘were certainly tactics of desperation, since their origin was the need to obtain immediate assistance, food, and shelter’ (Agier, 2008: 98). However, to see this as their only aim is to miss that which is most significant in the IDPs’ intervention.

Invisibilization and Depoliticization

To understand the tactic of occupation of symbolically significant space, it is necessary to turn away from the question of public space, and examine instead the invisibilization that IDPs claim is implicit in the state’s approach to displacement. On the surface, the legal framework set out in Law 387 (1997) for dealing with IDPs appears to be a model of international best practice. In theory, the system should provide support, housing and a limited economic framework which could facilitate the IDPs settlement in major urban centres while they await the resolution of the political conflict. However, this structure operates to invisibilize and depoliticize the problem of displacement in a multitude of different ways.

Firstly, this system never operated properly. We might pick out three aspects in particular: failures of the IDP registration system; the disarticulated institutional response; and the paucity of emergency aid. The former justice of the Constitutional Court, Manuel José Cepeda Espinosa explains the problem: ‘under-registration; refusal of registration by the officials in charge of feeding the system; systematic non-recognition of certain types of displacement …; reluctance of the victims to be officially recognized as IDPs; ignorance; and fear or impossibility of accessing State authorities’ (2009: 4–5; Wong, 2008). Secondly, a proliferation of agencies and competencies has resulted in the disarticulation of the institutional response (Rodríguez-Garavito and Rodríguez-Franco, 2009: 23). The complex system of offices, sections and organizations leads to the increasing likelihood of displaced people slipping through the cracks. This disarticulation of agencies is exacerbated by the structural under-funding of programs for the displaced (Colombian Constitutional Court, 2004; Wong, 2008: 24). Finally, the actual humanitarian assistance given to the IDPs is problematic. The assistance provides three months of aid, with the possibility of an extension for a further three months (Atehortúa, 2010; Cepeda Espinosa, 2009). There are often massive delays in emergency support, administrative hiccups and oversights (Atehortúa, 2010; Maldonado, 2010).

These three problems of registration, institutional confusion, and aid insufficiency, generate conditions where IDPs have to struggle at every point to ensure the receipt of the minimal support. The everyday challenge of economic survival often presents IDPs with an impossible choice between satisfying basic material needs by seeking employment and undertaking the extensive work necessary to access emergency aid. The system seems to place a multitude of bureaucratic hurdles before IDPs, including: the difficulty of accessing information about entitlements; the opaqueness of the juridical framework for recognition; and the physical access to the offices of the relevant authorities. While these are not in themselves invisibilizing mechanisms, they operate to order IDP priorities in such a way that their presence within the political sphere is discouraged. However, what is more directly invisibilizing is that the system constitutes itself as the totality of the state’s response to displacement. There is no political space to deal with displacement outside the juridical framework. Thus, when IDPs go outside the bureaucratic and juridical mechanisms of Law 387 (1997) and attempt to gain political attention for their plight, they are condemned as undertaking ‘de facto means’ and therefore dismissed. In this, the public rarely hears about the plight of displacement from IDPs themselves, because they are channelled into a faceless, atomized, tedious and unreported individual process.

A second layer of depoliticalization operates in a more direct fashion. Vidal suggests that there are significant restraints placed on IDPs seeking to engage with the political question of displacement. These range from extreme violence suffered by the leaders of the displaced to the difficult circumstances involved in organizing such a marginalized and atomized group (Vidal, 2007: 211). Colombia is one of the most dangerous places in the world for political organizers and human rights defenders of any variety (UN Human Rights Council, 2010). The murder of Oscar Maussa demonstrates this problem very clearly. Maussa was a community leader who had been displaced in 1997 by members of paramilitary groups in the municipality of Turbo, Antioquia. After the government publicly suggested that it would be safe for the displaced to return to their original land, Maussa and his fellow IDPs very publicly declared their intention to reassert their legitimate ‘rights over lands from which they had been forcibly ejected’ (OHCHR, 2010). They hoped to demonstrate the necessity of return as a political solution to the displacement problem. Upon their return to their lands, however, Maussa was murdered and others were threatened. It was clear that his death was a result of his very public stance on the IDPs’ return to their land (Ituango v Colombia, 2006; OHCHR, 2010; Saffon and Uprimny, 2007). Maussa’s death demonstrates the very real threat to IDP leaders who attempt to operate on a public stage in Colombia. The displaced are forced to stay quiet by implicit and explicit threat of violence. In fact, their condition as IDPs is already premised on the effects of actual or threatened violence. A recent study demonstrated that IDPs were encouraged to remain passive, obedient and invisible if they were to survive (Jakobsen, 2011). The IDPs interviewed suggested actively avoiding any action that would draw an individual into the public fray – from following ‘the soap operas, watch[ing] the news and keep[ing] the door closed in an attempt to block out the atrocities [literally] unfolding outside’ to avoiding any social or political organization, mobilization or even involvement (Jakobsen, 2011: 23). In other words, the conflict encourages the IDPs to interiorize depoliticization as a strategy of survival. The occupation of the Parque Tercer Milenio seeks to challenge this subjectification.

Finally, there is another, deeper level of depoliticalization which operates around the normalization of displacement. Polzer and Hammond remind us of the complexity of ‘Invisibility’ in the context of refugee studies: ‘A critical look at invisibility begs a series of questions. It asks not only who or what is invisible, but invisible to whom, in what ways, and why’ (Polzer and Hammond, 2008: 417). The invisibility that marks the condition of displacement is complex:

Keeping something or someone invisible involves power: the power to decide who receives resources, who has the legitimacy to make their voices heard, or who can be harmed or ignored without consequences. The process through which this power is wielded is itself rarely explicit – indeed, its influence lies in its being taken for granted and unquestioned. (Polzer and Hammond, 2008: 418)

When the IDPs complain of invisibility, they are talking about power. But this invisibility is not created by hiding IDPs, by denying the problem or its scale. Rather it is created by establishing a realm of the taken for granted, or normal displacement. If displacement is normal or taken for granted, then its continued existence is not politically problematic. This is perhaps the most crucial aspect of invisibilization. The city, in particular, is an intense space where this power of in/visibility takes place. Norton explains the relation between power and visibility:

The sense most recognized as a dimension of power and authority is the sense of sight. We are accustomed … to the government of the visible. We are accustomed to reading the inscriptions of authority on the city. There are flags and seals, the familiar grandeur of city hall, the courthouse, and the museums. In these we see the grandeur of the state and know ourselves to be within its power ... The government of sight entails the power of concealment, to determine what is invisible to us, and the power of commanding the gaze. (Norton, 2001: 190)

Three Approaches to Public Space

When the IDPs are dismissed to the periphery of the city, the grey zones unrecognized by city authorities, they slip between the cracks. In a political sense they disappear from view. Thus the purpose of the occupation of public space becomes clearer. The IDPs do not simply demand a larger share of public funds. Instead they challenge the generation of a ‘taken-for-granted’ displacement. By manifesting their presence in public space, they demand that their out-of-place existence be once more addressed (Cresswell, 1996). Crucially, the IDPs at the Parque Tercer Milenio sought to make themselves ‘visible’ in the public sphere. They did this by manifesting their physical presence in the public space of the park. The political response to the occupation was to deny the IDPs any legitimacy. Interestingly, however, this played out in the projection of the nature of the space itself. In other words, the space became a trope for the question of the visibility of the displaced and their place within the political constitution of Colombia. The occupation of the Parque Tercer Milenio, and the political responses thereunto, thus present three different logics of public space: the first is the logic of protected space that was crucial in the response to the occupation; the second is the balancing or rights-based approach of the Colombian Constitutional Court; finally there is the logic of dissensus that is much closer to the approach of the IDPs themselves.

Conclusion

The case of the Parque Tercer Milenio suggests that the occupation and (re)creation of public space is potentially useful for IDPs in a number of senses. Firstly, it generates an immediacy that can be used to win short-term humanitarian support from the state. However, we have suggested that this is only one part of the demand. The demand of visibility itself is more important politically. The IDPs seek to make their very being visible in public space in order to challenge the urban void into which they are increasingly condemned to fall. By inhabiting the public space of the city the IDPs are effectuating a material redefinition of urban space: public space is not an absolutely pre-defined category. Instead a tension is revealed between a traditional identification of it as a static physical location (a fixed space of a purified public) and as a site and space of political demand of the excluded. The sense of a unified, reasonable and calculative political sphere appears possible only so long as the IDPs are excluded or hidden in plain view. The IDPs present the enduring excess of the conflict, a demand that the injustice done to the people must be addressed. At stake in the visibility of the IDPs is nothing less than the construction of the political itself. The IDPs occupied the park, thereby seeking to redefine their place in the city. No longer re-displaced to the margins, they manifest their dis-placement (their injustice) by taking their place at the heart of the public space. In doing this they recreate the public space of the park itself, performing a political sphere inscribed with their history of dispossession. The sense of the political that emerges after this rupture is marked by dissensus rather than the calculability, commensurability and consensus that inscribe the invisibility of the IDPs.

Crucially, this rupture takes place in the intense spaces of the city. It is here that IDPs have the opportunity of appearing in spaces marked by their exclusion as displaced. When the politicians demand the setting up of displacement ‘camps’, they respond to the humanitarian emergency of displacement. This treats the displaced as an object of management, where the question is what is to be done with the displaced. The displacement ‘camp’ creates a proper space of displacement, a place for the displaced out of the way, where their displacement can be administered. However, this view largely excludes the political subjectivity of the displaced. This, then, is the significance of our argument for the literature on displacement. The IDPs should not be reduced to a population that may consent or not to a course of action. They are not stakeholders or merely interested parties. This is particularly important in the context of the recent Victim’s Law (Law 1448 of 2011) which lacked an appropriate engagement with the IDPs before its enactment. The political subjectivity and agency that we have described is a much more creative event, which cannot simply be inscribed within regulatory regimes. However, the object of this paper – the articulation between the displaced and the city – also reveals the multiple constructions of public space at play in this situation. In particular, we wanted to emphasize the manner in which public space becomes a trope for the struggle over the meaning of the public. For the IDPs, it is through the creation of this space within the park that they can publicly refuse the choice between the two depoliticizing alternatives: either be condemned to seeing and being seen through ‘the cracks and margins’ (Riaño-Alcalá, 2008: 276), or surrender to illegality for simply being in the city.

Case Cited

Ituango v Colombia (2006) Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Judgment of the 1st July.