#estratos

Bogota, North part. Bogota is like any city, segregated, but it has a particularity that makes it unique. After the Bogotazo (riots that followed the assassination of the liberal politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitan) the city-centre was pretty much devastated. Fearing for their lives and goods, the wealthy Bogotanos established themselves in the Northern part of the city where they found the security and tranquillity lost in the city centre. The rich were now in the North, the poor in the South.

Colombia, being one of the most unequal country in the world, tried to tackle this issue during the 1980′s by putting in place a system of six “estratos” (stratums), the system is pretty simple; the city would be divided in six parts, the first one being the poorest, while the sixth being the richest, if you live in the first estrato your electricity or water bill will be subsidized by the city but not if you live in the wealthy sixth estrato. According to an excellent article by The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/09/bogota-colombia-social-stratification-system) half of Bogota’s inhabitants live in the first and second stratum while only 1.6% of them live in the sixth.

This system, quite similar to the one in the trilogy Hunger Games, is controversial as it divides the city and its inhabitants (I witnessed one student in Law at the University of Los Andes (an elitist and private university in Bogota) greeting someone the following way “Hola estrato 4 !”, the joke was supposedly funny from the point of view of a stratum six. It is nevertheless anecdotal but it represent the atmosphere you can live if you are not from a “good district”.