'Some days we don't eat': residents scrape by in Colombia's largest shantytown

[Judi Lynn]

Iñigo Alexander in Maicao
Thu 23 Mar 2023 05.30 EDT

Under the blazing Colombian sun, Germán Balera pushes a small cart loaded with a few thermoses of coffee and packs of cigarettes across a derelict airport runway and into a labyrinth of ramshackle huts of corrugated zinc, plastic sheets and cardboard.

Balera is a resident of La Pista, Colombia’s largest informal settlement that is home to approximately 14,000 people on the outskirts of the city of Maicao in north-east Colombia. They are crammed into 12 makeshift blocks spread along the 1.2km runway of the dusty city’s abandoned airport, in the arid Colombian province of La Guajira.

The shantytown is one of 52 informal settlements in Maicao, a stone’s throw from the Venezuelan border. It houses about 4,000 families – almost doubling in size in the past two years. Life is dire in La Pista, where key essentials such as food, water, sanitation, adequate housing and education are in short supply.

“Some days we eat, some days we don’t,” says Balera, sitting outside his small, plastic-clad hut as his nephews play around him. “There is no work here, you can’t do anything. Life is hard here.”

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/mar/23/la-pista-maicao-colombia-shantytown

(Hard to understand how none of the well more than $11 billion poured into Colombia since 2000 has actually been used to improve the lives of the desperately poor people of Colombia.)

[enid602]

1. Neza

And yet, with over 4,000,000 inhabitants, Neza Chalco Itza is the world’s largest slum. Over 90% earn less than $187per month, which is the official poverty level for a household in Mexico. Hard to think that all of the cartel money never helps these people.