Abstract

AVENDANO ARIAS, Johan Andrés. "Bichas", "Ganchos" and drug territories in Bogota: topo-representations of a form of slavery. Rev. colomb. soc. [online]. 2020, vol.43, n.2, pp.129-155.  Epub May 08, 2021. ISSN 0120-159X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcs.v43n2.82880.

This reflection engages the street dweller (elderly people, men, women, boys, girls, and adolescents), in a multidimensional and scalar perspective, defining as its purpose the characterization of relationships between consumption of bazuco "bichas" (dirty coca base; also known as crack in other latitudes), living spaces, imaginaries, and representations-toporepresentations in the context of Bogota, Colombia. It is also an analytical and methodological proposal for the study, focusing on a form of slavery linked to addiction and dependence on psychoactive drugs. From a qualitative approach, mental maps are implemented and analyzed as expressions and images of spatial experiences and the symbology related to daily life, approaching specific aspects of the subject's sociology.

By unifying narratives and spellings, the instrumentalization that the inhabitants of the street are subjected to, given their problematic drug use in a horizontally and vertically structured network, of traffic and micro traffic of psychoactive substances (SPA), nourished by the conditions and knowledge of the transhumance of themselves through the city. Precisely, in a dual condition of consumers and vendors, the studied population becomes a strategic link between the operation of the hooks (registered trademarks for the sale of bazuco) and the territories of drugs that have been configured in the urban environment of Bogota parting from large macro-stores (the old Bronx for example), others of a subsidiary type and a few at the micro-level with a neighborhood scale. This set up constitutes a robust market in each sector of Bogota, guarantying the effective supply in any radius of demand in the capital, as shown on the map built here for these purposes.

In short, these patterns seem not to be isolated as, on the contrary, those are replicated in other cities, keeping the proportions and particularities, imposing the analytical need to return to the subject's sociology and its leap to the collective approach around to a population with realities distant from the frameworks of public and social policies.

Descriptors: geography, habitat, marginality, sociology.

Keywords : bazuco-crack; city; consumption of psycho-active substances; imaginary; sociology of the subject; street inhabitants.

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