CUCÚTA — Back in 2016, many Colombians were outraged when the writer Iván Gallo called the city of Cúcuta, on the Venezuelan border, a “dump.” Nine years on, I’m still trying to prove him wrong.
If you live in Cúcuta today, you have but two options: leave or live surrounded by the specter of tragedy.
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What’s happening in this departmental capital is not normal. It’s not normal to have violent deaths outside pubs, nightclubs and restaurants, at the school gate or at home. It is not normal for bombs to explode in a city, nor for gangs to impose a night-time curfew.
In recent months, Cúcuta and its metropolitan area including the districts of Villa del Rosario and Los Patios, once known as the “Pearl of the North,” have become the setting of all these incidents. The area ended up in 2024 with 561 homicides, which has allowed the Mexican NGO Civic Council for Public Security and Penal Justice, to slot Cúcuta for the last two years among the world’s 50 most violent cities.
Constant threat of death
Forensic experts with their synthetic yellow suits are now part of the daily landscape here, and it is entirely normal to fear, every day, that you could be the next innocent bystander killed in some violent attack.
Who is behind all of this? On the surface, there isn’t just one answer. It can be common criminals, or armed gangs that are either national in character like the Marxist ELN guerrillas, or a multinational gang or cartel, like the AK47s. Life here is to live under the constant threat of death.
Perhaps the worst of it is that illegality has permeated all social classes. We’re used to seeing opulent lifestyles that may be the fruit of hard work — you never know — but which we know are not in many cases. What should you think when you see high-end pick-up trucks, ‘palatial’ homes looking like casinos and other signs of over-the-top consumer habits? We all know what is going on here: Cúcuta is a den of narcotics trafficking.
It is no longer unusual to know either directly or indirectly, a person who was murdered recently. It barely makes sense in a city with a homicide rate of 36 per 100,000 inhabitants and where “everybody knows each other.”
Influencer shot dead
One recent case, so illustrative of Cúcuta’s plight, concerned María José Estupiñán. A paid gunman (though we can be sure the youngsters in question are paid very little for such awful work) knocks on her door, pulls out his pistol and fires six times in front of her screaming mother. The gunman then flees running through the same streets Estupiñán would walk every day.
Preliminary investigations pointed to this as a paid job following a court ruling in the victim’s favor, after she filed a complaint against an ex-partner over domestic violence. Locals have their own versions of why Estupiñán, a 22-year-old student and online influencer, was shot, from what I have heard.
This is symptomatic of a society that is no longer shocked by them nor has any respect for a person’s life, in spite of attending mass every Sunday!
Whatever the reasons, there was of course no justification for it. But we can see killings are becoming normal here, symptomatic of a society that is no longer shocked by them nor has any respect for a person’s life — often in spite of attending mass every Sunday!
Another recent victim was a volunteer member of the ombudsman’s office, Jaime Vásquez, killed on April 14, 2024. He was shot one Sunday morning while having breakfast in a café. There is also the Venezuelan Luis Miguel Osorio Chacín, shot dead along with his young son and a bodyguard outside his daughter’s school, on September 14.
Haven for crime and impunity
On March 19, there were three loud explosions in different parts of the city, including at the Villa del Rosario crossing point, and grenade explosions in the city center on Monday, April 28. Crime seems to control both life and death here.
I might join calls for justice, for the state to ‘do something,’ and even urge the international community to somehow intervene. But it would be talking in vain, as long as Cúcuta remains a haven for crime and impunity.
Your ordinary resident here has a right to live in peace while traffickers live in fear, not the other way around.
It’s time to recognize and reject the flow of illegal money into the city’s mainstream businesses, the way locals boycotted a well-known burger chain, which had a disturbingly large number of branches here given the city’s size, when people found out its owners had ties to Venezuela’s criminal regime. Your ordinary resident here has a right to live in peace while traffickers live in fear, not the other way around.
The city’s anthem praises its (18th century) founder Juana Rangel de Cuellar for giving us “a corner to die in.” We seem to have taken it at its word.
