When a national strike broke out in Colombia earlier this year, bringing thousands into the streets to protest the country’s social and economic model, images and videos were broadcast around the world. The root causes of the protests were less discussed in the international media, however. The demands of the protesters to halt government reforms that would gut pensions and the public health system and raise taxes for the working class were actually quite modest, given that Colombia has some of the highest economic and social inequalities in all of the Americas, and also some of the highest levels of violence (including state-sponsored violence).

Colombia has been at war with itself for over fifty years. The government has been fighting guerrillas while mostly ignoring (or even aiding) heavily armed criminal organizations that produce and distribute cocaine and also terrorize marginal communities in a bid to appropriate their land. The violence of these armed groups has produced some of the largest numbers of internal refugees in the world. Over the past several decades, Cali, the third largest city in the country and the center of cocaine production, has absorbed a huge number of these displaced people, mostly of Afro-Colombian or Indigenous descent, exacerbating the already extreme levels of poverty, inequality, and crime that exist in the city.