Previous generations were certain that, if they worked hard and honestly, they could get their own home and could develop their life project in a city like Cali where, due to its climate, its geographical location and its multicultural composition, it appeared as one of the privileged options for this purpose. Cali, then, became a paradise, dubbed the “Sucursal del Cielo”, the city of push, which at one point, in the mid-1970s, had more luxury hotels than Cartagena and Santa Marta, the sports capital of America, the world capital of salsa.
Those of us who live in Cali today, unfortunately cannot say the same. We live in a dystopian city where fear roams the streets freely and reaches our hearts. We cannot calmly go out to the corner, because the fear that a motorbike will stop next to us and take away our belongings makes us walk every second as if we were in a spy movie.
Nothing remained of that heavenly evocation that was immortalized by Maestro Jairo Varela. We live in the midst of chaos, not only criminal, but also in terms of mobility. Many people who used to enjoy driving now do so with feelings of anguish, frustration and, once again, fear, because for a driver in Cali, nothing causes more panic than two motorcyclists stopping next to him at a traffic light: in 60 seconds they it releases the adrenaline equivalent of watching The Conjuring movies in one sitting, and this several times per trip, that’s why driving is exhausting, that’s why people arrive at their workplaces tired. Cali became a city of tired people, to the point of getting tired, if you want to start a business, the extortionists line up next to the clients, when it is not the drop by drop that hangs you until the last peso is squeezed.
The mafia culture of the 1980s that permeated all spheres of our city left us with a trail of easy money, from which we have not been able to recover. The temptation of narco-life still spreads with impunity through the younger generations.
But hopelessness, despair and uncertainty cannot be the reason that leads us, we must resist, we must fight to recover our city, to assert our dreams, to revive the space to develop our life projects, to have certainties again, in a world of insecurities, to be great again in the midst of the smallness and pettiness of a few; but this is only possible if it is a shared dream in which we all add up.