We’ve had a lot of guides on our journey so far, but by far the most fun is Sol who is waiting for us in the little lobby of Quinta Ladera today. With tightly cropped blonde hair, a nose-piercing, tattoos and a big smile she is a proud resident of Medellin, with indigenous heritage on her mother’s side, a lover of alternative music and the ideal guide to take us around her city. She’s also a bio-chemist who spent a year in Santa Marta studying ocean life, a free-diver, a fluent English speaker and not averse to a good drink as we find out over the next few days.
We’re setting off on a journey to discover some of Medellin’s dark past and how the terrible violence of the cocaine trade destroyed a generation of lives here, and across the country, before the death of the infamous head of the Medellin cartel Pablo Escobar enabled the city to start building a new chapter. However to many of the city’s poorest residents, Escobar was a popular hero who manipulated them into supporting his political ambitions to control the country, while murdering anyone who stood in his way. It’s a mass of complexities and contradictions for all involved.
We start by walking through El Poblado to the Metro station so we can take advantage of Medellin’s extensive public transport network. It’s the only city in Colombia to have built a Metro system, and it connects trains to trams, buses and most impressively cable cars, to link the entire city together. In doing so, it permanently transformed the life and prospects of the citizens, in particularly the poverty stricken favelas that had been illegally built on the mountains sides, and from where Escobar mainly recruited his foot-soldiers and supporters.
Sol takes us from Poblado station to San Javier, and from there we take a cable car high above the city to La Aurora in the western San Cristobal district. It’s the part of our entire trip that Coman has been dreading the most, his fear of heights being at its most profound whenever we’ve had to take one before. We’ve packed valium in our daypack just in case but as we soar smoothly into the sky his initial terror quickly subsides and he starts to enjoy the journey as Sol explains a little of how Medellin was in the 1980’s.
The left-wing guerrillas who had started as freedom fighters after the death of presidential candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan in 1948, had lost their idealistic drive by the end of the 1970s and were more interested in controlling land and gaining money, so used their rural bases to farm coca plants and created routes to transport cocaine through Central America to the US. They started working with the likes of criminals entrepreneurs such as Pablo Escobar and both the guerrillas and the cartels used extreme violence to further their own ends.
“You talk too much,” became a common threat against anyone perceived to not be part of their conspiracy of silence and thousands of innocent people lost their lives. Sol tells us that when her father, a pharmaceutical engineer, was studying at university he was approached, like so many of his friends, to work for the drugs cartels with promises of quick fortunes if he spent a few years in the jungle camps helping process coca into cocaine. But his new wife was pregnant with their first child, Sol’s eldest sister, and he stood firm against their enticements and managed to create a successful and peaceful life for his family. However, like many of his generation he lost a lot of friends along the way, and had to battle threats and corruption for many years.
At La Aurora station we disembark and look back across the city from its high vantage point. The San Cristobal district we are in is one of Medellin’s 16 Comunas (districts) and was once completely in Escobar’s grip. With little interest from the city authorities in providing amenities or law and order in a favela, Escobar provided schools and hospitals, but also used the population to continuing building his multi-billion-dollar drugs empire and to fight against the Colombian government, police, paramilitaries, US drug enforcement agency and also the Cali cartel who by now were his deadly rivals.
Escobar was so powerful that he entered politics and became elected first to the city government and then to the national parliament, bombing anyone who stood in his way, blowing up planes, car and buildings, killing hundreds of innocent people. He believed he was untouchable but even his most ardent supporters eventually realised he was a madman. In 1993, with the help of the Cali cartel, the government managed to kill him, but many of his lieutenants saw an opportunity to step into his shoes and it took until 2002 for the government to finally seize Medellin back from the control of the drug cartel, and the guerrillas who worked with them. They did this by focussing on the main district controlled by the armed groups, Comuna 13.
We leave San Cristobal and get the cable car back to San Javier station and take a taxi up to Comuna 13, which has now become one of the main tourist attractions in the city. Covered in colourful and important street art, with dancers and performers plying their trade amongst hundreds of souvenir stalls, cafes and restaurants run by the community, by day it is thronged with tourists being informed about the area’s tragic history and witnessing the remarkable transformation driven by mothers and their children after the terrible events of 2002.
Colombia’s then president, Alvaro Uribe Velez, was an ultra-right wing politician elected on a zero-tolerance promise to drive out the guerrillas and drug traffickers. As soon as he came to power he ordered Colombia’s military to storm Comuna 13 and destroy the cartel. They started in August 2002 but after 11 separate military operations they had still not succeeded. So on October 16th that year, backed by two US military Black Hawk helicopters, and with tanks, trucks and hundreds of soldiers and paramilitaries, they attacked the district from all sides for four days, killing terrified civilians but succeeding in destroying a large part of the criminal activities and “liberated” the city.
Whilst he achieved his immediate aim, Uribe Velez had unleashed a wave of state sanctioned killing that continued for years as he unilaterally changed the constitution to give himself two terms of power. During that time police officers and military were given financial bonuses for any guerrillas or drug traffickers they killed. That led to terrible corruption and during his presidency over 6400 people disappeared, many of them completely innocent, and often people the police deemed undesirable, such as homeless people, or those with mental illnesses who they killed for money.
The violence only ended with a change of government and in Comuna 13 the community dealt with the trauma by immersing themselves in graffiti, art and culture to tell their story and bear witness to their experiences as a means of healing and reconciliation. As an unintended but positive result of this, what was one a lawless, no-go area is now a prime tourist attraction and a financial success story for his inhabitants. It also has a growing Afro-Colombian community who are relocating there to escape the continued violence of the drugs trade in the remote jungles of the Pacific coast of Colombia.
Tourists however are not welcomed by locals after dark, when the area becomes their own again, and Comuna 13 will be closed to outsiders tomorrow, on New Year’s Day. So we take advantage of the festive, and incredibly noisy, atmosphere and walk through the Independence 1 neighbourhood, stopping to eat aborrajados, which are delicious patties of deep-fried plantain, guava and cheese, and savouring ice-cold lollipops of maracumango in a lemon syrup. Sol also takes us to Cafe Aroma de Barrio, owned by a local artist called Chota 13, for us to sample his famous drink of iced coffee and lemonade, which is incredibly refreshing.
We leave Comuna 13 via the six escalators that descend the hillside and were installed by the city government in 2012 as part of the ever-growing transport network which has transformed the city. It started two years after the death of Escobar when wealthy families were encouraged to continue the city’s tradition of public philanthropy in return for tax incentives, and began investing in education, infrastructure and transport to drive Medellin forward. The city’s Metro system came first, and then in 2004 the Metro Cable was established with the first line of gondolas connecting the disadvantaged hillside district of Santo Domingo with the city centre, meaning that its residents could now start to travel into the city easily and find work and education which had previously been almost impossible for them to access.
Yesterday’s driver Raul meets us at the bottom of Comuna 13 and takes us across the city to the once prestigious, but now distinctly rundown central district of downtown Medellin. Sol confirms what Oscar, our Uber driver, had said yesterday about this being a haven for street crime and definitely not a place to wander around at night. She describes how it had once been where many of the wealthiest citizens of Medellin had lived, full of fancy houses, restaurants and theatres based around Plaza Berrio, but from the ‘60s onwards developers started to tear down historic buildings and build office blocks, concrete skyscrapers and shopping centres meaning the rich people left and the area is now sadly full of vagrants, drugs addict and prostitutes, many of them transsexuals forced to live on the streets.
We start in Parque Simon Bolivar with the early 20th Century Metropolitan Cathedral, where a huge flower festival is held every August, and walk through the various streets to the main shopping area around La Playa. Sol buys us glasses of sangria, smoking with dry ice, in a local bar before we continue to Parque San Ignacio where the Universidad de Antioquia is based. Sol, her sisters and both her parents all graduated from there so it holds a special place in her heart.
On we go through La Candelaria neighbourhood of downtown, through the once grand Plaza Berrio which was where the second oldest village of Medellin was founded in 1675 and is now a mess of traffic, concrete, pickpockets and street hustlers. It’s absolutely teeming with street stalls and garbage, and people trying to make a living, many of them Venezuelan refugees who have fled the economic collapse and rampant violence of their country and now live hand to mouth across Central and South America. Colombia alone has taken in over nine million Venezuelans in recent years but there is not enough state money to be able to help their needs.
We finish in Plaza Botero, where 23 huge bronze statues donated by the artist to his hometown, stand proud outside the towering presence of the black and white Palacio de Cultura, designed by Belgian architect Agustin Goovaerts and built in the early 1930s but never completed to its full original glory, being only a quarter of its intended size. Next to Plaza Botero is the small white church of Vera Cruz where dozens of female sex workers stand solo, or in small groups, waiting to be picked up for a quick buck in the backstreet motels which charge for rooms by the hour. It’s a heartbreaking sight, as are the unconscious drug addicts lying in the street ruined by cheap by-products of the cocaine industry, many inhaling industrial glue when they can’t afford to pay their dealers.
As we drive back to the hotel we are pensive and once again grateful for our lot in life. Medellin is a city of many, many stories and we have witnessed a lot of its tragedy today. Fortunately in the morning we see a much more optimistic view of its future, and also a downtown that is magically empty after yesterday’s over-crowded streets. Stalls are boarded up and lots of shops closed for New Year’s Day but the historic bar Salon Malaga is open and Sol takes us there first.
Founded in 1956 its unprepossessing frontage contains an elegant old school diner within, featuring formica tables, antique jukeboxes, walls of musical memorabilia and photos of music and theatre performers from the late 1800s to the present day. Coman hits it off with the owner and gets a guided tour of all his old reel to reel recording equipment and we are shown downstairs to where they host tango performances and have bands play. The iconic Argentinian tango star Gardel loved Medellin and used to perform here regularly in the 1930s and 40s and his pictures adorn many walls.
Sol however is more interested in us ushering in the New Year with a drink and orders us bottles of strong, dark Tres Cordilleras beer. It’s only 10am! Fortified for the morning ahead we walk to Parque de las Luces, where the old Antioquia railway came through the city, connecting the Cauca and Magdalena rivers. It closed in the 1960s and the old hotels that served the station are now government buildings. The plaza was abandoned for years and a source of public shame but was redeveloped in 2010, with 200 huge lighting poles erected in it a couple of years later remembering people who died during Medellin’s violent years.
Parque de la Luces is next to both the City Hall and the huge building housing the regional government of Antioquia, responsible for nearly seven million people. In front of it is an enormous and quite incredible sculpture by local artist Rodrigo Betancourt depicting how the inhabitants of the area have worked hard to raise themselves up from oppressed peasantry to innovators and heroes, able to soar.
From there we walk across the road to Plaza de la Libertad where the UDigital University is spearheading Medellin’s attempt to become Colombia’s very own Silicon Valley, attracting technology graduates and professionals from across the country, and indeed the world. In fact in 2015 Medellin won a prize as the most innovative city in South America.
But the past always hangs heavy and outside the buildings that house Medellin’s foremost radio and TV stations and its biggest newspaper, a torch containing an Eternal Flame sits on top of a plaque featuring the names of hundreds of journalists killed by Escobar and the drugs cartels for speaking the truth about him and their activities. He even bombed the newspaper offices to try and deter any national investigations into him, creating a climate of fear that these brave journalists faced down.
Medellin’s renewal is most clear in the spaces beyond here. The huge EPM building houses the Empresa Público de Medellin, the part-private utilities company that has the monopoly on all services in the municipal area of Medellin. Vastly wealthy it invests in the community, in 2012 constructing a ‘Barefoot Park’ and water museum in its grounds to create a safe public space for citizens to enjoy in 2012.
It also contributed to the Parque del Rio behind it, built in 2017 as another public space for people to jog, roller skate, picnic, practise yoga and more alongside the Medellin river. It reclaimed land that was polluted with traffic and congestion, constructing a tunnel to send it underground and developing the new public space into a recreational oasis, which currently plays host to Christmas decorations commemorating 100 Years of Disney, following last year’s wildly popular decorations based around the film ‘Encanto’. It borders Plaza Mayor, home to theatres, music venues and the exhibition halls where Fashion Week and Comicon are regularly staged.
We end our time exploring Medellin with Sol in the Laureles area of the city where the huge football stadium Estadio Atenacio Girardot has led to urban redevelopment, and now plays host to an array of public sport complexes similar to those in London’s Olympic Park.
There’s so much to admire in Medellin; its determination to overcome its recent struggles and violent history showcases a young and dynamic city full of optimism and ambition, with a fantastic year-round climate. But there’s no denying the abject poverty at the heart of the city centre and on its margins, and the very real social issues it must still address. Back in El Poblado, with its safe streets and high end restaurants it feels like a fine place to live, but like any city, scratch the surface and a whole new world is revealed… much like Colombia itself.
And to that end, we still have many more Colombian adventures ahead!
