Jorge Alvarez says he spent six years in hell and it was only with the help of Jesus did he escape. And the police who evicted him.

            This 33-year drug-addict and mugger lived in Bogota’s Cartucho, a war zone-like ghetto in the centre of the city. As part of a program to improve Colombia’s capital the local government tore down this slum so horrific it spread fear amongst all residents of the city.

            A decade ago, Colombia’s capital was a pit; a grimy example of urban ugliness, chaotic crime and downtown dirt.

            Two mayors transformed the city in to one of Latin America’s more amenable capitals; a greener, cleaner, safer Bogota. A tumbling murder rate allowed the city to take on the mantle of the country’s capital, re-emerging as the centre of finance and culture. Once called the “Athens of South America”, Bogota rediscovered its arts, with cinema festivals, opera seasons and international book fairs.

            While the rest of the city received a facelift, the sore of Cartucho continued to fester.

            If hell is urban, it may look a little like Cartucho. The slum, comprised of not even ten blocks, resembled the aftermath of the battle for Stalingrad with many of the buildings burnt out and half-collapsed. The residents – a mix of thieves, prostitutes, drug-addicts, beggars and rubbish recyclers - wandered the detritus often looking like zombies, the years of cheap noxious drugs taking their irreversible toll.

            In the spiral of destitution, Cartucho was the last stop – here lived Bogota’s lowest of the low, the city’s untouchables, whose next move was usually to a pauper’s grave in the city cemetery.

            The thieves spread out from Cartucho to rob and attack making much of the city centre dangerous night and day.

            The zone was so lawless and the residents so violent, the rare police incursions were organized as military operations with dozens of officers and armoured vehicles.

            That this slum was located just blocks from the Presidential palace reminded the observer of a common third world sight: unspendable wealth and power set next to bottomless misery.

Jorge got in to drugs after spending 8 months kidnapped by the country’s Marxist guerrillas and the deaths of both of his parents. To fund his addiction to Colombia’s cheaper more destructive version of crack, known as Bazuco, he started off as a male prostitute.

“Sometimes I just had sex with these fags, but if I thought they had money I would go back to their apartments and when they least expected it – BAMM!! “Shhhhh daddy – where’s the money?” jumping up to show the stranglehold he would perform on the victim.

Tiring of prostitution he turned to robbery. On busy days, he could make as much as 40 pounds a day mugging those unfortunate enough to pass by Cartucho.

And like a whirlpool, Cartucho dragged him closer.

“I used to sleep outside Cartucho because that place is rough on those just arriving,” he says, every drag on his cigarette hollowing his gaunt face further. “After a while, I started spending more and more time there just to be close to the cheap drugs.”

            Cartucho to Jorge was like a dream and a waking nightmare. His eyes gleam remembering it, but he also confesses that he can’t sleep because in dreams he’s back in Cartucho terrified.

            “It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen, it wasn’t just there was no law, but everyone acted like there was no law,’’ he says, legs trembling in excitement. “Everything was available. Guns, drugs, clothes, hookers, child prostitutes; it was all there.’’

A recurring nightmare has him back in Cartucho’s central street watching his friend’s young girlfriend being dragged away screaming by a man waving a gun.

“He took her in to a house. She never came out alive. I went to look for her the next day, and there she was in the backroom of this house. She had been raped to death. Someone in the house laughingly said that the man had sold her one time to the house for ten thousands pesos (equivalent of two pounds). She had been raped by 30 or 40 men who lived there,’’ he says imitating the position he found her in: legs splayed open, face contorted in pain, tongue hanging limply from the corner of the mouth. His friends nod as if to say that’s the Cartucho they remember.

            Even in hell death was commonplace. In line with estimates of council workers, Jorge guesses that there was a killing each day. And this of a population of under 2,000.

            “People were killed all the time, they killed you for a match there, for a single toke of marijuana,’’ he said. “But there were always new junkies arriving.”

            With no hesitation, he admits to killing three people while living there. “They all tried to screw me over or owed me and wouldn’t pay.” Not a flicker of surprise passes over the faces of those listening to him.

According to Jorge, a popular pastime amongst the drug dealers was to let the homeless addict consume as much drugs as they liked and then demand the bill. When they begged that they couldn’t pay – the dealer would pull out a gun and demand that the addict play Russian roulette – if lucky the bill was forgotten. “I remember one dealer saying: “if you’re not lucky, well I’ll collect in the next life.”

            But while the robberies caused Bogota’s decent folk to walk carefully passing the slum, as long as the killings remained inside the slum the city could look the other way.

“The city’s residents thought that because they didn’t have to see these people every day the problem had disappeared – when we had to move them out people realized that they hadn’t gone away and that we as a city had to do something about it,’’ said Consuelo Corredor, administrative director of Bogota’s welfare department.

The city began the process of destroying the slum in 1998, block by block. But it was only this year the city evicted all the residents from the zone. The people were moved on to another neighbourhood called the “slaughter house”. The residents of the slaughter house, appalled by the new arrivals, staged marches to protest their new neighbours.

Responding to the protests, last Saturday the local government rounded up all the residents they could and deposited them in to homeless shelters.

            Double-digit unemployment, prevalent drugs and a civil war that forcibly displaces hundreds of thousands each year all make the homeless a common sight in Colombian cities. The local government says that there are 15,000 homeless in Bogota, but it certainly feels like more (beggars and street vendors are such a common sight at traffic lights, a joke doing the rounds asks “What’s the mayor’s new plan to cut unemployment? Build more traffic lights”).

As in other countries, there’s a debate on how to resolve the problem of the homeless. Some advocate the homeless should be given more aid, while others insist less help will force the homeless to find jobs.

            Of course there is a third option – exterminate them.

In line with many across this country, shop-owners and residents feeling that the police cannot protect them from these violent homeless contract guns for hire to “socially cleanse” their neighbourhoods killing the thieves, prostitutes and drug-addicts.

“Just a couple of years ago we were down to almost no “social cleansing” but it seems to be coming back in force,’’ said Corredor.

 Given the violent world these homeless live in it’s often difficult for authorities to determine which is a simple homicide and which is a social cleansing.

But the homeless know.

“Many people I knew were disappeared, we knew that if we didn’t see that person for a couple of days, they had been killed and dumped somewhere else,’’ says Jorge, who now lives in one of the shelters but plans on entering a public rehabilitation clinic. “You learnt which neighbourhoods you could go to and which would kill you.”

Less than five minutes walk from the shelter is one of the zones the homeless know they’ll be killed if they’re caught there. This is one of Bogota’s cheap shopping centres, mainly dealing in contraband and pirated material. Receipts are worth exactly the paper they’re written on and the consumer has at least an 80% chance that the goods they buy will work.

This shopping centre is also known to be controlled by the extreme right-wing paramilitaries who see such places as rich pickings for protection money.

John Gutierrez sells goods here.

“People hear that these homeless people have been killed and they think “ohhh poor things!,’’ he says mockingly. “That’s not the reality – they come here and rob from our stores, rob from our clients or sell drugs on the street.”

 “We call the police but there’s not enough police around here to stop them, so the police arrive late and the muggers have already left – you tell me what we’re supposed to do? I’ve never paid for anyone to be killed, but I understand why some people do.”