What do the indigenous people confined to the La Rioja building eat?

In October 2021, a hundred indigenous people took over the Bogotá National Park in protest. This, with the intention of claiming their rights and demanding the support of the government and the necessary institutions for the resolution of different conflicts that afflict their communities, among them, unfulfilled land restitution and violence.

His stay would last several months, which generated different health problems such as malnutrition and viral diseases that led to the death of several children and protesters in this place. Given this, the district took action on the matter and entered into a conversation with the indigenous population seeking to move them to a safer place.

After negotiating with the mayor’s office, the indigenous people were transferred to La Rioja, in the center of Bogotá, in a building that worked for the rehabilitation of homeless people. From then until today, More than 1,500 people, including children, the elderly, and women, live under overcrowding, hunger, and unsanitary conditions.

Hostile Zone: We enter the URIs, the capsules of hell

What do the indigenous eat inside this building?

The food shortage prevails in the ‘La Rioja’ building in which this community survives. Given the lack of food, the indigenous people took advantage of the Hostile Zone chamber to ask for them and for basic supplies such as rice, oil or canned goods to be sent to them, as well as utensils for preparing them, such as pots and spoons.

In the absence of these, the indigenous solve the food with what they manage to rescue and get. In each room or division that this building has, there are about 40 to 45 people, among whom the food must be distributed, so the portions are meager in the face of the hunger that attacks.

Canned sardines are a common food among this population that has found in them, their shield to survive. The banana is cooked or fried to mix it with proteins that are rarely available. A lunch captured by the Zona Hostil camera, consists of cooked ripe and macaroni-type pasta, it will be distributed to 44 people.

Inside the building, there are several stores where you can get various implements and food, however, these are a luxury for the confined indigenous people, since a large majority do not have the necessary resources to get hold of any of this.

What other conditions exist in this place?

In this second episode of Zona Hostil, the journalist who hosts this space, Raúl Arévalo, revealed the conditions in which the indigenous people live. Overcrowding, diseases, damaged structures, bathrooms not working and even flooding of some locations are the strongest shots of this journalistic product.

The foregoing has come together as a cocktail of lethal social problems for these communities that today are permeated within this “infernal building” by phenomena such as drug addiction, sexual abuse, hunger, alcoholism, violence and death.

The place has been nicknamed “hell”. In it, several people between children and adults have died from viral diseases, tuberculosis. The journalist has cataloged himself as a piece of purgatory.

Given the panorama, this chapter presents the position of the authorities and the solutions they devise to put an end once and for all to this ordeal.