Three decades ago, this bustling city was the most damaging city in the world, an epicenter of murders, massacres and car bombings linked to the car of the same name and its infamous boss, Pablo Escobar.
Even after Escobar’s shooting death here on a rooftop in 1993, the culmination of a major manhunt through the Colombian government with the help of U. S. anti-drug agents. paramilitaries and police.
Today, Medellín, home to 2. 5 million people, is enjoying a surprising change, attracting record numbers of tourists from the United States and beyond. Once on the world’s most sensible murder list, the city recorded only about 19 murders per day in 1991. , at the height of the defunct Medellín cartel, the homicide rate has since fallen well below that of many cities in Latin America and the United States.
These days, the city’s turbulent past, especially Escobar’s legacy, has a major tourist attraction. A deep foreign fascination centers on the dark aspect of Medellín. Articles, books and dramatizations about Colombia’s cocaine cartels, adding “Narcos,” the popular 2015-2016 Netflix series, have amplified the appeal of so-called narcotourism.
“Once Netflix came out with ‘Narcos,’ that’s when it all exploded,” said Luis Ospina, one of many guides offering tours of sites similar to Medellin’s violent past. “We get Europeans, Americans, basically English-speaking. “
Visitors search for lines of Escobar’s bloodthirsty reign as they head to Comuna thirteen to hear stories of revolutionary chaos. In addition, tourists frequent high-end cafes, bars and department stores in exclusive spaces such as El Poblado and Laureles, and explore galleries that exhibit paintings by Fernando Botero, a Medellinense and Colombia’s best-known artist.
Escobar, however, has become a commodity. It could have been better in life, but in death, many other people need a percentage of the action. The main destinations of the narco excursion are the sandy Barrio Pablo Escobar, where the drug trafficker helped build many houses for disadvantaged citizens. , many former citizens of a city garbage dump; the wooded area of Los Olivos, where police snipers shot a barefoot Escobar, 44, on a rooftop on December 2, 1993, as he tried to escape; and the cemetery where the billionaire’s remajors were buried.
A museum crisscrossed by a circle of family members in what they call a former “safe house” features artifacts from Escobar: a bullet-riddled Mercedes sedan, the wreckage of a private plane, a Wet Bike (one of the first jet skis featured in the 1977 James Bond film, “The Spy Who Loved Me”). that dazzled Escobar), and offices with hidden compartments in which millions of dollars were intended to hide, in addition to merchandise. Themes: Bottles of alcohol, T-shirts, key chains and coasters, all embossed with the old capo’s cup.
Despite the profligacy of Escobar’s image, his caption is a point of abundant tension and a war for memory. Many, the majority, in Medellín vilify him as an enthusiastic killer who has turned the town into an area of loose campfires. Pablo Escobar’s T-shirts are disgusting to many.
“If you go to Berlin, you don’t buy a Hitler T-shirt,” said Marcelo Jaramillo, whose tour operator gives a “transformed Medellin” itinerary, but not a “Pablo tour” expressed by some guides.
Those who lived through the city’s dark days, he said, sometimes prefer not to talk about it, let alone glorify the mobster in the carnage.
“It’s an open wound,” said Jaramillo, 40, who was a young man when the chaos explained his hometown. “That’s not replaced with a TV series. . . The city is divided between those two worlds, between darkness and light. And either party gets advantages from tourism.
But a minority still sees Escobar as a kind of Robin Hood who built homes and schools for the handicapped and erected soccer fields and lines of force as he went from humble origins and motorist in car theft and other petty crimes to the Forbes world list. Individuals Yours only grows with the years.
“You can’t say anything bad about Pablo Escobar around here,” said Maria Diocelina Guerra Willis, 85, a grandmother who still lives in a space in the Pablo Escobar neighborhood that she says is hers thanks to the generosity of the defeated trafficker. “It’s thanks to Pablo that we have this place. “
At the top of the concrete stairs lining the hillside neighborhood, Edwin Alexander Montoya, 20, and Maria Jose Jaramillo Montoya, 8, siblings who live in a space they say Escobar gave to their grandmother, show framed photographs of the drug. Baron who died for the visitors. ” For us, God has forgiven Paul for all he has done, and now he is with him in his Holy Glory,” said Maria Eugenia Castano, 47, mother of the two. “We have a lot to thank him for. “
Rumors persist that Escobar is still alive, mocking his persecutors, even though thousands of mourners attended his noisy vigil and funeral in 1993. “I think Pablo is in Buenos Aires [Argentina],” said Luis Felipe Mendez, a Colombian tourist visiting the neighborhood. “He’s alive. Me too. “
Alternatively, some refuse to give police credit for Escobar’s final death, insisting that the fatal blow to Escobar’s head while he was being prosecuted was a case of suicide.
A mural of Escobar’s mustachioed face, with his lascivious smile and bald comb, greets many visitors who arrive every week, in pickup trucks, to Barrio Pablo Escobar, where a typographic shrine exalts the former leader of the cartel. From an elevated niche, a resemblance to the Holy Child of Atocha, a figure of Roman Catholic devotion that was enjoyed through Escobar’s mother.
One gallery features an Escobar model holding a walkie-talkie — with a pair of AK-47s hanging on the wall — amidst a series of blockbuster photos: a provocative Pablo in police shots; Pablo as a cheerful politician (he once aspired to be president); a smiling Pablo in a circle of familiar clichés, who urges the flesh in sports and vacation spots. close to the field, wreaking environmental havoc.
Handwritten comments in a guestbook about the gallery attest to Escobar’s continued appeal.
“Dear Paul,” Felix Malanog, a 25-year-old Californian, wrote in an accessed May 30, 2022. “I hope that at this time you do well in heaven. Too bad I wasn’t born in your time. Thank you for the memories you have created in the history of Colombia and the world. You are a legend. “
Escobar’s fascination also fuels a thriving market.
“His total history is just amazing,” said Jani Perkonmäki, 46, who turned a part of his home in rural Finland into something resembling an Escobar museum, filled with photographs and memorabilia, adding what he says is one of the gangster’s shirts, a pair of his aviator sunglasses (in his original leather case). pager and transistor radio. ” Yes, the deaths are very sad. And I don’t do this violence,” he said by phone from his home in Hameenkyro, Finland. “But how can a user accomplish everything Paul did?”
A regular guest from Medellin, Perkonmäki hopes to settle here. The tattoos of Escobar and other cartel members embellish his body. A tattoo on his back, next to a life-size symbol on Escobar’s face, reads “Silver or Lead,” literally, Silver. or Lead. It, a cartel risk feature that requires borrowers to pay or face an unhappy choice: a rain of lead, i. e. bullets.
With the permission of the Escobar family, Perkonmäki said, he plans to market in Europe a Nordic-style cocktail — gin and grapefruit juice — with Escobar’s face on the label of cans and bottles.
Adam Chaitin-Lefcourt, a criminal defense attorney who runs a caviar shop in California, said he visited Medellin on a whim in 2017 but temporarily delved into Escobar’s saga, though he lamented the violence and loss of life.
“Look at Tony Soprano: why are so many people drawn to this?” said Chaitin-Lefcourt, 37, referring to the hbo series star. “This is the charm of the antihero. . . Anyone, as long as they have the intellect, preference and ingenuity, no matter how deep depression and poverty, they can become one of the most prominent and influential people in the world. “
He plans to return to Medellín. Il seeks to buy a bag, made from the skin of a stained feral cat, from which Escobar allegedly distributed cash to those in need.
Escobar’s mystique is not something the leaders of the people of Medellín embrace. They prefer to highlight other charms in a town with a varied culinary scene, a booming high-tech industry and a temperate climate: “The village of eternal spring”. , as Medellín is called, nestled in the Andes and dotted with flowers.
“Today, Medellín has gone from being the most violent city in the world to a center of science, generation and innovation,” said Alejandro Macías, the city’s tourism secretary. “We deny our history, but we are witnessing a new narrative in which Medellín is transformed.
Petty crime remains a problem, especially in and around the complicated inner city neighborhoods. Some tourists come for drugs and sex, mingling with criminal elements. Mafias remain a low profile but remain a force in Medellin, say experts, who control drug trafficking. , human trafficking, money laundering and other scams in the city of the moment in Colombia.
“The Medellín cartel is gone,” said Pedro Piedrahita, a political scientist at the University of Medellín. “But Medellín is once again one of the main logistics centers for transnational organized crime. “
However, the sight of strangers using laptops in their backpacks, looking for workspaces, testifies to the large number of so-called virtual nomads from the United States and other places who call Medellín home. towers that jump over the green slopes. For many expats, the Escobar era is little more than an ancient curiosity.
“Some Americans are still on Netflix’s ‘Narcos’ Medellin, but that’s no longer the case,” said Croix Sather, 51, an inspirational writer and speaker who divides his time between here and the United States. “I was scared when I got here, however, I soon learned that the city is not harmful as a perception. “
The transformation is evident in the sprawling neighborhood of Comuna Trece, home to some 150,000 residents. Comuna Trece was largely a police-free zone in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it was Colombia’s largest urban insurgent stronghold. A series of army operations dispersed the guerrillas, but also left many civilian casualties and lingering bitterness.
Residents have reclaimed their community and turned it into an unlikely cultural and tourist hotspot, now visited by 12,000 or more a week, making it one of Colombia’s most popular tourist destinations. It is a position of street art, hip-hop artists, rappers, classical musicians. , and oral historians telling the story of the community’s trajectory, all amid a plethora of galleries, bars and restaurants, many with deafening music. A carnival atmosphere reigns.
“Armed teams would come down from the hills, force other people to kneel and execute them right here,” said Jhona Marín, 27, of Comuna 13, who now guides visitors through the neighborhood. “Deaths on the streets, that’s the norm here. “
Alejandra Mejía, 21, one of the many young vendors of Comuna 13, deploys a drone to take pictures of tourists against the backdrop of the city’s panoramic perspectives. Visitors line up to buy souvenirs.
A colorful work of art tells the story of the reinvention of the Thirteen Commune. Six escalators help citizens and visitors climb the steep slopes of the community, which resembles Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. The common motifs of elephants spray-painted on the walls bring a message: the other people of the Thirteen Commune do not know their past.
This is also the objective of the Inflection Memorial Park of Medellín. The contemplative monument was built on the site of Escobar’s former fortress, the Monaco Building, which the city demolished in 2019 as part of its efforts to reshape collective memory. A sloping black granite wall now has 46,612 perforations, one for every user lost to drug-related violence during Escobar’s reign as Colombia’s cocaine king, adding up to a slew of police killed.
Among the inscriptions engraved on the site are the words of Hernando Baquero Borda, a Colombian Supreme Court judge who has dealt with U. S. extradition requests that drug lords have fiercely resisted. In 1986, gunmen on motorcycles shot dead the lawyer and two others.
The judge’s words now: “We are what we leave to others. “
Special Envoys Liliana Nieto del Río in Medellin, Jenny Carolina Gonzalez in Bogota, and Cecilia Sanchez in Mexico City contributed to this report.
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Foreign correspondent Patrick J. McDonnell is the leader of the Los Angeles Times’ Mexico City bureau and in the past headed the Beirut, Buenos Aires and Baghdad offices of the Times. Originally from the Bronx, McDonnell graduated from Columbia School of Journalism and was Nieman. Fellow at Harvard.
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