
Living in the Sewers of Bogota
Beneath Bogota, an underground population of homeless children and drug addicts lives in the city's sewer tunnels, sleeping in feces and dodging rats and flash floods when it rains. VICE host Thomas Morton goes down into the tunnels to talk with people who ended up there after abuse or neglect pushed them out of their homes, and who now treat the sewers as safer than the streets above. That safety is relative: so-called death squads, made up of police, paramilitary members, and hired men working for local businessmen, hunt the tunnels as part of what they call "social cleansing," opening manholes to fire rounds inside or pouring in gasoline and setting it alight. Morton talks directly with sewer dwellers about how they eat, sleep, and stay alive under that threat, and about the drug use that runs through the community. Shot on location in the tunnels themselves, the film stays close to the people living there rather than the officials who are supposed to be responsible for them.