“I couldn’t isolate myself at home because the government left me homeless”: Dispossession and Sociospatial Inequality in Times of Pandemic in Altos de la Estancia, South of Bogotá, Colombia

Abstract

The article reveled the insights of the Semillero de Problemas Urbanos Contemporáneos in Altos de la Estancia, Bogotá, Colombia during the confinement imposed by the district government to stop the SARS-CoV-2 contagion. For two months, May and July 2020, of intervention and from the fieldwork with interviews and visits in the settlement, it was documented the context of the eviction of the informal inhabitants of Altos de la Estancia as a process of dispossession that not only corresponds to the sanitary protection measures imposed in the context of COVID-19 but also to a long history of peasant social displacement due to violence and setbacks in the policies of low-income housing in Colombia. The inhabitants of Altos de la Estancia have suffered on more than one occasion the perverse effects of housing dispossession. First, when they were displaced by guerrilla and paramilitary groups and forced to move from their villages to the city. Then when they did not obtain a clear response from the government to access housing, and finally, when they informally decided to access lots offered by “tierreros”. The research findings that these informal actors and the government make housing a commodity can speculate for personal benefit.