Gloria

For a decade the whole country had been fighting a violent battle over one question: conservative or liberal? Gloria's father was a declared liberal but in San Pedro he found himself suddenly surrounded by conservatives that didn't want him there. When her parents were forced to leave, her mother was already pregnant. They arrived in Buenaventura, a city nested in a Pacific Ocean bay and home to the most important port in Colombia. Here is where Gloria Ospina was born in 1962.

Gloria grew up a few streets from the dump. Together with her family, she lived in a small house with a big garden. Whilst most people from Medellín looked down at Moravia, to her, it has always been a special place. Maria Lucia Peréz, Gloria's mother, soon became a community leader and one of the first Madres comunitarias, a daycare mother for around 15 children that didn’t have anyone to look after them.

“The tough reality in Moravia is that many kids are left alone during the day because their parents have to work,” Gloria explains. It has been like this for decades and Maria Lucia was amongst the first ones to help. That's when she became known by the name Mamá Chila. Her house was filled with children and she cared for every single one of them like they were her own. Mamá Chila almost literally became the mother of the neighbourhood.

When Gloria turned into a young woman, life was still good. She fell in love, married, and had her daughter when she was 23. Her husband worked in construction and their family worked well despite the armed conflict around them that was starting to claim more and more victims.

Liberals and conservatives stopped fighting each other after they had joined forces in 1958. They were still fighting though, but the newly-declared enemies were various left-wing guerrilla groups, the most well-known amongst them being the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia). All over Colombia, atrocities were committed, above all, in two cities that Gloria is all too familiar with: Buenaventura and Medellín.

It was around 1986 and Gloria's husband was desperately looking for an opportunity to earn money when he met some old friends from Moravia who would offer him a job. They were working for one of the richest men in the world and probably the most influential person, especially in the poorer neighbourhoods of Medellín.

His name was Pablo Escobar. He built social houses, hospitals, and schools, he was voted into congress – and he planted bombs and killed hundreds of policemen, judges, politicians, and civilians. But his core business was cocaine. There's only one thing that Gloria's husband and his new boss had in common: they both died from a bullet. “Whatever he did for the cartel, it was a very short career,” that's all Gloria knows and wants to know about her husband’s final occupation.

Medellín at that time was home to countless criminal gangs, most of them somehow related to drug trafficking and competition was tough. There were simply too many young men lacking a future. One day, one of those men decided to find his future in the arms of a new family. In order to enter this new family, he had to pass a test: kill someone from an enemy gang.

So, he went out on the street looking for a target and chose a middle-aged man. Then he pulled the trigger, turned around and received his reward. He now officially belonged to the new family he had yearned for. Gloria's family, on the other hand, lost a beloved member, a husband, and father. “The murderer of my husband was nothing more than a young boy with a gun.”

For Gloria, that was far from enough. Together with other community leaders, she co-founded the Centro de Desarrollo Cultural, a Cultural Development Centre that soon became the heart of Moravia. A large open space for everyone, this is where theatre plays are written and performed on the stage of the auditorium, where bands are born, concerts played, and readings held.

“After the experience with my husband, I realised that dignified work is vital for everyone so that people aren't led onto wrong paths. The idea is that all the artists here actually get paid for their work,” Gloria explains.

Gloria is dressed in light colours and flowery patterns. She never looks on the floor while walking, always focused on what lies ahead. But here in the Centre, it takes her a long time to show visitors around. “¿Hola linda, cómo estás?” Every five metres an old friend greets her with a hug – and the Centre is filled with people.

There are young children playing, teenagers practising a self-choreographed hip-hop dance and adults talking about the history of Moravia. But no matter how many, there are no unknown faces. This is Moravia, a community that survived together.

Where do you live? In Colombia this simple question reveals much more than just a location, it also gives away your Estrato. The grand majority in Moravia lives in Estrato One, “Bajo-Bajo” or Two, “Bajo” – “Low-Low” or “Low.”

To Non-Colombians these categories mean nothing, to Colombians the social stratification system is the most normal thing in the world. If one compares it to a caste system, then Colombian society consists of six castes and they are called Estratos. Everyone with a home gets assigned an Estrato depending on where and how they live. Estrato One is the lowest, Six the highest.

The idea behind this system: fight inequality by subsidising the people from the lower Estratos One to Three. For Gloria, the Estrato is “just a number good for statistics” but phrases like “No wonder they act like that, they are Estrato One,” or “Don't buy that, that's for someone from a lower Estrato,” can be heard on family's dinner tables all over Colombia.

Moravia, in addition to being a low Estrato area, for a long time has not been a place to show off, and Gloria knows that: “People continue to think of it as the dump of the city and some still consider the inhabitants dirty people. It's hard to believe that the former mount of garbage is now a beautiful garden full of flowers.”

Today, after all the threats they had to overcome, Moravia faces one that they would have never thought possible: gentrification. Now that the neighbourhood is relatively calm, it is actually becoming very popular. More people want to live here, more businesses are opening up.

For Gloria this means one thing: rent is skyrocketing. “Prices are rising every day and to be honest, I'm not sure for how long I will still be able to afford living here.” The times when Gloria and her mother still owned property are long gone. So even though they have lived here almost all their life and were leading figures in getting Moravia where it is today, now they won't be amongst the few that profit from it.

The problems for the original Moravians haven't changed: education is still poor, jobs are still rare and reasonable payment is still an exception. Gloria's daughter, like so many young adults here, is still out of work. They have only one thing to spare: time. In the narrow alleys of Moravia people actually stop and talk. They sit down in front of their humble homes. They look out of their windows.

Shouted greetings flying towards Gloria as she is walking down her old street. “How is your mother?” “She's alright, thank you. How are you?” A middle-aged man is standing in his doorframe. The sound of the familiar voice lurks his mother out of the dark inside of their house. “Oh, you're here too,” Gloria calls out happy to see yet another old friend. “Siempre presente,” the woman says with a smile. “Always here,” two words that have been true for a long time.

With the foundation of the Frente Nacional in 1958 the conservatives and the liberals effectively excluded all other political movements, especially politically left-wing or communist forces. As a result, some of those left-out of the political process turned into guerrilla groups. The most well-known amongst them is the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) which was officially founded in 1964.

With most of its recruits being farmers, the FARC was particularly strong in rural areas. From the beginning on they claimed to be fighting for the people of Colombia and later even called themselves FARC-EP, with the abbreviation “EP” standing for “Ejercito del Pueblo” – the people's army. One of their central demands has always been a land reform and a more equal distribution of property.

However, Pablo Escobar was not a typical figure in the shadows. In 1982 he pursued a brief career as a member of the Colombian Congress that he soon had to give up again due to his main profession. This was the time when he became particularly present in Medellín's poorest neighbourhoods, one of them being Moravia. There it was easier to recruit staff for contract killings and his drug business from the thousands of desperate young men. Like in so many rural parts of the country the State was absent here where it was most needed.

Escobar, on the other hand, came with presents, especially during times of electoral campaigning. “I met Pablo Escobar, when I was 14 years old and didn't even have anything to dress. He came personally to bring food and clothes,” remembers one woman in Moravia. From there he went on to the families that lived on the Morro, the mountain of garbage that grew because the people of Medellín had used the neighbourhood as a dumpster for years. He promised help and he delivered.

He constructed 443 new homes in Loreto, further south in the city, and called the new-born neighbourhood “Medellín sin tugurios” – Medellín without slums. In 1984 the families left the dumpster in Moravia and moved into their new homes. After his death the inhabitants unofficially changed the neighbourhood's name into “Barrio Pablo Escobar”. By now more than 15,000 families live here, although for the longest time the neighbourhood has not been officially recognised. Only in 2012 the municipality started to award titles of ownership to the inhabitants.

“Yes, he did do a lot for the poor, but look where we are now. I would say that almost a 100 percent of our youth here consumes drugs,” counters a men in Moravia. Truth is, Colombia back in Escobar's times was mainly an exporting country, but by now it has become a consuming country too. In the last few years groups like Oficina Envigado pushed aggressively towards internal drug consumption and they seem to have succeeded.

They even entered the big state-owned universities to sell drugs there and established “aeropuertos” – places of drug dealing there. In some of the universities they became normal, in others the administration managed to get rid of them. “It was very hard though, I received a lot of threats and at times I even had to take bodyguards with me,” one former professor describes. The range of drugs evolved too, now it's not just cocaine, but everything from marihuana to heroine.

And then by the end of the eighties it went from bad to worse when paramilitary groups became a more powerful force in the conflict. At the beginning they were made up of many smaller groups, until they eventually formed the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia – the United Self-Defence of Colombia.

Their common goal: fight the guerrilla groups, amongst them the most powerful still being the FARC. They were pursuing this goal in the most violent way, sending death squads not only to kill guerrilla fighters but also the civilian population that supported them. Just like the FARC, the paramilitary groups first appeared in rural areas and soon got involved in drug trafficking. Unlike the FARC the Autodefensas have always been suspected of having tight relationships with the Colombian military and parts of the government.

In the nineties the conflict intensified even more. Everyone was fighting, the government, the guerrilla groups, the paramilitaries and many different gangs, most of them involved in drug trafficking. All over Colombia, atrocities were committed and it was getting even worse after the turn of the century. The following years the country witnessed how peace negotiations went back and forth, even though the bloodshed never stopped for long.

The final peace talks between the FARC and the government started in October 2012. While the negotiations progressed, killings and violent attacks still occurred on both sides. However, four years later, in September 2016 the government and the FARC signed a peace agreement that was then put up to a vote. Against the expectations, the Colombian public voted against the deal. Changes were made, that included more rigorous punishments for the guerrilla fighters. Shortly after the Congress ratified the agreement, this time without a referendum.

With the seventies, the garbage came. From all over Medellín the inhabitants simply unloaded their waste here unofficially until in 1977 the municipality made the area an official dump. It was also the first time that the city built infrastructure, before that it was the people themselves that constructed sewage systems and other necessities.

But with the interest of the municipality the police arrived too. They tried to take over possession of the land again and resettle the people who by then had grown into a rather big and strong community.

The Moravians resisted in very creative ways: some offered the police “entertainment” that generally consisted of sex and alcohol, others fought directly in the streets and then there was also a strategy called “the stone pregnant”, where the men stayed at home while the women went out on the streets with a fake belly of rocks and their kids by the hand to confront the police.

35 metres, this is how tall the mountain of garbage had grown and by the eighties, families actually lived all around it, mainly because that is where they found food or materials to sell and to build their houses with.

The only unpopulated area was the mountain’s very top because, until 1984, when the municipality officially closed the dump, the lorries would come in regularly to unload more trash. On one hand it was a dangerous, toxic place full of mosquitos on unstable terrain, on the other hand the inhabitants called it their “silver mine” because everything they owned came from there.

In the midst of this misery is where Pablo Escobar first appeared. He built houses for 443 of these families in a different neighbourhood – another illegal settlement but one with actual houses instead of shacks. During this time the community urged the municipality to recognise them and help as well and by 1993 Moravia was finally given the official right to exist and became a legal neighbourhood of Medellín.

Besides those fights in the eighties the police was not a very present force in Moravia. Instead various armed groups existed, that, to this day, organise the neighbourhood. It's a simple system: the inhabitants pay a “vacuna”, a bribe, and are awarded with safety and protection in return.

Despite that Moravia was all but a safe place in the nineties. Street shootings were considered normal and happened frequently, the same goes for drug trafficking. Like in most other parts of the country, criminal gangs had ruled the area until paramilitary groups came to brutally fight them. Both groups caused tremendous harm to the civilian population.

However, the community and especially their leaders kept fighting for their neighbourhood and sometimes got killed in the process. In the year 2000 they resumed the negotiations with the municipality that had been paused unilaterally by the administration due to the violence.

In 2005 the plans became more precise and one part of them was to solve the problem of the mountain of garbage that was not only still there but which had by then been completely populated with the inhabitants who were living a dangerous life right on top of it.

The city offered to resettle them but moved some of the first families far away to another marginal neighbourhood with a lack of social and physical infrastructure. After the inhabitants protested, the municipality eventually built apartment buildings in Moravia for them. However, to this day, there are still a few families that resist and continue to live on the old dump.

Since it was impossible for the community to get rid of the tremendous quantity of garbage, they started to turn the hill into a garden, planting flowers right onto the trash. Thanks to that effort the old dump turned into a beautiful, blossoming mountain. Perhaps equally as important for the community was the foundation of the Cultural Centre, the “Centro Cultural de Desarollo Cultural” ten years ago. Ever since then it has been a place of arts, culture and collective memories open to everyone.

Find out even more about Moravia's history here!

The result is that today, an unemployed person without an income who still lives in an Estrato Six apartment that he or she inherited from the family must pay approximately 20 percent more for basic services. On the other hand, someone who has actually managed to open up a successful business in his or her Estrato Two neighbourhood still receives subsidies.

Another more significant problem is what the system did with the people's minds. In theory, the Estrato defines the house, in reality it actually defines the person who lives in it. The system didn't create segregation, but made it more obvious so that today it became almost part of the Colombian culture.

So, this is the Medellín of today: most people, some 37 percent, live in Estrato Two, officially classified as “Low” and the least people, not even 4 percent, live in Estrato Six, classified as “High”. The lower Estratos One to Three together represent 79 percent of the total population, another 10 percent live in the medium Estrato Four and only 11 percent live in the higher Estratos Five and Six.