Martín Mejía

When the rainy season begins Helena's baby shall be born. Her mother and brother prepare for the coming weeks of rain and maternity. Men and women fish and harvest in deep solitude; while nature becomes the prison for all of them. The promise of a new life would have to change things.

Of all the hellholes in the world, El Cartucho, in the Colombian capital Bogotá, was perhaps the worst. In the 1980s, the colonial neighbourhood of solid middle-class houses degenerated into the fiefdom of a drugs gang. The streets became the backdrop to a flourishing trade in drugs, people and garbage, crack houses sprang up all over and life wasn’t worth a damn.