Critical Socio-Legal Study of the Right to Special Protection Applied to the Case of Street Inhabitants of the Medellín River in Colombia

This article aims to describe the material sense of the right to the special protection of the street inhabitants of the Medellín river from a socio-legal, ethnographic, reflexive, and case studies methodology, based on the investigators’ immersion into the social field where the subjects struggle to survive. The investigation took place between 2013 and 2018 in the sector of the Medellín River, the avenue of Greiff y Zea, and the Minorista. It consisted in discovering from the participant observation of their experience along with the participation of 135 homeless persons, the real significance of the supposed protection introduced as the constitutional formula adapted for the vindication of egalitarian citizenship under the state protection. The results of this work allow to question the formal contents of the law developed on this right, generic and specific, of the special protection of the homeless in Colombia and, in particular, in the case of the street inhabitants of Medellín. From this point is concluded this right is not a prerogative for protecting them against the discrimination, the marginalization, and the manifest weakness to reach true citizenship, but as an instrument of domination of the municipality of Medellín to legitimize the actions of persecution, enclosure, and submission, into a process addressed to eradicate them off the city. The prerogative, instead of protecting them, makes them subjects of an unfair treatment that reproduces the inequality, hidden behind a program of official attention discursive and selective that denies them the full exercise of their citizenship. In consequence, inside of the collective conscience of this social group predominates the idea of them not being citizens or considering themselves as nn citizens. The subject is addressed in three ways: a) approximation to a critical perspective of the right to the special protection in Colombia, b) faults of the right to the special protection of the homeless in Colombia, and c) critical theory of the right to the special protection of the case of the homeless of the Medellín River.