Deiro González has seen four men die in the same room during the last twenty years. The bodies have expired by chronic pain or sudden deaths without firewoods or mourners in the parallel bed to which he sleeps. “The last was Mr. Salgar. It was a natural death,” recalls the 74 -year -old man observing the bed of the deceased. It is not clear about the exact dates of deaths, but the feeling of abandonment that emerges from them. “The police collect them and nothing else happens,” he says. The dead from the bed next door have been just some of the dozens of strangers with which González has shared a room for two decades.
González has no other place to go. Without pension, work or family, surviving your age is a daily fight against logic. For 20 years he chose to live in a pay, a type of temporary housing where rooms are rented per night, in which he shares a room with a partner to divide the price. “When I started, there were 1,200 pesos and now the piece is worth 20,000 (about 5 dollars),” says the old man, while traveling its folded blue wall stay that has a bathroom without door or pipes.
According to the District Secretary of Social Integration, there are 4,500 occupants of rents of this type in the center of Bogotá, and represent the extreme forms of poverty and exclusion in the city. Many occupants have been inhabitants of Calle already are one step away from being again. It is a population that especially takes refuge in the old buildings of the Santa Fé neighborhood, the same ones that used to house the greatest opulence of the South American Athens in the first half of the twentieth century.
Thinking about making visible the realities of the occupants of paying, the district was given the task of censoring them since the end of last year. “It is an important exercise because the entrance door for inclusion is to recognize the other as a citizen,” says Roberto Angle, current Secretary of Social Integration of Bogotá. “According to the count, there are 4,500 people living in Pagadiarios in San Cristóbal, Mártirres and Santa Fe,” says the official, regarding the panorama in the poorest neighborhoods in the city center. According to an estimated 2021, there are about 14,219 people sleeping in paying throughout the capital. The new census will determine whether the figure has increased in the last four years.
The building eaten away by the humidity in which González lives has wood sheets that betray a past of better times. José Ramírez is the one who manages the place of 27 rooms distributed in five floors. He has been in charge of collecting the money from the rental and maintaining the fragile order of the payment before the owners. “It is not easy here to work. Many things are seen,” says the 68 -year -old man reviewing the accumulation of realities he has witnessed.
Riñas, loves, erratic behaviors of people who consume sudden drugs and deaths are just some of the stories. “Nothing surprises me, but the deaths do,” says the father of the family. His work holds his wife and daughters in a common house, while he transnocha driving a kind of hotel for the invisibles of Bogotá in which, on a good day, the owners can earn more than 400,000 pesos (about 100 dollars) in rentals.
According to the observations, the district has confirmed that this type of housing is present in almost all the localities of the capital, and that prices range between 8,000 and 60,000 pesos a day, or between 2 to 14 dollars. In addition, more than 43% of the inhabitants of these residences are migrants and the main reason for their stay is the “instability in the flow of income.”
To about five streets from the residence of González, there is another pay in which most are Venezuelan citizens. Nayluz Millán occupies two continuous rooms in which he sleeps with his partner, his three daughters and his mother sick of the heart. “It is not easy, but here they help me a lot and I can pay. I am grateful for having a roof for my daughters,” says the 36 -year -old who exercised as a nurse in her country.
Unlike González, Millán’s paying has a small shared kitchen of about three square meters. “Here I can do girl breakfast,” says the mother inside a stay that does not let the light strain. In the building, almost everyone occupies a room per family. A floors up, Carolina Rojas lives with her four children. Since he arrived in Colombia, Rojas has had to look alone for his family’s livelihood because her husband left her to cross the Darién and did not have news of him again. Unlike the other migrants, she does not receive any monetary support from the district because her situation is still irregular.
It is calculated today that there are more than 430 payable in the center of the city, and the estimated 2021 spoke of 6,500 throughout the capital. In the tour of these sites, a certain specialization in the type of population they house is evidenced. There are paying in which more older people live, others centered on migrants, some more inhabited by sex workers and trans population, and places specialized in narcotic consumers where a room can house dozens of literas in which the occupants pay two dollars or less.
That consumption is the common denominator of many stories of paying residents. Omar Moreno, who lives in a diagonal room to González’s, calls him Flagelo. “Mamita, see, here we all suffer the scourge,” says the 60 -year -old man referring to Bazuco’s consumption, the most popular drug among the inhabitants of the street in Bogotá.
Despite their addiction, Moreno has managed to stay in the paying for the past 12 years in an individual room. “I have done and decorated everything here,” the head is upright while showing several colored paintings and a collection of hats hanging on the wall. His crafts have served him to appropriate a space that he could lose at any time, because his fight is the same as that of others: gather weights while living to pay the piece one night at the same time.
For more updates, visit our homepage: NewsTimesWire
