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In one of the poorest neighborhoods of Bogota, Belen, I saw two people bleeding in the middle of the road. One person was clearly dead. A group of onlookers was moving frantically, shouting loudly. There was an attempt to resurrect an injured man. I asked the driver to inquire whether our help was needed, but he was told something insulting by the locals, and insisted that we leave the scene immediately.
Was it a traffic accident? Or a murder? The driver did not know. He actually did not want to know.
"Look," he said. "You may be a Russian or Chinese Communist, or whatever, but here, in the middle of this slum, you kind of look like a gringo, and that is a damn big disadvantage to both of us, and to my car. So, if you don't intend to bury your bones here, we should not stop in the middle of this neighborhood, for too long."
"I thought they love Gringos in Colombia," I uttered, sarcastically.
"Down there, yes," my driver waved his hand towards the financial center of Bogota. "But not here. Not up here."
Before becoming a driver, this individual used to be a top manager, at one of the biggest South Korean electronics companies operating in Colombia. I have always been having good luck with my drivers. During the Dirty War in Peru I once was driven, for weeks, by a retired and thoroughly broke army general, and in Bulgaria, after the East European collapse, by a former ambassador to the United Nations.
Neo-liberal Colombia has some of the greatest and most bizarre disparities I have witnessed anywhere on Earth.
After filming and photographing in the middle of various tough slums that have mushroomed along the hills 'above' the capital, I returned to my hotel.
Just a few kilometers away from the misery-stricken dwellings, in a coffee shop of my hotel, a group of upper-class Colombians from Cali was having a casual dinner. The people were loud and I could not avoid overhearing their conversation. They spoke about their dogs having diarrhea, regularly, and how it could actually be stopped or prevented.
"It is outrageous," one of them lamented. "Poor animal has been sh*tting and sh*tting. What is it telling us about the quality of Colombian food and water?"
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Obviously, someone had enough of such contrasts. Or more precisely, few millions of Colombian people decided that the situation is, should we say, "indigestible".
And, so, on November 21, 2019, Colombia exploded.
Like Chile did, a few weeks earlier.
The explosion has been spontaneous, angry, and for the extreme right-wing government of President Iva'n Duque Ma'rquez, very embarrassing. Some would say even, scary. His approval rating hit the bottom, 26%. Not as bad as in Chile, where the admirer of Pinochet's dictatorship, President Pinera, ended up with just a pathetic 10% support from his citizens. Not as bad, but bad enough.
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