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La Olla Y Los Patios: An Ethnography Of Place, Selfhood, Violence, And Rehabilitation In Bogotá, Andrés Romero

Wayne State University Dissertations

In the early hours of May 28, 2016, the mayor of Bogotá, along with the Colombian military and SpecialForces, seized the biggest olla or open-air drug market in Colombia at the time. The olla known as “El Bronx” was a three-block area in downtown Bogotá and where over 2,000 people found shelter under the authority of paramilitary affiliated crime bands controlling the city’s drug trade. Widely depicted by the media and the broader polity as an “inferno,” El Bronx was regarded as a space where those socially relegated outside of the human were encumbered by seemingly endless transgression and drug …