Colombia part 2 - Medellín's remarkable transformation
From kidnappings to building libraries. How this city fought the drug cartels, embraced art, and revitalized itself shows what's possible in 20 years.
In Part 1 we covered Medellín’s
Origin (up to 1875 AD)
Hypergrowth (1870s to 1950s)
Fracture and Kidnappings (1940s through 1960s)
Now, in Part 2 we will dive deep into
The Drug Cartels (1960s to 1990s)
The Resurrection (2000s- now)
Aside from the Communist Guerilla forces and the Paramilitary, there is a new player emerging to prominence around the 1960s.
New players emerge - Drug Cartels
Human beings will always find ways to get high.
For years underground industries had been growing in fragmented ways to supply tobacco, alcohol, marijuana and other substances. Tobacco and alcohol were being smuggled in to the cities to avoid import tariffs, drugs were being produced and exported to meet foreign demand. The locals were cutting routes through the Amazon forest to enable the logistics.
Both Cocaine and Marijuana were banned in America since 1914 and 1937 so there was some illegal demand. Then, demand exploded. During the USA’s hippie movement around the 1960s and 1970s, the most popular drugs were Marijuana and then cocaine. These plants could be grown within the forests, in fact the coca plant that produces Cocaine grows most abundantly in the forest of Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, etc.
A new set of players emerged to exploit this market - drug cartels.
The drug cartels: The value chain in the drug business involves a) growing the plants, b) processing and production, c) exports, and d) retail distribution. The Drug cartels built their own armed forces as their business prospered. They also paid everyone: the Guerillas, the paramilitary forces, journalists, judges, politicians, military and others in positions of power.
While tobacco, liquor, emeralds and marijuana were the most important goods in the 1950s and 60s, cocaine took over as the most important contraband at the end of the 1970s.
Growing and processing coca is relatively quiet, but exporting and retail distribution of an illegal substance is a very violent business.
The Drug business was a super fragmented industry until the Medellín cartel and the Cali cartel vertically integrated all 4 aspects of the cocaine business. These vertically integrated businesses had to become heavy handed to preserve control. Their influence became visible in the whole of Colombia. One particular person emerged as the most successful operator of this world. His name was Pablo Escobar.
While hella entertaining, Pablo Escobar is often portrayed inappropriately in shows like Narcos and movies like American Made. Many locals are horrified by the way he’s glorified.
"Don't go to any attractions related to Pablo, don’t go play a Cartel vs Military paint ball game ain Pablo Escobar's mansion. And don't mention him to a local unless you want them to spit in your food. Everyone knows someone who was killed by him. Those scars are still fresh. This place is about much more than that." - a local in Medellín
I won’t dive too deep into Escobar, just give you this taste: He ended up starting off as a body guard in a cartel, eventually took over the Medellín Cartel, ruthlessly consolidated and monopolized the Cocaine business and amassed enough wealth to be the world’s 7th richest person. He joined politics, even got elected to some office until he was named a Drug Lord in public by the opposition. He got that other politician killed.
Pablo Escobar is like Voldemort around Colombia. You’re better off not saying his name. And please don’t wear a damn t-shirt with his face on it.
The worst is when some tourist wears a Pablo Escobar t-shirt in Medellin. Imagine wearing a T-shirt with Osama Bin-Laden’s face on it and walking around New York city. It won’t go well.
Eventually, when Colombia tried to get rid of him by extraditing him to the US, he first offered to pay off $14B, the country’s national debt, which was less than half the money he personally had. When that offer was rejected and the government still tried to catch him, he declared war on the Colombian State. It was nasty. There were hundreds of car bombs and assassinations, Pablo negotiated different prison situations, and kept escaping. Finally, in 1993, riddled with bullets at the age of 44, he died.
Pablo Escobar’s death inspired the famous painting below.
The point is that there was a lot of violence during the Tragic period. The violence didn’t end after Voldemort’s death, the power vacuum led to yet more confusion and power struggles.
See this photo below, it shows a beautiful sculpture by an artist called Fernando Botero. A backpack bomb was planted near this sculpture at the end of a concert - it killed 22+ people, wounded a hundred more and destroyed the sculpture. It was senseless violence. 3 different groups claimed responsibility for the attack, and no one knows even today who actually committed this horrible bombing. Botero donated another Bird of Peace to be installed next to it to inspire resilience.
The country fights back
The government of Colombia was not in control of the situation for many decades. Then a right-wing leader emerged who promised to wake up the beast and unleash the power of the Government to bring order to the situation.
Álvaro Uribe, deployed the government military and ruled with an iron fist from 2002 to 2010. Controversially, he prioritized ruthless action over human rights to eradicate the various different armed forces - starting with the Guerillas. He used some paramilitary forces to help him then cut peace deals to disband them as well. The cartels and Guerillas fought back, but the government ruthlessly attacked civilian zones (like Communa13) to achieve victory. The conflicts were brutal, and controversial.
In 2002, he authorised Operation Orion, directly targeting Communa13 with military force. Along with cartel and Guerilla fighters, hundreds of civilians were killed or vanished. It is the same operation that ended up shooting up the wall shown where the Revolution of Love Mural would eventually be painted.
The mural below shows Uribé and the controversial sentiment around him. The people still mourn the thousands of civilians who got caught in the cross-fire of the government’s attack on civilian strongholds.
I’m a complete outsider and never a proponent of violence. But in this situation, I consider that these results were tangible.
By 2010, the murder and kidnapping rates came way down. A more peaceful country exists today, partially because this leader made some extremely hard decisions.
The next President, Juan Manuel Santos and the Guerilla Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) agreed to end the Colombian conflict and sign a Peace Agreement. But a referendum to ratify the peace deal failed after 50.2% of voters voted against the agreement with 49.8% voting in favor. The sentiment we learned was that the memory of all the violence was still with the people, they didn’t want the perpetrators to walk away without jail-time.
The Colombian government and the FARC revised the peace deal a bit and signed it on November 24, 2016. Many paramilitary forces got disbanded over time as well.
In terms of the violence, a 96% drop in murder rates has transformed the environment.
The Resurrection (2000s to now)
Ten years after Pablo’s death, Medellín elected a math professor called Sergio Fajardo as their mayor. The son of an architect, a lover of geometric shapes, and fearless about committing to projects even before funding was figured out. He offered a 4-step framework to transform the city. This ideology came to be called Social Urbanism:
Identify the most neglected spots in the city
Identify the root cause of those people’s problem
Offer a social solution to the problem
Visually transform the architecture of the place
"Our most beautiful buildings must be in our poorest areas." - Sergio Fajardo, Mathematician and Medellin's mayor from 2003 to 2007.
But how would that work, realistically? He invited the actual citizens who lived in all parts of the city to help him figure out where the problems were most critical and brainstorm solutions. People had been through such atrocities in the past, that they took this opportunity for civic engagement up with gusto.
Here are four incredible stories. Each follows the principles of identifying a neglected area of the city, identifying its root problem, solving the root problem, then visually transforming the place.
Plaza Cisneros - a dark ruin becomes the Garden of Light
When the railroad was running, the goods used to be sold at a huge market in Plaza Cisneros. By the 1960s, the railroad went bankrupt. The market didn’t have a purpose after that and became a dark, dodgy ruin, with homeless people making the area totally unsafe at night.
The root problem was that people lost their livelihoods and their homes when the railroad shut down.
So, the city built three shelters nearby where people could move in for free to solve for homelessness and a library for people to create a new livelihood. Then, they transformed this dark ruin and created a massive park of 300, 18 foot tall lights - making it a park of light, and representing a park of hope. It looks like this.
2. Libraries - making education accessible everywhere
The new mayor was a professor, of course he advocated access to education as a crucial piece of the long term solution. He authorized the creation of 5 fantastic libraries in some of the poorest parts of the city. Like the España, which characterizes the boldness and scale of his vision. These libraries didn’t just offer books, but social programs and learning opportunities for Kids and their Parents so that anyone willing to, could get educated and find an alternative way of life than joining a gang.
3. The Metrocable - mountain and valley connected through the sky
The formal Medellín city had a metro since 1995. It was the country’s first (and still only) metro and the citizens are proud of it. But the metro doesn’t climb hills or bore through tunnels.
Imagine yourself as a civilian living along the mountains in informal Medellin. All the jobs are in formal Medellin, down in the valley, but you can’t get there because there’s no proper road. Even after the roads are built, it takes over an hour 1 way. So, you're forced to hustle and try to make money because there’s no way out. You don’t feel connected to the bigger city, just to the patch on your mountainside.
Then in 2004, a remarkable system is built. The technology of cable cars has historically been used by ski-resort to transport people up & down the ski slopes. Medellín innovated. It decided to use them as the mode that connects the hillsides to the city center!
My wife and I did the entire loop in one of these cable cars with no destination in mind, just took a 25 minute joyride. It is hard to describe how useful this solution turned out to be. Not just as a pragmatic way to move people around with minimal infrastructure investments, but also as a source of pride for the citizens. The same citizens who thought that the government was ignoring them, could now see with their own eyes proof of the opposite. They could now get to the city center within 15 minutes. And an entire trip costs ~$1.
The Metrocable gave people a reason to look up and believe that anything is possible. A constantly whirring engine of hope, that kept people’s chin up.
Such a use-case for cable cars had never been tried at scale before. Medellín prove that it can be built, and that it works.
4. The Escalators - electric stairs nestled in art
Communa13 was ground zero for Operation Orion, the deadly clash between the city and the other forces. Communa13 is now the most visited tourist spot in the city and the Paisas are proud of its evolution. This happened because of some remarkable efforts at re-integrating this region into the city.
Informal Medellin was built on the hillsides, with haphazard stairs that people had to climb up and down to get around. It limited people’s mobility and it limited how goods and services like electricity could be brought to these people.
As we know from our Brasilia adventure, even if someone builds a bunch of cool buildings, people have to embrace them and imbue them with life.
The mayor invited the citizens to offer their ideas for inclusion. He ran contests for creative solutions, and then implemented the best ideas for real. I think of this as leadership without ego, a form of truth-seeking that all of us can embrace.
The city conducted a contest for transportation ideas and the idea that won was to create giant escalators that would become the back bone of connection that this community needed.
At the surface this sounds like an impractical idea. Even in nice malls or airports, how many times have you stepped on an escalator and it isn’t working or “under maintenance”? Those aren’t even built on a hill, they’re in buildings.
Then there are the social considerations: the people living in these places were historically poor and surrounded by violence. They might vandalize the escalator or steal some of its parts, or have an accident and blame the government.
The solution? Give the community a reason to take pride in these escalators and take care of them as a resource. How? By embracing street art, and music.
Modern yet rooted; Religion, Music, and Art
Colombians have the tropical love for color, a Spanish aesthetic flair, and a rooted sense of religion. There is art everywhere. The city embraced these traits. They sponsored mural painters and graffiti artists to create masterpieces along the walls near the escalator construction site. When the escalators were launched, some of the most stunning mural exhibits were also unveiled to the public, creating a public space that people would be proud to nurture. Musicians and dancers were invited to perform in the public spaces.
As the noise of gunfire and car bombs petered out in the wake of Escobar’s death in 1993, a decade on, the mid to late 90s were being defined by a new sound filling Medellíns airwaves and sound systems: Reggaeton. - Ashleigh Kane
This city loves music. The artists compose, produce, interpret, and mix music in the same hood. The rappers spit rhymes all day. World famous artists (like J Balvin, Karol G, and Sky Rompiende) have reached global charts from here.
Here’s a rapper making fun of the height difference between my wife and me in style.
Once the murals were unveiled alongside giant escalators that dropped travel time from one spot on the mountainface to another from an hour to 6 minutes. That changed the character of this area. It became an area of pride.
The art is everywhere. I couldn’t help taking a picture of this refrigerator in someone’s house that has literally come to represent the elephant in the room.
There are many references sprinkled about the article, but I offer this article and recommend this incredible tour company if you want to learn more about Medellín.
One last nugget about how societies evolve :)
Many people replied to me about a story I wrote from Colombia about a hilarious misunderstanding regarding a hooker. People asked - what’s going on with the prostitution in Colombia, isn’t it a very religious country?
Well, yes. However, for a country this religious, I found Colombian national laws to be remarkably practical.
Abortion is also legal & free, with no questions asked, till 24 weeks of pregnancy. Gay marriage is allowed, Gay couples are allowed to adopt children. Event Euthanasia is allowed. Because life is a right, not a duty.
Sex working is not legal, yet not illegal. How so? Well, the Colombian Supreme Court ruled that the state can’t tell you what to do with your body. So, in case some adult has sex with a consenting adult, and then ask for money, that’s on them. But if a child is involved or a pimp is involved, that is totally illegal.
You'll find the most number of Prostitutes and Love Motels next to the second oldest church in the city, and porn street near the oldest church (La Candelaria).
A tour-guide suggested that this old Spanish saying has something to do with Colombia's situation: "el que pecay reza empata", the one who prays after sinning washes away the sins. Religious absolution makes it rather convenient to have a Love motel next to a church, so that men can absolve all their sins, right after they commit them.
The Revolution of Love
Coming back to the opening Mural from Part 1 in this series.
This wall got shot up during the dark times, during Operation Orion. A giant escalator got built to help the people who live at these heights. The bullets got painted over as the city embraced art, and murals as a symbol of inclusivity. The colors are vibrant like this neighborhood.
Most poignantly, humanity’s evolution is shown so beautifully. As the journey from being a monkey to an artist. A peaceful DJ is the final evolved state. All these embodiments of Colombia, in one piece of art, representing at least 20 years of revolution.
As the new year kicks off, may you approach 2024 with vitality. Remember that any situation, even as dark and complex as Medellín’s can be turned around. It may take 20 years, but you’ve got to keep your chin up.
Share this piece with your history buff friends and reply with any thoughts you have on this piece. :)
great way to connect back to the start of article 1
I can’t wait to come back to Rio, not just for the history but for the partying !