main MetroCable station in
the slum of Santo Domingo, commerce is booming.
Family-owned stores, restaurants and even banks
now dot this neighborhood
in Medellín’s poorest sector. The station connects,
via pedestrian walkways,
to the España library-park,
with its three black towers, rising above the dense
mass of shacks that have
become one of the city’s
defining landmarks and
a great source of pride for
the neighborhood.
Under Fajardo (2004–
2007) and his successor,
fellow Compromiso Ciudadano member Alonso Salazar—a left-leaning former
journalist also backed by
powerful and conservative
business elites—Medellín
has experienced five years
of renewed (though still
uneven) economic prosperity and relative calm.
Medellín’s homicide rate
in 2007 was 90 percent below its 1991 peak. Boosted
by progress in local public transparency and improving security at both
the local and national levels under the Democratic
Security program championed by President Álvaro Uribe (himself from a
prominent Medellín family), the local economy is
attracting foreign and domestic investors.
AP/LUIS BENAVIDES
Despite the flurry of so-
cial projects, poverty and
inequality persist. More
than 80 percent of the
city’s residents belong to
the lower three of Colom-
bia’s six official socioeco-
nomic classes. Although
marginalized areas have
greatly benefitted from in-
frastructure and building
projects, cultural and geo-
graphic barriers continue
to hamper social integra-
tion. “Poverty and inequity
have deep historical and
cultural roots,” explains
Aníbal Gaviria, a former
Antioquia governor and
current Partido Liberal con-
tender for the 2010 Presi-
dential elections, “and 20
million Colombians still
don’t really produce or
consume much but barely
survive.”
Migration remains a
strain on Medellín’s infra-
structure and basic servic-
es. Although urbanization
has slowed since the 1960s,
violence back to Medellín’s
streets. A sharp rise in
crime rates in 2008 caught
the city by surprise, and
this worrisome trend has
accelerated this year. “Drug
lords now keep a lower pro-
file,” says Gómez Martínez,
“but they are still involved
in a complicated continu-
ous war.” There were over
1,050 homicides in Me-
dellín between January and
July 2009, surpassing the
total for all of 2008.
Mexican President Felipe Calderón, center, waves during a
visit to the Comuna 13 neighborhood in Medellín.
the armed conflict in the
countryside continues to
drive thousands of poor
people into Medellín each
year. Many of Colombia’s
4 million displaced persons—the world’s second
highest internally displaced population after
Sudan—have settled in
Medellín’s slums.
These persistent social
problems, together with
the intensified competi-
tion among regrouped local
paramilitary and organized
crime groups, have brought
ers to the United States,
which created a dangerous
power vacuum in the city’s
underworld. To Medellín
residents, this confirms old
rumors that paramilitary
leaders continue to control
a vast criminal enterprise
even while taking part in
a national government am-
nesty program.
Reversal of Progress
The rising violence is re-
versing some of the recent
social progress in margin-
alized neighborhoods. On
one September day alone,
six people died in gun bat-
tles near the Santo Domin-
go MetroCable station and
library-park, icons of the
area’s transformation.
