It is a place scarred by poverty and years of armed conflict between guerrillas, the state and paramilitary groups. Perhaps nowhere else in the country are the challenges of a post-conflict Colombia more evident, and perhaps no other part of the world is more indicative of how an economy can be fueled by the production and trafficking of cocaine.
In Olaya Herrera, cows are butchered on the streets, in the open air. There is no slaughterhouse here. The two men, Afro-descendants like the majority of people here, took shifts working. While one passed the knife through the stripped-down meat, the other gathered the innards and guts scattered to the side.
A boy then approached with a wheelbarrow and took the guts a few meters over, where another group was put in charge of them. Olaya Herrera looks like any other poor town in Colombia or Latin America β but it is not. The municipal waste services may barely function and the streets may be dirty and cluttered with trash, but there is money here. The type of money that comes from the business of cultivating and processing coca leaves into cocaine. However, in reality these numbers could be even greater.
According to a municipal official in charge of agricultural projects in the region, 60 percent of its rural land is used for the cultivation of coca leaves. About meters from the pier where the two men butcher cows in the morning, there is a small park that was constructed after the river Satinga overflowed its banks, flooding streets and houses along it. This is a park full of life, with fruit sellers, two grocery stores, a pharmacy, small trees where students gather around, and, most striking of all, an open bar full of shelves lined with Johnnie Walker whiskey.
If it were viewed outside of its immediate context, this spot might even pass as a small hangout in the capital, with its nickel-plated bar, exposed bottles on shelves, and neon lights shining in broad daylight. At 10 in the morning on a Wednesday, there are already rowdy drunks in front of the whiskey bar, including one who is already swaying and about to faint between his chair and the table in front of him.
