Johaner Delgado, a 22-year-old Afro-Colombian student who defines himself as an optimist, walks through the halls of his university one morning wearing a black T-shirt with the phrase “Stop the massacre in Buenaventura.”
Skinny and smiling, Delgado was born in 2000 in that port city in western Colombia, the same year that paramilitary groups began mass murder there — by the time he was 5 years old, the armed groups had committed at least 15 massacres.
Just in 2021 Buenaventura was among the 20 most violent cities on the planet.
Delgado survived 22 years without being killed or recruited by a criminal gang, and until recently woke up every morning to read news on Facebook about people shot overnight.
But in October something changed.
“My life expectancy got a little longer,” he says with relief.
Delgado is one of thousands of young people whose hope was inflated by Gustavo Petro's proposal to achieve total peace, in which all the armed forces in the country are dismantled at the same time.
The president points to Buenaventura as the place with the first urban peace process.
"It's the best thing that has happened in this city," says the student.
Two gangs that control the territory, Los Shottas and Los Espartanos, called a truce after fighting that left some 250 dead in a year and a half.
“Almost all of them were young,” says Delgado.
The Government says that there are at least 1,700 armed.
"All of these are also young," adds the one who is one of the youth representatives in Buenaventura.
Johanner Delgado in front of a mural.VANNESSA JIMENEZ
The city celebrates more than 80 days without murders.
The difficult challenge is to ensure that this truce, delicate as glass, is not broken.
Shottas and Espartanos have stated that they want to talk with the government, but as non-political criminal gangs they cannot negotiate a peace agreement like the ELN guerrillas.
The new Law of Total Peace says that they can dialogue so that they submit to justice in terms "that in the opinion of the National Government are necessary to pacify the territories."
What legal terms would they accept?
It is not known.
Who will be the spokesmen for the two bands?
It is also not known.
When will the official dialogues be inaugurated?
The date has not been announced.
The Government is in what the Peace Commissioner calls "a confidence-building scenario."
Meanwhile, hundreds of young people wait with tense jaws for the truce not to be broken.
"After homicides, the second cause of death for young people in Buenaventura is suicide," says Delgado.
“I think it is because they decide that no more, that they cannot live like this.
And this is the best opportunity we have for that to change, because this time we have the support of the State”.
Children play with spinning tops in the Alberto Lleras Camargo neighborhood.VANNESSA JIMENEZ
Delgado is at the university with her friend Carolina Torres, 21, and asks her if she feels calmer since the truce began.
"Total," she replies with a sigh.
They get in a car to show EL PAÍS what it means to grow up in this urban war.
Down unpaved streets, he points to a corner where a member of the Schottas was shot 13 times as he was going to visit his mother.
Then another in which the activist Temístocles Machado, whose name is drawn in
graffiti, was assassinated
of the poorest neighborhoods.
Pointing, Torres says his father stopped driving a taxi because he feared crossing an invisible border between the two gangs and ending up dead.
“I couldn't visit my friends in other neighborhoods,” he says, enjoying the sea wind coming through the car window.
"And today one sees that Los Shottas and Los Espartanos go to parties together."
They go to a party but cannot publicly identify themselves at a dialogue table because there are arrest warrants against them.
Without an official table, the government organized cultural events this week—dances, community pots, talks—that Shottas and Espartanos considered a gesture of goodwill.
"The
bare ones
feel heard," says a person close to the approaches.
"They are tired of death and want the government to guarantee them employment options to get out of there."
Delgado and Torres reach the Alberto Lleras neighborhood, one of the most violent in the city.
Controlled by Los Espartanos, in 2008 it was a ghost zone where public space was only for the armed.
Luis Fernando Angulo, president of the Community Action Board, awaits them there.
“I just want us to spend this Christmas in peace,” says the 27-year-old, next to a community pot that offers rice and beans to the young people of this poor neighborhood.
The last two Decembers were lived in the middle of the war.
Guest dancers dancing a bambuco.VANNESSA JIMENEZ
Angulo has not seen his father for two years, who lives in an area controlled by Los Schottas.
Despite the truce, he does not dare to visit him.
“I don't feel the confidence yet,” he says.
Total peace sounds good to you but fragile.
And if the bands get tired of waiting for the Government?
If they do not accept the offer that they make to submit to justice?
If the Government does not comply with job options?
“Being young in this city is very difficult,” he says.
A group of artists, guests from the center of the country, dance a bambuco on the soccer field.
Unemployment in the city was 28% in 2021, 16 percentage points higher than the country's average.
Espartanos and Schottas stopped murdering but they have not given up micro-drug trafficking or extorting merchants, the two best-paid occupations that one of the poorest cities in the country has offered them.
From hope to caution
If the young celebrate, the older ask for caution.
Leyla Arroyo Muñoz and Mary Cruz Mina are 56 and 40 years old, respectively, and speak with the firm voice of a rector asking her students to calm down at recess.
“Total peace is fragile, young people are not going to have the patience to wait a year if the Government does not begin to comply with them.
That's not why we have to throw this opportunity away,” says Muñoz as a storm falls in the center of the city.
Both are peace activists and among multiple jobs they have documented the number of missing persons, organized soccer matches to reconcile young people at war, participated in marches to bury violence, and alerted neighbors and authorities to possible massacres.
“Now Buenaventura is the focus of the media, a lot of partying and everything, but we have spent many years of a conflict that disrupted the community and many more years of structural racism.
So no, this is not so easy to fix,” says Mina, fixing her red glasses.
What they see at the heart of the war in Buenaventura, they say, is a fractured community that has failed to give its youngest better opportunities.
Leader Mary Cruz is known for her unstoppable community work in Buenaventura.
VANNESSA JIMENEZ
"We never stop trying to make peace here, even if the hit man is my neighbor's son," adds Muñoz.
He mentions that a famous drug trafficker was his cousin in fifth grade, or that two of his childhood friends went to the FARC and the paramilitaries.
“We know of children who were taught to dismember cats and then dismember people.
We need to work on the psyche of all these
peeled
”, she adds.
"Since the peace agreements of 2016, we have been preparing to receive our countrymen again no matter how many people the neighbor has stung, killed, because that is the only way to return to being a community in this blessed country."
The tragedy of the war in Buenaventura is that violence is recycled every four or five years.
At the end of the 1990s the FARC arrived, at the beginning of 2000 the paramilitaries.
When the latter demobilized in 2005, other groups called 'La Empresa' arrived, then 'La Local', which in turn became Shottas and Espartanos.
And when the FARC demobilized in 2016, the ELN and the Jaime Martínez Front of the dissidents appeared in the rural area, in addition to the Segunda Marquetalia.
If violence has not been lacking, neither have peace efforts.
What has always failed is to maintain them.
The mayor in charge, a 36-year-old man named Mauricio Aguirre, says that violence was recycled in the city when the government failed to reintegrate into society the former paramilitaries (AUC) who demobilized in 2005. “These two structures , [Shottas y Espartanos], are heirs to the Calima Bloc of the AUC.
Their heads, who are no longer young, are demobilized from the paramilitaries ”, he assures.
A girl runs in the port of Buenaventura.VANNESSA JIMENEZ
An example is alias 'Fidel', one of those demobilized who later became the head of Los Espartanos.
Another is alias 'Diego Optra', head of the Shottas and heir to the Bustamante clan—a family that has controlled drug trafficking in the port for more than a decade and with several members in prisons in the United States.
Neither arrests nor demobilizations have brought tranquility to the port.
"It always fails when the State fails to reincorporate young people into civilian life," says the mayor.
Without employment or educational outlets, they end up looking for ways to survive in gangs like 'La Empresa', which with its name presents itself as the largest employer.
“Shottas” is the title of a low-budget Jamaican film in which two young men, with no opportunities in Kingston, end up creating a criminal empire on their island that stretches as far as Miami.
And the Spartans, who in Buenaventura rebelled against the hegemony of the Shottas, are seen as the war machine that stopped the power of the Persians in ancient Greece.
There are plenty of cultural symbols for war in this city where peace has been elusive.
“The Government has to work on how submission to justice will be, but it cannot set aside key decisions for reincorporation.
For that we already have a plan for several years, we don't have to start from scratch”, says the mayor.
In recent years, roundtables have been set up to build development plans that define how to invest for better education or employment, plans that have been a salute to the flag in this Afro-Colombian city discriminated against by the central government.
Now that Vice President Francia Márquez has committed to complying with them, they hope that the money to execute them will begin to arrive.
A group of young people participate in the cultural activities of the Alberto Lleras Camargo neighborhood.VANNESSA JIMENEZ
Another neuralgic point is knowing what role the port businessmen can play by employing these young people, because they manage one of the main trade entrances in the country and have benefited from the truce.
“The employers have told me that they want to support this process but that these young people have to be qualified, and for that we have to improve the educational offer”, says the mayor.
Currently there are only two public university campuses that are not enough to meet the demand of all the young people who want to study.
Johaner Delgado, the optimist, is one of those few who managed to enter a career in business administration, although he likes public administration more and one day he wants to be mayor of Buenaventura.
“I am very optimistic”, he writes by text message after Petro and Francia visit the city to close the week of cultural events.
If all goes well in a few years he won't have to keep wearing his black shirt.
In his city there are many like him hoping that this time the massacres will stop.
Subscribe here
to the EL PAÍS newsletter on Colombia and receive all the latest information on the country.