A City in Search of Good Fortune

The Design Observer Group

Buenaventura, Colombia

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Report: Quilian Riano & Dk Osseo-Asare

“Mention to anyone in Colombia’s capital, Bogota, that you are planning a trip to the port city of Buenaventura, on the Pacific Coast, and you will likely encounter stern warnings and looks of disbelief. Buenaventura holds a special, troubled place in the Colombian psyche. For decades the inability of the federal government to tame the hyper-violent city — despite efforts by the wildly popular and controversial president Alvaro Uribe — typifies the disruptive power of what has become a zone of insurgency — Colombia’s “wild frontier.” As recently as a few years ago, drug traffickers and right-wing militants fought daily turf wars in the city’s slums while guerrillas and paramilitaries battled for control of the sole access route to the city through the Andes. Although a massive military presence has dramatically improved security, even today skirmishes are not uncommon along the main road into the city, where the guerrillas now fight U.S.-trained Colombian government forces.

Ultimately the battle for Buenaventura is about control. The city of Buenaventura (population 325,000), home to one of Colombia’s largest and most profitable seaports, is also close to the country’s most productive coca fields. This strategic location accounts for the city’s shadow economy of illegal cocaine exports and imported black market dollars, which flow along with regulated products like coffee and sugar cane. External forces (the central government, shareholders of Buenaventura’s privately owned port authority, the U.S. State Department) seek to regulate the city in order to ensure an uninterrupted flow of legal goods. At the same time, a parallel set of local players (guerrillas, paramilitaries, drug lords) prefers instead to maintain a status quo of informal instability that enables the transshipment of illegal drugs to markets in Western Europe and the United States.
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But even as Buenaventurans work to improve their collective condition, they are caught in this tangled web of competing interests that exploit the city for profit (legal and illegal) yet fail to invest in the its future. Part of the problem is that many in the country perceive Buenaventura as peripheral. Physically, the city is remote — an island located at the western edge of the Andes. Economically, it is marginal…. ”

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