Medellin - Infamy to modernity

Medellin, nestled in the Aburra Valley, within the
Andes mountain range

The bus from Cartagena to Medellin forges a path from the sea to the high mountains of Colombia, winding through the steep channelled topography that dominates the centre of the country. The ride is akin to a rollercoaster, pulling your stomach back and forth with each hairpin bend so severely that many passengers grasp sick bags in their hands. The rapid ascent does little to help the queasy.... the peak of the ride takes you to 2000m above sea level.

A view across the red brick metropolis from the Santo
Domingo neighbourhood.

In the final half hour the bus crests to reveal Colombia's second city in the valley below, partly obscured by wisps of low cloud. A river bisects a city of red brick buildings, modernist plazas, un-pretty concrete towers and car parks. Medellin has assiduously demolished the majority of its older buildings and replaced them with the new. It is, more than anything, a determinedly modern South American metropolis reinventing itself. 

We really loved it, and it wasn't anything to do with how the city looked or the places we went. Rather how the city felt, and the way its ambition has forged a new model for developing and developed urban centres around the world.

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A Violent History

Medellin in the 1980s and early 1990s was a desperate city in a nation drowning in crisis. Since the onset of La Violencia in Colombia in 1948 -a civil war provoked by the assasination of the hugely popular Liberal presidential candidate Gaitán in the street - the country had been gripped by a long and deadly conflict between Liberals, Socialists and Conservatives. Much of the countryside was controlled by insurgent groups - armed socialists such as the ELN and FARC - or Conservative paramilitaries over whom the government exerted little control. By 1964, 300,000 people had been killed across the country. Corruption entangled a parliament whose coalitions would collapse. The violence spurred millions who lived in the countryside to flee to the cities, including Medellin. In 1951, Medellin had a population of 390k, by 1993 it was over 1.5m.

Colombia was (and continues to be) a place of huge inequality. While the wealthy and the middle class could (and can) afford a European standard of living the majority live well beneath the poverty line, eking out an existence in an unforgiving urban environment. Increased numbers of poor internal migrant and the collapsing security situation of the 70s only increased the pressure on meagre social service provisions.

Hernan from Real City Tours focused on where the
city is going, rather than the sad and turbulent past

In the late seventies cocaine arrived and catalysed the ongoing civil conflict to new levels. It is estimated that through the eighties, cocaine exports brought in 2.5-4 billion US dollars - around 7%-10% of the total GDP of Colombia at the time. The drug was cheap to produce in the mountainous nations of South America and could command high prices in wealthy North America and Europe. The areas surrounding Medellin possessed the perfect altitude for production, while the lawlessness of the countryside (as a result of the conflict) provided the hiding places for the cocaine production sites, and Medellin's relatively strong transport links enabled strong access to market. Also dispossessed poor migrants to the city provided ready recruits for the emerging drug gangs. Medellin soon came to be the centre of the worldwide cocaine trade, and with it huge inflows of capital and profit. Much of this was used to buy weapons to support the feuding between different gangs. Payments were channelled to paramilitaries or insurgents to act as "security guards" for the coca fields. This money in turn was used by these groups to increase their arms and the political conflict escalated further. Huge fortunes of tens of millions of dollars were to be won and lost. The stakes had been raised, and with this so did the violence.

It was within this deadly environment Pablo Escobar's Medellin Cartel distinguished itself through ruthlessness, extreme cruelty and a gift for PR which any politician would be proud of. Steadily he picked off his competitors whilst maintaining a public image that allowed him to sit in parliament briefly in the mid eighties and give interviews to journalists claiming to be a legitimate businessman. He ordered the killing of Ministers of Justice, Supreme Court Judges, Presidential candidates, police captains, politicians and journalists. A staggering trail of dead.

The countryside surrounding Medellin, where Escobar
built his luxury prison.

Escobar's domination followed - in 1991 it was said he controlled 90% of cocaine entering the US market and 90% to the rest of the world (earning literally tens of millions of dollars per day) and had a personal fortune of $30 billion. In the early 1990s as many as 27,000 violent deaths a year were occurring in Colombia, a significant amount of them linked to the Medellin cartel, while 600 police officers across Colombia were killed by cartel assassins. When eventually the police did arrest Escobar in 1991 (a major achievement such was the fear his threats of 'silver or bullets' caused in the highest echelons of government) he was put into a prison of his own design, complete with widescreen TVs and Jacuzzis.

 The 1995 bomb had been planted in the base of "The Bird,"
the work of the renowned Colombian painter and sculptor
Fernando Botero. It remains standing in the park today next
 to a replica that is intact as a reminder of the progression seen
in the city. 

Repeated calls for him to be extradited to the US were denied by the Colombian administration due to his influence. Thumbing his nose to authority, Escobar continued to direct his drug empire from within the luxury prison and eventually escaped. He was finally killed in 1993 by the Colombian police as he jumped from the roof of a Medellin hideout. His location was pinpointed by American intelligence agents after months of searching. The killing of Pablo Escobar however solved none of the underlying issues - drug money still flowed, the civil conflict continued to rumble on. In 1995, a bomb went off in a central Medellin park killing 30 and injuring 200 (mainly teenagers attending a city music festival). No one claimed responsibility nor could the police find the perpetrators. Perhaps there were too many suspects given the city's turbulent past.

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A New City

It against that awful legacy that Medellin began it's recovery from the mid nineties. The engine for change was the public utility company, Empresas Públicas de Medellín, which supplies water, electricity, sewage disposal and gas to the city. It is owned by the city and able to generate electricity cheaply due to the hydro dams in the mountains. Around 30% of profits generated have been used to fund public projects across the city over the last 20 years with great success.

Taking a ride on the Metro de Medellin

The construction of the Metro de Medellin - the only one in Colombia - started in the early nineties, and began operating in 1995. It is slick and modern transit, bisecting the city and rapidly conveying the inhabitants from one end to the other.

Spectacular cable cars link the mainline with slums. Libraries - the most impressive of which ("Bibloteca Espanyol") is situated in formally the most dangerous neighbourhood of the city, Santo Domingo - have been dotted in the poorest of areas to provide educational and social centres. 30 story elevators that climb the sides of impoverished neighbourhoods have been installed, a new university district, and a beautiful botanical garden which we visited.

Three hundred poles light up Cisneros Plaza, an area that
used to be rife with prostitutes and drug dealers.
It is now a modern public area and a key part of the renovation
 effort being carried out across the entire city.

Underpinning these investments are principles of security, inclusiveness, connectivity and education. Systemically the city has sought to reclaim dangerous areas and install well lit openly designed public spaces. The biggest projects - such as the Cisneros Plaza makeover and libraries - are targeted at areas historically associated with social deprivation. Education courses are offered to residents in these areas to try and improve skill levels and build trust. It feels a city which recognises that its most valuable resources are not commodities such as the coffee that grows in the mountains, but rather the people who live within the city. A refreshing approach when often poverty is seen as a blight to be fenced off, rather than an opportunity to develop and economically improve.



'Serenidad' (peacefulness) displayed as part of the city's
infamous Christmas lights display 

This inclusiveness (alongside other factors) have had great benefits. Since 1992 - the height of Escobar's power and the drug war - the murder rate has declined by 90%. Medellin is now heralded as one of the top technology centres in the world, certainly South America, with a burgeoning tech industry, and has just been named the Wall Street Journal's city of the year.

Strolling through the Jardin Botanico

One night we ended up at a music concert at a finca on the edge of the city with a bunch of friends we had made from both the hostel and neighbourhood we stayed in. The feeling was one of optimism and internationalism, most locals who we talked to had lived and studied in Paris, London, Barcelona. Many young people had travelled to the city from abroad or within Colombia. The DJs on stage were big electronic acts from New York and Sweden. It felt like you could be at a boutique festival in Cambridgeshire or Spain. While inequality remains a serious pervasive issue, certainly the majority of the people of the city would not be going to out of town concerts or participating in the tech boom there at the moment, it did feel like the city was really going somewhere, and genuinely invested in developing the whole city, not only the enclaves of the rich.