Urban Spaces of Fear and Disillusionment

This chapter explores the effects of sustained violence on Afro-descendant and indigenous populations in Cali, Colombia. Based on evidence collected over a three-year period, we expose the violence these groups suffer at the hands of right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrilla groups who forced them out of their rural lands and into the city. Such suffering is enhanced by poor housing conditions, lack of governmental support, unemployment, aggression by drug trafficking gangs and everyday exclusions by an inherently racist society. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates that one of the leading government housing programmes, the ‘100% subsidised housing’, which was designed to offer sanctuary to those who suffered the cruelty of war and displacement, has failed completely, because these neighbourhoods intensify the anxieties of a population that arrived to the city in search of tranquillity and opportunity, only to find further hostility and grater rejection.