recent decades, especially
in “second cities,” beyond
the usual international line
of vision.
“Second cities” are less
frequently visited by international journalists, scholars and officials, and are
often outside the scope of
U. S. media coverage, which
tends to focus on the largest cities: Buenos Aires,
São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro,
Mexico City, or Bogotá. Our
goal was to understand
the transformation of Medellín as an example of
what has occurred in such
second cities.
One of us, Lowenthal, is
a veteran Latin Americanist
who had never previously
been in Medellín. The other, Rojas, is a Brown University undergraduate born in
Colombia, who has lived
primarily in the United
States since age seven and
wanted to connect with his
native country by working
in Medellín. We met there
in July and have since been
exchanging ideas based on
our respective experiences.
These include Lowenthal’s
interviews with business,
political, professional,
and educational leaders,
and Rojas’s work for three
months in the office of
Medellín’s mayor, focusing on an urban renewal
project in Moravia, one of
the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
RAUL ARBOLEDA/AFP/GETTY
The Spanish first settled
in what is now Medellín
in 1541, but the region remained sparsely populated
and agricultural for centuries. In the early nineteenth century, Medellín
became the center of the
Antioquia region’s booming gold industry, replacing
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Medellín’s Parque Biblioteca España has become an architectural tourist attraction.
Santa Fé as Antioquia’s
capital. After the decline of
Colombian mining in the
late nineteenth century,
coffee and textile exports
spurred further economic
and demographic growth.
Bet ween 1870 and 1940, Medellín grew from a town of
20,000 to a city of 170,000.
Blessed with plentiful hydroelectric power, agricultural productivity and
a hardworking business
class, Medellín was prosperous, inwardly-focused,
largely self sufficient,
somewhat provincial, and
known for industriousness
and local pride.
Urban Development
One of the central differ-
ences between Medellín
and other growing cities at
the time was the emphasis
placed on the creation of
urban development plans
by local business elites.
The 1913 Plan Futuro pro-
vided Medellín with mod-
ern infrastructure projects,
a public utilities company
and some industrial de-
velopment. In the 1940s,
local officials and indus-
trial leaders drew up the
Medellín master plan to
prepare the city for urban
expansion.
Municipal and regional
governments were unable
to maintain order or control a burgeoning contraband trade that soon led
to commerce in marijuana
and then in cocaine. As the
cocaine trade grew in the
1970s and 1980s, drug cartels corrupted both national and local institutions,
further diminishing the
city’s already inadequate
capacity to cope with rapid growth.
By the late 1980s and
early 1990s, Medellín was a
blighted city with a homicide rate of 380 per 100,000
in 1991, perhaps a world record. Drug traffickers, local gangs, guerrilla militias,
paramilitary groups, and
petty criminals terrorized
every sector of the city, often informally supporting each other’s efforts. A
new criminal class marginalized and corrupted
Medellín’s business leaders. “The early 1990s were a
period of public insecurity
