This year’s COP16 represents one of the largest and most important international events of its kind Colombia has ever hosted. During the last weeks of October, more than 12,000 world leaders and distinguished visitors are descending on the city of Cali to debate the earth’s future at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.
Another major international event held in Cali, the 1971 Pan American Games, transformed the small town (populated mostly by the workers and owners of the sugar industry) into a modern city and left a lasting effect on the cityscape. By demolishing working-class neighborhoods and displacing thousands of people, however, it marked the beginning of a wave of concrete brutalism that would spread and destroy much of the city’s natural beauty in favor of urban development and vehicular traffic.
COP16 probably won’t have any lasting architectural or infrastructural result, but it could transform the city in other ways. It is estimated that attendees will inject $25 million into the local economy. Every hotel, hostel and guesthouse in the city is fully booked for the dates of the conference. And if international delegates return home with good impressions, COP16 could jumpstart an eco-tourism boom for Cali, which would mark a shift from its current status as a destination for party, drug and sex tourism.
The local government worked hard this past month to beautify and “green” the city center as part of a program called Mi Cali Bella. It involved paving streets, whitewashing graffiti, cracking down on traffic violations, creating pedestrian avenues, relocating hundreds of street vendors, offering new electric transport, and fixing up parks and green areas.
Hoping to ensure the safety of visitors and dispel Cali’s image as one of the most violent cities on the planet, the rightwing mayor, Alejandro Eder, has rolled out state-of-the-art security measures. Four thousand police officers and hundreds of undercover cops specialized in dealing with kidnappings and extortion have swelled Cali’s already oversize police force. One hundred and twenty SWAT units trained in Miami for anti-terrorism and urban operations and equipped with the latest in drone technology and weapons, as well as 16 new Guardian armed transport carriers, have been deployed. And a contingent of New York City policemen, including the city’s head of anti-terrorism, have flown in to help supervise.
Giving police greater force and firepower within the city will ensure future human-rights abuses.
Cali enjoys some of the greatest biodiversity on the planet, especially in the protected nature reserves of the Andes mountains on the edge of the city. Its economy, however, is mostly based on two huge monocultures: sugar and cocaine. COP16 will be held smack in the middle of the largest extension of sugarcane cultivation and processing in all of Colombia and quite near the center of production of cocaine. These two industries have ravaged the environment and are responsible for much of the violence that has plagued the region for decades. Criminal organizations based in towns near Cali that are centers of cocaine production have recently threatened COP16 with terrorist attacks. For a country plagued by violence and exploitation, any measures that fail to address these social and economic costs will be merely superficial.
No matter how hard Eder, whose family controls one of the oldest and largest sugar companies in Cali, might try, it is impossible to greenwash a history of violence and human rights abuses by beautifying a few streets in the center of the city, or giving lip service to biodiversity while letting condos encroach upon the lush foothills of the Andes mountains. Eder’s superficial beautification for COP16 comes soon after the local government demolished three working-class neighborhoods adjacent to the city center to make room for a giant mall, condominiums and a new courthouse in an area now called Ciudad Paraiso (Paradise City). This is part of a larger plan to displace the working class and informal workers from the city center. As progressive as they claim to be, COP16 and the new global green economy might help this process of transformation and gentrification.
The cynical choice for the name of city’s beautification program, Mi Cali Bella, refers to the dark days from the 1980s to the start of the 21st century when the government, police, military, narcos and paramilitaries joined forces to rid the city of what they called its undesirables: the homeless, neighborhood drug dealers and users, street prostitutes and trans. Their victims were often found floating in the city’s rivers with signs around their necks that read “Cali Limpia Cali Bonita” (Clean Cali Pretty Cali). This form of social cleansing, of which Cali has long been the national leader, resurfaced with the National Strike protests in 2019 and 2021, when state-sponsored death squads hunted down and murdered many of the most radical protesters.
Eder, a specialist in international security policy, was elected on a platform of law and order and has pushed to militarize the city and crack down on crime and vandalism. It is likely that much of the additional security and technology, as well as NYC’s finest anti-terrorism strategies designed for urban settings, deployed during COP16 will remain in full force after the international guests have gone. Colombian police and military are notorious for human rights abuses, while Colombia is the world leader in assassinations of environmental activists. Giving police greater force and firepower within the city will ensure future human-rights abuses.
There is a real and present danger that President Gustavo Petro will be assassinated by the rightwing fanatics he has denounced or run out of office by reactionary judicial institutions, in which case many of the estimated $40 billion in environmental programs that COP16 will commit to fund could be scrapped. Even if this doesn’t happen, the money that comes out of COP16 to help Colombia promote eco-tourism, transition to green energy and protect its environment will only make the country more dependent on foreign aid – a step backwards from a truly self-sustaining economy.
Coca and marijuana need to be legalized.
To make real, long-lasting change within Cali, the sugar industry, which owns most of the land in and around the city, needs to be forced into diversifying its crops and providing restitution to the campesinos (peasant farmers) and Afro and indigenous communities whose land and rivers they stole.
To make real, long-lasting change within Colombia, coca and marijuana need to be legalized, as they represent the greenest and greatest potential for the national economy. The United States’ war of drugs has kept Colombia at war with itself for several decades, the results being an irreparable loss of life and well-being throughout the country, huge profits for narcos and a military and police force that enjoys an ever-growing budget.
Alternatively, the international spotlight that COP16 provides could help radically improve life in Cali and the rest of Colombia by encouraging the declassification of coca and marijuana as narcotics. Legalization would free Colombia from the grip of narcos and the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, allow Cali and other cities to demilitarize, and solve a prison-population problem (many of Cali’s prisons and jails are at between 133 percent and 2,040 percent of capacity).
Done properly, legalization could jumpstart a truly green, self-sustaining local economy that would directly benefit Afro and indigenous communities and campesinos, who are imprisoned, exploited and murdered at staggering rates in the U.S.-funded war on drugs, by granting them licenses to grow and sell these plants for medicinal and other uses.
Of course, this is still just a pipe dream, as the U.S. also would have to legalize these plants. However, before the opening ceremony of COP16, President Petro made a dramatic gesture by offering to buy up this year’s bumper crop of coca from towns near Cali, where armed conflict has been the most intense, and where criminal organizations have threatened to attack COP16 if their cocaine business is threatened. If Petro were to follow through on his promise, and if he handed over the plants to community groups poised to commercialize medicinal coca products, it could be the beginning of a whole new green economy for the country, one that would make the foreign assistance offered by the world leaders convened in COP16 unnecessary.
Otherwise, after the distinguished international visitors leave, Cali will return to normal. Its tourism will once again center around Sala music and dancing, aguardiente and prostitution. And the violence – independent, organized and state-sponsored – that has plagued the city for over a 100 years will return to haunt it.
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