Interview: Cali Caliente – A New Book Project on the Causes of Violence in Colombia by Kurt Hollander

Interview:  Cali Caliente – A New Book Project on the Causes of Violence in Colombia by Kurt Hollander

Howard Campbell

SWJ–El Centro Fellow Howard Campbell, an anthropologist interviews journalist Kurt Hollander on his new book and photography project Cali Caliente that documents the history and culture of violence in that city.

Member of la primera linea, National Strike protests, 2021 (Photo courtesy of Kurt Hollander)

Howard Campbell: So I’m here in Cali Colombia, on June 15^th, 2024, talking with Kurt Hollander about his project Cali Caliente. Let’s explore a bit about what this book project is about. What exactly do you mean when you say Cali Caliente? How do you approach this city in terms of caliente?

Kurt Hollander:  Well, I came to Cali in 2013 for a photography project. I came to document a huge, thematic love hotel here and that kind of led to a long-term photography and book project called The Joyous Life for which I photographed and researched the world of sex in Cali. One of the ways to describe a sexy person, and being horny, is caliente. I basically entered into the city by researching and writing a book about the local culture of sex, everything including architecture, literature, music, and even diet, and documenting it all with photographs.[1]

Soon after I finished the Joyous Life project, there was a national strike in 2018. There were lots of protests and also a lot of police and State violence in response. I photographed the protests and wrote about different aspects of the violence in Cali during that time.[2] And then there was a second national strike in 2021, during which I took pictures and wrote about the protests, mostly about the riot police and la primera linea, young people who took up shields to defend the protests against the police and others who might do them harm.[3] And then I continued writing about different kinds of violence in Cali, such as economic or even architectural violence, that is, offensive bunkers, and other cultural manifestations of violence.[4]

Police during National Strike protests, 2019 (Photo courtesy of Kurt Hollander)

Latin America is amongst the most violent geographical areas on the planet, Colombia one of the most violent countries on the continent, and Cali, it’s third largest city, the most violent within Colombia. Cali has long experienced more violence and homicides than most cities in war-torn countries such as Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq.

Much of the violence occurs within the cocaine industry, with the media attention and politicians in Colombia focusing mostly on drug violence, basically because of US policy. But all criminal organizations that traffic cocaine also engage in lots of other illicit businesses, such as contraband, smuggling, kidnapping, extortion, and selective assassinations, all of which involve violence. For example, in Cali, the ease and low cost of hiring a sicario to kill anyone you want has led to a Wild West scenario of paybacks within the city.

There is also State-sponsored violence, carried out by the military or the police force, not just against guerrilla groups but also their sympathizers, human rights activists, community leaders and even against those peacefully protesting police violence. The police force in Colombia is under military authority, and thus combat-trained, supplied with military weapons, and basically immune from any legal responsibility or prosecution, all of which inevitably leads to high levels of violence.

A vandalized police bunker, 2021 (Photo courtesy of Kurt Hollander)

I had kind of avoided writing about drugs and violence in Cali, especially the Cali Cartel and narcos, because it's all become such a cliche and has been written about too much, though rarely in a profound or serious way. But seeing and documenting what happened during the two national strikes made me start to focus on violence and crime in the city, and I began to put all I had written together in a book called Cali Caliente.

Besides sexy and horny, caliente here can mean violent or dangerous. People often refer to a city, neighborhood, or street as caliente, usually to warn people to be careful there. In the book I explore many factors that lead to violence and aggression here in the city, everything from the food, the climate, dietary supplements and drugs, as well as economic and historic factors from the Conquest of the Americas up until now, passing through Colombia’s civil war which has lasted more than 50 years and of course the drug trade, which has brought the greatest amount of violence to the city.

HC: I know when we talked about Mexico, you mentioned the ways in which globalization and privatization have created conditions that are extremely difficult for the majority of people and contribute to a lot of this violence. How would do you see this in terms of Cali? How do you understand this violence? When I was in Bogotá recently, I met this gringo who’s been in Colombia for 10 years and has a few businesses, and I asked him what his opinion of the violence here was and he said that the problem really is that the people here are sanguinario. And I thought that was really reductive to say that Colombian’s are bloody or bloodthirsty. This is a violent city, but a lot of things are going on here, so how do we explain it in general terms?

KH: For a long time, Cali was ranked as one of the top cities for homicides, and it is known as one of the most violent cities in Colombia, famous for its underage sicarios who ride on the back of motorcycles assassinating people (which is why it is illegal to have an extra man on the back of a motorcycle), for the “social cleansing” of homeless people, junkies, gays and transvestites, with bodies floating through town on rivers, and for massacres of whole families and political parties.[5] While it is true that the greatest violence in the city has been generated by the narcos, mostly ajustes de cuentas (settling of accounts) amongst their own and rival organizations, violence and massacres in Cali existed long before and have continued long after the Cali Cartel was dismantled, so drugs are obviously not the only source of violence.

Basically, it's impossible to understand anything that's going on in terms of violence without taking into account the history of colonialism in Colombia, all the way back to the conquest of the Americas by Europeans, and the systems of exploitation that were put in place and which still mostly remain in place.[6] Violence is a multi-factor phenomenon, and it has to do with much larger economic and political issues. In my book, I go back to the Spanish Conquest, then through the Colonial period, and then I follow it through the US involvement here in Colombia, not in a chronological way, but as a backdrop to what’s going on today. And what you see is how international players, from the beginning to today, want to just take the money and run. There is a theory that says that countries that are rich in natural resources are malditos, they're cursed, because the natural wealth that is extracted (petroleum, gold, even timber) always leaves poverty and violence wherever it's taken from.[7]

HC: What were some of the resources that were initially extracted during the Colonial period, the source of the wealth for the Spanish Empire.

KH: The Spaniards came for gold, which is the quickest kind of wealth extraction, but then they stayed for the cacao, coffee, sugar, so mostly mining and agricultural products. The fincas, that is, the plantations, that the Spaniards and their ancestors established here, however, didn't generate a profit, that is, until slaves were brought in. The slave economy is what most generated wealth for Europeans and for the European descendants in Colombia.

Colombia is an incredibly wealthy country in terms of biodiversity and minerals and everything that nature provides to man. Most of that wealth has been shipped off to Europe and, for the past century, to the United States, while the wealth that stayed here has gone to just a few families in in different regions. When people extract wealth from a country or region, when they forcibly take the land away from the indigenous people in order to get to the natural resources, and when they use slavery to carry out this extraction, it creates a system that generates not just wealth but violence. The history of exploitation and extraction are the roots of the violence today, with globalization being just the most recent form of this wealth extraction and exploitation.

HC: You talk about globalization, and so maybe we could transition to this sort of post-colonial post-apartheid modern era in which you no longer have the Spanish Colonial system, but you have residues from it. As I understand it, almost a quarter of Cali’s population is black, who are in general at the lower end of the social hierarchy, with a lot of undercurrents of racialism and racism. What do these power structures of economic exploitation look like over the last 100 years when it's no longer the Spanish colonial system, but a capitalist system heavily controlled by the US and the national elite.

KH: Well, it's a complex issue. Just to talk about the Afro-Colombians is to bring up the history of the slave trade, of moving people around to work without pay in order to create great wealth. But there is also a history of Africans and Afro-Colombians who escaped from slavery early on and made their way to the Pacific Coast, which is completely cut off from the rest of Colombia, especially from the major cities that are the centers of extraction and exploitation.

Many of the escaped African slaves went to the Pacific coast and created their own villages there, with their own music, dance, food, alcohol, and community organization. So, there's always been a lot of autonomy on the Pacific coast, which saved them from the exploitation of Europeans and the Colombian elite. With the expansion of narco trafficking, the military and paramilitary moved into the Pacific coast and ran hundreds of thousands of indigenous and black people off their land, the same thing they have been doing to campesinos in the countryside of Colombia. So the reason why there's such a big black population here in Cali is because whole communities were forcibly, violently displaced from the Pacific coast, and these communities have come to the city and because they’ve had to flee without anything to their name, they wind up living in the poorest neighborhoods with the least amount of natural resources, least amount of water, least amount of social services, schools and hospitals, and the least amount of jobs, which is why they have a hard time from the start. And this is why they are in the midst of so much violence, as both victims and at times victimizers. They are the victims of economic violence and of the violence that comes from wealth extraction in the form of cocaine, as most of the murders in Cali are business related, that is, the business of trafficking cocaine from the coca growing regions and laboratories around Cali to outside the country. What surprises me is that there isn't more violence here in Cali from the Afro communities because of such inequality.

HC: I wonder if you could talk about the industrial base in the formal economy, that is, in non-narcobusinesses. Aside from sugar cane, what are some of the other businesses, especially ones that are not agriculture?

KH: Well, Cali has only been a city for around a hundred years, and before that it was mostly an agricultural economy, in a system where the plantations outside the city generated the wealth and employment, while inside the city the landed gentry lived but didn’t work as much. Over time, Cali became industrialized, but only in part. For example, the city’s infrastructure was built to relay the coffee production in the center of the country, in the zona cafeteria, to the port city of Buenaventura on the Pacific coast. The infrastructure, that is, the river transport, the railways and the highways were all built to accommodate the coffee industry in the center of the country and the sugar industry outside of the city, not for the city’s own industrial economy. Over time, however, the city grew and became more industrialized, with lots of working-class neighborhoods emerging in the center of the city.[8]

HC: But then, what were people making?

KH: Well, they were making everything that the sugar industry, the coffee industry, the transportation industry and the construction industry needed. But then, from 1980 to 2012, more or less, the federal government instituted the de-industrialization of Colombia, in order to favor the giant agroindustry, which provoked a shift towards a service economy and informal economy in Cali (including the cocaine industry). It basically ruined the working class economy in the city and sent hundreds of thousands of people into the informal economy.And at that point, being that the US economy was booming, people started to migrate to the United States even more.

HC: What are the main cities in the US with people from Cali?

KH: Many caleños went to Miami and New Jersey, but the majority went to Queens in New York City. This immigration, which began in the 1960s, but surged in the 1970s and 80s, coincided with the rise of the Cali cartel, and there's a connection between the Colombian immigration to the United States and the cocaine trade, with people being used as mulas (mules) to transport drugs. A lot of the Cali Cartel’s profits stayed in Queens and was invested in businesses there, including discotheques and clubs where Salsa bands from New York and from Cali played.

HC: Narcocorridos are about US and Mexican narcos but they're also about the life of the people. I suppose salsa music comments on drug issues also, right?

KH: Salsa is actually not from Colombia, it’s actually from New York City, and before that from Cuba, as well, but it was adopted by the black, working-class population here in Cali because of the African beat and how good it was to dance to. Over time it became the official musical culture of Cali, in large part because it was promoted by the alcohol companies and official media, and because it was also backed by the Cali cartel, as they used it to launder money through the Salsa discotheques, the recording studios and the radio stations that played it, both in Cali and NYC, while selling cocaine in the clubs, as well.

HC: The Vallenato is also partially a narco music in its origins, as discussed in the book Marijuana Boom.[7] The marijuana industry was fairly grassroots and much different from the cocaine multinational business. It was more from producers working within Colombia and working with middlemen merchants in Colombia, selling to Americans directly locally, or shipping it to United States predominantly, but with much less violence and on a much smaller scale, though heavily connected to the history of smuggling, and these kind of independent communities. It was something like Sinaloa but not as developed, basically peasant farmers who when they became marijuana farmers sold their product. Vallenato was connected to the region but also to the drug trafficking groups who supported and consumed it. Early on it became understood as a music connected to narcos, like narcocorridos in Mexico, in that that it spoke a lot about smuggling drugs, even though it's much more than that. That sounds to me a bit like Salsa and cocaine.

KH: Vallenato and Cumbia were both originally black music, and Salsa has roots in Cuban son and in US jazz dance bands, so in essence they are all, at least in their beginnings, roots music. But Salsa was also born with a silver spoon, to snort cocaine, and was connected to the Cali cartel. Salsa lyrics sometimes directly refer to cocaine and have some call-outs and praise for some narcos in particular. In its origins Salsa was very anti-imperialist, anti-Yanqui, very much rooted in the South Bronx and other Latino ghettos in New York, a true street music, with ties to gangs and with songs about violence and poverty, but over time it becomes the favorite music of Latinos with money, those who go dancing in fancy clubs elegantly dressed and drinking the finest liquors, and much of the money that paid for it all came from cocaine profits.

The Cali cartel began to bring the biggest, best Salsa bands down from New York to play at their private parties and in their clubs in Cali, and also in La Feria, the city’s largest music and dance festival (but also a rural festival with bull fights, horses) and with beauty pageants in which the winners were usually the wives or lovers of the Cali Cartel bosses. Musical promoters associated with narcos also brought bands from Cali to clubs up in New York, where there was a large population from Cali who loved Salsa music. And the Cali Cartel would use the bands and the music world as promotion for their product, but also as a good way to launder their huge profits. It's a complicated story, one that hasn't really been told so much, one that is very particular to Cali.

HC: It sounds like it could be considered a narcoculture that legitimizes itself as a culture, not just crass business and murder but also a way of life, one that is connected to a particular place and people. That's really interesting because I think people don't want to understand how complex these things are.

KC: The thing is, there was just so much money coming into the Cali from the cocaine industry that the narcos could do anything they wanted, and what they most wanted was to be seen as patrons, not so much of the arts, but of the night life, of the entertainment industry, because in part that is where their cocaine was being sold and the profits being laundered. The Cartel bosses really wanted to be accepted by the elite in Cali, by the sugar baron families, and so they would have parties in the most expensive hotels and they would organize lots of social events and most of that was around Salsa music and dancing.

HC: That sounds a lot like the festivals and beauty pageants in Mazatlán, and the lavish sort of shows, celebrations and weddings there where the best bands of Mexico would play, especially those that played narcocorridos, all paid for by the narcos. So, you have the musicians, and you have this regional culture which everyone is very proud of, different social factors overlapping and reinforce and legitimize each other.

KH: The Cali cartel had all the money in the world, so it wasn't money they dreamed of, it was social acceptance, which they got through music and parties and the beauty pageants they sponsored and the beautiful women they were with. And this led to whole new industries in Cali, including plastic surgery and the beauty industry, businesses often paid for by cocaine profits, which in turned changed the way women from Cali look and behave.

In my book I document how the drug industry has transformed the culture in Cali, that is, the music, the way people look and dress, the life of luxury they live. And I analyze this within the context of globalization and the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement signed in 2012, a year before I moved to Cali, and how this transformed the food people eat and the things people drink (much of what is imported in ultra-processed, genetically-modified sugar-heavy food and drinks and even dietary supplements), and how this affects people's bodies and health and behavior.

HC: The other day I went to De Uno, a convenience store that sells bags of stuff, piles of food that’s very cheap, cut-rate, low-quality food. One of the aspects of your writing that an anthropologist might feel would be controversial is when you talk about this how kind of diet, or the heat in the city, affects violence or aggression, they'd say that’s just geographical determinism, that the temperature is a factor in people's lives, but it doesn't cause anything in any one-to-one way. I wonder how you would explain these things, this complex of factors in relation to violence and crime, your idea about Cali as caliente.

KH: Well, there's no single bullet to explain violence or crime, but there's a lot of contributing factors. What I found is that Cali is very rich in stimulants, that is, coffee, sugar, cocaine, and many more, and the tropical heat here enters into people’s bodies and makes them more prone to socialize, and this can in turn lead to more fights, especially with the addition of alcohol and drugs. And there are also gyms and MMA fight clubs around the city where everybody's getting pumped up, everyone's taking protein supplements and steroids, which is shifting the physical culture in Cali away from sports and towards a vanity, narcissistic, aggressive culture.

I believe these are all contributing factors, not just as consumer products, but also in terms of them as globalized industries, as models of extraction and exploitation. One of the biggest contributing factors to violence and crime is a lack of economic equality, and these globalized industries only increase the economic divide in Cali, just as the illegal drug industry has done over the past decades, and just as the armed conflict in the country has done over most of the past century. All the violence and social and economic inequalities that these conflicts have created have left a significant part of the population, especially the least economically advantage, completely traumatized, and trauma is also one of the major factors in predicting future violence, both as a victim but also as a victimizer. So, when you add this to hot, sticky weather, a diet rich in sugar, caffeine and saturated fat, cheap alcohol, cheap drugs and serious poverty, you get a very dangerous mix.

For your friend to say that the Colombians are bloodthirsty, it just shows that he knows nothing more than social stereotypes. There's always a history behind human behavior and when you look at this history in Colombia you see who's getting the short end of the stick and who's making out like bandits. One of the things that I found is that, during the last century, the United States has been a major force in creating the violence and economic inequality in Colombia by imposing its structures of wealth extraction and by fomenting wars to sell its weapons and services. Not to mention that the United States is by far the largest consumer of cocaine, a product whose production and distribution has caused the greatest amount of suffering and death in Cali.

As it was just shown in the ruling against Chiquita Banana, US corporations (especially those involved in mining, industrial agricultural and water) have been funding the paramilitaries that have cause the lion’s share of violence in Colombia, and the US government has been complicit in the major massacres and land grabs within the country, as well.[9]

So, this is the background and the context in which all the kinds of violence in Colombia happens, and in my book I discuss how this has impacted the life and culture within Colombia’s third largest city, Cali.

HC: But there's also the flip side to what you're talking about in terms of heat, of Cali Caliente, and that’s that Cali is an extraordinary city, with the greatest music and dancing, rich diverse food and drink, very culturally innovative, there’s really a tropical atmosphere in the city. People are laughing, they're walking around having fun.

KH: Cali is a great place, it’s very human, the people don’t suffer from the problems of isolation and depression like in the US, they still have a really rich, authenticate culture and there’s a real joy of living. The Joyous Life is actually the name of a book I wrote about Cali that focuses on the world of sex in the city, and which shows how the local products people eat here, especially the fruits, the local products people drink, and smoke and snort, and all the local music and dancing, are all aphrodisiacs. I document, with photos as well, the culture of sex, that is, the architecture, music, images, literature, etc., which I see as authentic, local culture designed to bring joy into peoples’ lives. So, The Joyous Life is the flip side to my book Cali Caliente, two sides of a city that coexist, not always peacefully, but that are both fundamental in understanding life here. For instance, the smiling faces of young salsa dancers that is presented to the tourists in the promotion of the city’s festivals hide a harsh reality, of prostitution, of social and gender inequality, of a corporate culture used to sell alcohol and cocaine.

HC: I'm just wondering if it's possible to have a place like Cali without the extreme violence. For instance, in Sweden and other parts of Scandinavia there is very little violence. While many people consider these utopias, I consider them boring places that I wouldn’t want to live in. A place like Cali, however, with all its problems, is vastly preferable to me. I think it's an incredibly exciting place. But Cali is also one of the most violent places in the world, and I feel like if you could just somehow lower the violence, if you could just take the worst of it away, it would be a utopia. Is there some way with good government and good laws and changes in society that somehow you could preserve the best in Cali.

KH: Well, I think it would be easy if you could get rid of all the multinationals and US army bases in Colombia.That is, if you could allow the Colombian economy to exist for Colombia. But then you would also have to get rid of all the political and economic mafias within the country who are concentrating wealth amongst themselves. I can’t really see how this could happen without that.

HC: Medellín is being portrayed as a kind of role model in international media, a city that went from being one of the most violent in the world to now relatively reasonable levels of homicide and crime and an incredibly rich, civic culture of libraries, something close to Europe in the Americas. How did they do that?

KH: Well, I am no expert on Medellín, I don’t know the city well at all, but I figure they’ve achieved this almost European way of life in part by converting the city’s economy into a globalized service economy (Airbnb, Uber, Starbucks) that caters to a fluctuating population of European and gringo digital nomads and tourists. This, however, leads to problems of gentrification and higher rents and displaces the lower classes outside the center of the city. Which is to say, it’s the classic model of displacing violence and poverty to the outer areas of the city that lack most basic social services. It’s a kind of replacement theory in which globalization and gentrification work together to substitute the conflictive working class with happy consumers. Unfortunately, this usually spells the end of all authentic, local culture and neighborhoods and makes life for those not invited to the global dance party much more difficult and precarious.

The government in Cali is always trying to come up with ways to convert the city into an international tourist destination, whether as a health and beauty destination (which I call Silicone Valley due to the amount of plastic surgery clinics there) or as an exotic, sexy place to dance Salsa and drink aguardiente all night long. To achieve these dreams, whole working-class neighborhoods, which had been left to rot and ruin, including the ones in which Salsa music and dancing first took hold in the city, have been completely demolished, to make room for a giant new mall, a courthouse and a condominium. Fortunately, tourism is still limited to just one neighborhood and thus hasn’t affected the real estate market or the local economy in any significant way. One of the reasons globalization and gentrification haven’t completely taken over is that in Cali people and barrios still resist, and rival criminal organizations still battle for control of the city. Most foreigners don’t want to run the risk of being caught in the crossfire while on a pleasure trip. When the local government finally does transform the city into a European and gringo-friendly pleasure destination, I will have to move on. 

Kurt Hollander is a writer and fine art/documentary photographer. He is the author of Several Ways to Die in Mexico City (Feral House, 2013); founder and editor of Poliéster Magazine (a contemporary art magazine of the Americas published from 1993 to 2000) and The Portable Lower East Side, a NYC cultural journal published from 1983-93; and screenwriter and director of Carambola (Mexico, 2005), a feature film.

Endnotes

[1] Kurt Hollander, “Intimate Photos of Colombia’s Sex Motels” Dazed Magazine. 31 July 2019, https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/45216/1/intimate-photos-of-colombias-sex-motels.

[2] Kurt Hollander, “Violence and Video in Cali, Colombia,” Social Text. Vol. 41, no. 4 (157), 2023: pp. 107–121, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10910058.

[3] Kurt Hollander, “Petro Is Trying to Rein in Colombia’s Infamous Riot Police.” Jacobin. 16 April 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/04/gustavo-petro-police-reform-esmad.

[4] Kurt Hollander, “Colombia’s Ugly Architecture of Inequality,” Jacobin, 5 September 2021, https://jacobin.com/2021/09/cali-colombia-architecture-buildings-inequality-narco-police-paramilitary-violence-cartel-bunker-de-justicia.

[5] Ibid.

[6] David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

[7] Michael Ross, The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

[8] Linna Brito, Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020.

[9] Luke Taylor, “US banana giant ordered to pay $38m to families of Colombian men killed by death squads,”The Guardian. 11 June 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/11/chiquita-banana-deaths-lawsuit-colombia.