"Buenaventura, un Puerto sin Comunidad"

Through the documentary called "Buenaventura, Un Puerto sin Comunidad", social leaders of all generations expose the complex living conditions of the people.

Buenaventura celebrated 477 years of foundation on July 14 and it was on this date that the National Center of Historical Memory opened its doors so, residents in Bogota get to know the situation of Buenaventura told by its inhabitants and leaders of all ages, genders, social organizations and community action groups that have seen and experienced the war and the indifference of the Colombian State.

A forgotten community by the development

The dispossession of the territory is the backbone of the documentary, within the harbor expansion project of Buenaventura includes the building of 17 megaprojects, which according to the complaint made, compromise 80% of the territories inhabited by the majority Afro-descendant community, a situation that makes the residents be worried because, as it's usual, according to the citizens, waves of violence will be unleashed to get people out of their places of residence.

Although the megaprojects are conceived as forms of development for the economic and political model of the country, these projects are colliding with the relationship of the communities with the environment and the territory, being stripped of a space that they have inherited ancestrally and that for many have no price because those territories generate food, economy, family unity and social development.

The documentary "Buenaventura, Un Puerto sin Comunidad", reminds the country that the community achieved dignified living conditions in the 80s, when the extinct Puertos de Colombia company managed by the State could generate some formal jobs, which subsequently generated the decline of formal employment, thanks to the policy of privatization of the country's harbor in the 90's, although the salary of harbor workers was not the best example of remuneration that the State had, but even without that, and with the privatization of the harbor, the employment became almost non-existent in Buenaventura, in a parallel way the drug trafficking takes force and with it the armed groups arrive, initially in the rural areas, causing the first displacements.

After the war moves to the urban area, violence is consolidated with the phenomenon of missing persons, dismembered bodies and the explosion of bombs. In this context, the struggle of the settlers has been constant and on different types and "sides", the State, the private company endorsed by the State, crime, war, drug trafficking and environmental, due to the presence of natural resources.

Buenaventura and its harbors contribute to the Nation more than $ 5 billion of Colombian pesos in taxes per year, as indicated by the newspaper El País on May 21, 2017 and it is incomprehensible that people do not have safe drinking water, education, quality health and decent jobs, while companies that are present in the harbor hire foreign labor with all the conditions set by law.

Against the phenomenon that has been evidenced by the Buenaventura's people, strategies have been created to sustain themselves through the creation of informal work, others have migrated to different parts of the world to help their families, others are organized to face this phenomenon of development without the community, have risen in protests and stoppages to speak to the country with arguments.

Conclusions

The people got tired and mobilized in a civic strike for 22 days in 2017. Today the delegates of the civic strike of Buenaventura and the delegates of the National Government continue working so that the agreement is fulfilled and "Buenaventura un Puerto sin Comunidad" the documentary It is an excellent door to understand the context Colombians living in the main harbor of the country, which contributes economically, but at the same time strips them of basic conditions of dignified life stipulated in the National Constitution.

I have no doubt that the leaders participating in the documentary who are part of the Civil Strike Committee can re-paralyze the harbor if necessary since they have the social-historical arguments, the deficiencies and the struggles of ancestral resistance that has allowed them to survive.

The commemoration of the 477 years of the founding of Buenaventura is undoubtedly a space for analysis and reflection that invites us to know the country and to think it from the diversity that composes it and to project forms of development and not a "development".