It is a Friday night in Bogotá and the dance floor at Andres DC is a mass of sweaty bodies as the predominantly young clientele of the city’s popular nightspot gyrates to a mix of western pop and local Vallenato (folk) tunes.
Cocktails at this showy restaurant-cum-nightclub, a carefully choreographed chaos of fun and kitschy colour, are a heart-stopping 50,000 pesos ($27). But neither the price, nor the 20,000 pesos cover charge, is a deterrent: as per most nights, the place is heaving.
Go back a decade or more, and Bogotá felt much like the chilly and conservative Andean city that it always used to be. Founded at an oxygen-depleted 2,600m at the foot of a towering ridge that runs from north to south, the city of about 8.5m people was better known for its hot chocolate and early closing times than for its nightlife.
In the 1990s, and in an effort to control increasing violence, Antanas Mockus, a former mayor, reined in bar closing times from 3am to 1am. A few years later, the city’s taxis began installing bulletproof screens separating driver from passenger – even though they often dug into passengers’ knees and left the driver’s chest pushed up against the wheel.
Today, the screens have all but gone and there is a feelgood factor arguably stronger than at any time in living memory. The economy is growing at a fast clip; once-gruesome violence from the country’s drugs war and 50-year insurgency no longer affects the capital directly and a demographic boom – a quarter of the country’s 47m population is aged between 14 and 28 – has produced an explosion in demand for entertainment – above all, nightlife.
Santiago Prieto, a 25-year-old musician and member of local group Monsieur Periné, is one of the younger generation fuelling the city’s new-found vibe. Sipping cocktails with two friends at the lounge-style Casa 53*76 bar, with its 2013 sophistication wrapped in retro decor, Prieto says that even his traditionally precarious profession is feeling the economic upswing.
“A few years ago, being a musician was a real struggle,” he says in a quick burst of well-spoken Spanish that reveals an upper-middle-class upbringing. “Nowadays, everyone has work.”
Twenty-six-year-old Felipe Cuervo, a sharply dressed philosophy graduate with the distinct air of a 19th-century bohemian poet, says that the economic turnround is so tangible that it has even made him dream of travelling across the Atlantic in pursuit of further study. “Europe is an academic paradise but it’s in crisis,” he says. “Here in Colombia we have options.”
The growing sense of optimism among Bogotá’s young crowd marks a fundamental shift compared with the previous generation, which, equipped with sufficient education, money or both, would often leave at the first chance.
“Young people today feel they have more opportunities than their parents,” says Ana María Otero-Cleves, a 30-something history professor at the city’s Los Andes university. “They are now actively choosing to stay in Bogotá.”
Start-up spirit
Sebastián Jaramillo, a tall, good-looking 28-year-old, typifies that spirit. Educated in the UK during his last years of high school and then in Boston at university level, Jaramillo decided to return to his native Bogotá to set up a business.
The offices of his impulsarme.com, a virtual marketplace for university graduates seeking their first proper job, are a throwback to the heady dotcom days. There are floor-to-ceiling blackboards in each room covered with dozens of brainstorming-style phrases scribbled in white chalk. Employees, mainly programmers, have to step over a napping chocolate Labrador in the hallway to get to the bathroom.
But for all the laid-back atmosphere, things are moving fast at impulsarme.com. After three years in operation, the portal pairs 40,000 university-educated Colombians with 700 companies, ranging from multinationals to family-owned businesses, each month.
“Young people use to leave Bogotá, and often with a one-way ticket,” says Jaramillo. “All my friends are now deciding to stay. They work in different fields, but all of them have work and all of them are doing well.”
It has just gone 8am on a typical slate-grey morning and a small group of first-year students at Los Andes university are discussing the themes that most concern them. Felipe Arango, a law student, recognises that things have changed radically since the dark days, in the early 1990s, of the devastating car bombs planted by the notorious drug trafficker Pablo Escobar.
Safer streets
Bogotá’s murder rate last year dropped to 16.9 per 100,000 inhabitants, a 22.6 per cent fall compared with 2011, and a sea change when set against the 80-odd murders per 100,000 inhabitants recorded during Bogotá’s worst years. “We are in a different space now,” admits Arango.
But he and his classmates say that petty crime is still a big problem. Gabriel Durán, who also studies law, thinks that the city is plain insecure. “I get on the bus, I get robbed. I leave university, I get robbed. I don’t feel safe.”
Another problem is access to higher education, says Guillermo Asprilla, chief of staff of the city’s leftwing government. “There aren’t enough places in the public system, and the private system is often too expensive for young people,” he says. The result is that an estimated 60 per cent of those seeking to continue their education after school are unable to do so.
Fanny Puentes, a 25 year-old who lives with her mother and her seven-year-old son on the southern fringes of Colombia’s capital, began to study science at one of the city’s many private universities a few years ago. But things got tough when her mother became ill and had to stop working. Puentes was forced to seek a job as a sales assistant in the city centre. Since then, she has lost the three semesters of credits she had to her name.
“I dream of going back to study one day,” she says. “I just can’t see a way to do it.”
But even she recognises that people, in particular young people, have more work than before. Basic jobs may not pay particularly well, but at least there are more of them. Besides, several government schemes, such as the “first job law”, which gives employers tax breaks for increasing their overall headcount by taking on young people, have started to make a difference. Another programme, which grants Colombian start-up companies full exemption on corporate taxes for the first couple of years, has also helped.
“New companies would often go bust because they didn’t have enough to cover all their expenses,” says Gabriel Gómez, who heads the Colombia Joven (Young Colombia), the youth policy department within the government. “Now, they have the breathing space they need.”
It has gone 2am, and things are still going strong in Bogotá’s T Zone, an area full of bars and nightclubs in the city’s affluent north. At Little India Super Star, a bijou bar that sells gin and tonic under a canopy of chilli-shaped fairy lights, a small group of young and moneyed Bogotanos exchange small talk at the bar.
Serving them is Pablo Fernández, a 35-year-old Uruguayan, who came to Bogotá a few years ago and has been witnessing the improving times ever since. “People are going out much more than they used to,” he says. Asked if he plans to move on any time soon, he shakes his head in a sort of “no way” way. “There’s too much work to leave just now. It’s good to be in Bogotá.”
