Unreported World

Reporter Hamida Ghafour and producer James Brabazon travel to one of the strangest, wildest cities on earth - Buenaventura, on Colombia's Pacific coast.

There is little running water or electricity in Buenaventura and housing is so scarce that people have constructed whole neighbourhoods of shacks built on stilts. Yet, over the last two years violent, death has become an everyday fact in this city of around 300,000 people. Everyone is affected - almost everyone has lost someone.

Initially, people are too frightened to talk to the team, but with the help of Father Ricardo, a local Catholic priest, Ghafour begins to uncover what's behind the violence and the rules by which people in the city must live.

The team is told that this rundown backwater is at the centre of the Colombian cocaine trade, controlled with private armies by the cartels who make millions of dollars shipping their drugs to America.

Each neighbourhood is controlled either by Colombia's rightwing paramilitaries or groups associated with the left wing guerrilla organisation FARC. Each demands total obedience and any transgression is punished with death.

Father Ricardo's church is a sanctuary and frightened women tell Ghafour how in the FARC areas they must even leave their doors open at night so that guerrilla fighters can move through their homes at will. Many have lost sons. One woman, whose son helps Father Ricardo run the church, takes Ghafour to meet his family. But within minutes the local FARC commanders arrive, angry that filming was taking place without their permission.

The gunmen reveal that their job - and the job of the rival paramilitaries - is to keep open security corridors that run from the jungle through Buenaventura's waterways and out into the ocean. Colombia's drug cartels use these routes for the bulk of the cocaine that goes to the USA, bringing the drugs from jungle factories and transferring it to boats and ships.

The cartels pay FARC and the paramilitaries vast sums for this safe passage. With shipments worth tens of millions of dollars regularly moving through the city's waterways the gunmen demand unquestioning cooperation from the city's population. One recently apprehended cartel boss was arrested carrying $80m in cash.

Ghafour travels to the coastguard's headquarters. Amongst an array of recently captured speed boats she discovers two large submarines. In the last two years, the coastguard has captured fifteen submarines, built in workshops deep inside the jungle.

The team investigates the efforts the authorities are making to regain control of the city, but find them to be largely ineffectual. The success of US-backed anti-drug operations elsewhere in Colombia mean the ordinary people of this impoverished city are now being enveloped by a flood of cocaine, with all the violence and corruption it brings, as the cartels entrench themselves around the city.

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