Glue Generation

In recent years Colombia has made a great effort to change that image of a country linked to drug trafficking, the fight against the FARC, on the one hand, and the death squads on the other. The results were not long in coming and with the help of the international community the country began a slow path towards normalization. But the road is still very long and slow. From the countryside thousands of "desplazados", peasants and small landowners, are pouring into the cities, abandoning their lands driven by guerrillas, drug traffickers or disasters. They rush into the big cities looking for a job, a house, help from the government, but they mostly end up supplying the army of desperate people that populate the streets of the city. Their children grow up without food and without education, often abused within the same families, used to ask for government aid, they grow up sniffing glue (pegantes), resins, which takes away the stimulus of hunger and even pain, but that already from third or fourth time since use damages the brain irreparably. These adolescents, often children, who are prematurely aged, meet them at the edge of the streets of Colombian cities in a state of continuous drowsiness, dullness, daze, with their bag of glue in hand ready to be snuffed. They are ghosts, immobile statues, which are part of the urban furniture, to which no one is ever more likely to be. I went around the streets of Medellin, Bogota, Cartagena de las Indias, Cali collecting some emblematic images of this, more than discomfort, real generational disaster. In Colombia there are several dozens of NGOs that deal with "desplazados" and try to deal with precarious means to the great request for assistance.