Medellin, Revisited
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This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Medellin, Colombia is set in the middle of a steep valley of green mountains with a river running through the middle. In this busy city of about 4 million people, the weather is perfect, averaging about 72 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. We call it La Ciudad de la Eterna Primavera, the city of eternal spring. It's both urban and forested, and it's just a beautiful place. I spent some of my childhood there. That's producer Luis Gallo.

I remember afternoons at my aunt's apartment way up in the hills of Menegin. She'd teach my cousin, my brother, and me how to paint. And from her windows, I could see the whole city, the high-rise towers dotting the forested valley. I can still smell the air, a mix of pine and balsa trees, and damp soil so unique to this part of the world that I haven't smelt it anywhere else.

But as beautiful as the city was when Luis was a kid, back in the 1980s, Medellin was also in the middle of a full-blown crisis. 30 years ago, this was the murder capital of the world. Today in Medellin, military police were patrolling the streets looking for bombers. That's largely because of Pablo Escobar's notorious Medellin Cartel, which waged a bloody drug war right on the city's streets.

13 bombs have gone off in Medellin since the weekend. The city's mayor today signed an order imposing a 10 p.m. to dawn curfew in the city. At the time, my father was a captain in the counter-narcotics unit for Colombia's national police. He was basically fighting the narcos. I remember one day when our family was leaving the city and my dad was driving our SUV, we were suddenly attacked and shot at. My mom, brother, and I had to duck under the seats as my father sped away.

Escobar had declared war on the Colombian state. My family eventually decided to leave the country and we moved to the U.S. For Medellin's residents, the threat of random deadly shootings and bombings was real and constant. To outsiders, the city became synonymous with the cocaine war and indiscriminate violence. But then, in its darkest hour, Medellin began to find its way out of that crisis.

I did a story a few years ago for this show about a sweeping revival program Medellín launched in the mid-1990s. As part of that plan, the city built parks and libraries and public spaces. Medellín's leaders also invested in poor neighborhoods, locally known as comunas. Community programs were created for residents who had long been neglected.

The sweeping program was called social urbanism, a term coined by city leaders. It was designed to breathe new life into Medellin by investing in the needs of city residents. And it seemed to work. Social urbanism, along with a harder focus by police on drug trafficking, helped the city's murder rate plummet by at least 80%. Against incredible odds, Medellin transformed from a notoriously violent narco capital to a more peaceful model city.

The press called it the Medellin miracle. Today, celebrities who could live anywhere in the world have chosen to stay in Medellin, their hometown. That includes reggaeton stars like J Balvin. It's a city inside of the mountains. You know, it's a lot of nature around. You just gotta go. I guarantee that you'll be back. 2,000%.

If not, I'll give you your money back. In 2020, I decided to move back to Medellín. I rented an apartment that I really liked from a friend in El Poblado, not far from where my family had once lived.

And now, I was close to all the best bars and restaurants. Walking around, I sensed the city overflowing with creativity. I discovered hip new design shops, a listening bar where DJs played vinyl records every night, and my favorite cafe where I often did work. Medellín was buzzing. It really felt like the place to be. But soon after I moved back, I started talking to other people in the city. And it became clear to me that Medellín is in trouble again.

Because in the last few years, there's been an explosion of new problems, like huge spikes in housing costs, the widespread displacement of locals, and worse. Many residents are now worried that the so-called Medellín miracle is crumbling, and they fear that their city is at another breaking point. But before we get to the story of this latest crisis, a quick reminder of what things were like when the Medellín miracle first started back in the mid-1990s.

At the time, residents were filled with hope about the future of their city, thanks to the new revival program. People were especially excited about their brand new public transportation system. The Medellín Metro first opened in 1995.

I remember the TV ads with aerial shots overlooking downtown, showing the brand new trains with green and gold stripes speeding in and out of stations. I was eight years old when we went as a family to ride it for the first time. My cousin, brother, and even my grandma came. I remember looking out the train's window, almost floating over the city, and getting a panoramic view of Medellín's skyline.

I was obsessed. I think a lot of people in Medellín felt this way. It was the first metro system in the whole country. It was proof that things could change. And maybe those really scary times were over.

Medin's residents began feeling that same wave of optimism as the city came up with even more creative solutions to its transportation problems. The city built a massive series of outdoor escalators that stretches to nearly 330 feet up into the foothills. It was created primarily as transportation for commuters in the working class hillside neighborhood called Comuna 13.

The city also added more metro stations and cable cars going up into the comunas. Luis Fernando González is a professor of architecture at Colombia's National University. He says the metro broke down barriers and social segregation, and it's one of the main symbols of the city's revival.

Neighborhoods all over Medellín were now linked by a web of trains, streetcars and buses stretching across the city. The transit system became the crown jewel of the Medellín miracle and a model for cities around the world. It helped make the city a star in international urban planning circles. Academics and politicians flocked to Medellín to learn how they got it so right.

And as the city's profile rose, Medellín's leaders saw a huge opportunity. In 2003, a handsome, charismatic mathematician and professor named Sergio Fajardo was elected mayor. Inspired by Medellín's revival, he and other leaders decided to go even bigger. Luis Fernando says Medellín's dream was to become a global city.

To Fajardo and his team, that meant more than just a world-class transit system and social urbanism project for locals. He wanted to put Medellin on the map as the most educated, most respected, most talked about city in all of Latin America. Fajardo figured that the best way to make his city a player on the regional stage was to promote Medellin as a tourist destination.

Tony Puig, who is one of the sellers of Marca Ciudad and marketing, city marketing, as it was called. Luis Fernando says Fajardo hired a man named Tony Puig, who was an expert at marketing cities. He'd once created a tourism campaign for Barcelona, which had done its own huge infrastructure overhaul ahead of the 1992 Olympics. His campaign was very successful. Luis Fernando calls it the Catalonian miracle.

The Catalonian miracle sold Barcelona's transformation and attracted millions of visitors. Fajardo's team copied and pasted the Barcelona model, with no criticism, to Medellín. Puig's marketing team created beautiful books showcasing Medellín's new libraries and parks and cable cars flying above the comunas.

Every aspect of the new Medellín got a museum exhibition, a press release or a photo spread. Social urbanism now had a look. There's a joke in Colombia that paisas, as the people from Medellín are known, are the best salespeople because they can talk you into buying anything. And Medellín's leaders sold a new vision of the city.

The campaign takes Medellín in a new direction that sells the city as going from fearful to hopeful.

Fajardo's PR team flaunted the city's miraculous revival. And in terms of impressing the world, the publicity campaign worked perfectly. By the mid-2000s, not long after the campaign started, Medellin was quickly becoming one of the hottest tourist destinations in the world.

The New York Times ran a glowing article in its travel section explaining why everyone should go and bask in Medellín's quote-unquote renaissance. Anthony Bourdain visited Medellín, ate arepas and bandeja paisa, and rode one of the cable cars. So even a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable to come up here. Oh, completely. And during Escobar times, this area used to be called the Assassin's Cradle. That was then, this is now.

Over the next decade and a half, Medellin was put on all sorts of lists of must-see cities. In 2022, nearly a million and a half people visited Medellin. When this tourism boom first started, Colombians were excited. We wanted people to come and see that Colombia was different from what they saw in movies and TV shows. In a sense, Fajardo's PR campaign had worked on us too. If so many people were coming, it must be a sign that we were doing something right. We believed the hype.

But looking back, something was off. Those glossy books, all that international promotion of the city. At a time when Medellín was still supposed to be focused on rebuilding for its residents, the city seemed to be putting so much energy into attracting foreigners. And then those visitors came and stayed, which the city wasn't ready for. And that is having huge ramifications throughout Medellín.

In Provenza, a main pedestrian strip in the posh neighborhood of El Poblado, streets are crowded most days of the week with locals and foreigners. People drink and dine next to creeks lined with lush, green mosteras that grow like weeds throughout the city.

One day, I noticed large posters plastered on walls next to the shops and restaurants. One reads in bold black capital letters, Medellin is not for sale. Stop gentrification. There's another one with a megaphone shouting, gentrifiers, go home.

Ana Valle is the artist and activist behind the posters. She was born and raised in Medellín and comes from a family of human rights advocates.

Ana says that when she was growing up in the 1990s, she rarely saw non-Colombians in Medellín. That's because its image around the world was that of a very dangerous city. But then, a few years ago, she noticed her own neighborhood was changing. She's been seeing many more foreigners at the grocery store, in her gym, and in her building.

not just tourists or visitors, but people staying for good. Ana says this influx of foreigners has caused many locals to feel una molestia generalizada.

Literally, that means a general nuisance or annoyance. That may seem small, but Ana's protest posters show how she and other locals are grappling with something pretty huge. The knock-on effects of foreigners staying in Medellin long-term. One of her posters really stood out to me. There's a drawing of a Christopher Columbus-style ship, and in giant block letters it says, "...digital nomads are temporary colonizers."

♪♪

TikTok is filled with videos of nomads, mostly young white Americans and Europeans, telling their peers why they should come and stay long term. Medellín, Colombia allows you to set up your life in such an amazing way. There's a YouTube video posted in late 2023 by a nomad named Pablo giving advice to other foreigners about how to settle in the city.

I wanted to talk to some digital nomads myself and I knew exactly where I could find them. I made my way to a WeWork in the heart of Poblado, not far from where Ana put up her posters. The scene looks like any other co-working space like Brooklyn or Berlin.

Digital marketers, programmers, and tech workers crowd communal tables while sipping their cold brew. English is the main language spoken into headsets and AirPods. I asked one of the guys sitting next to me what made him decide to come to Medellín. I just fell in love with the city. Medellín is really, it's super green. I think the culture is really, really unique and cool.

Hampton Rees is a blonde Texan in his early 30s. He lives in El Poblado, an upper-middle class district of 400,000 people south of downtown. Foreigners love El Poblado. They call it the Beverly Hills of Medellín. It's the epicenter of nightlife, shopping, and entertainment, with boutique hotels rising above treetops. Rainbow-colored macaws add to Poblado's lush tropical vibe.

Hampton also thinks that a big draw for foreigners is the neighborhood's party scene. You hear a lot that there's beautiful women. I have seen a lot more male digital nomads than I have seen female digital nomads. They can go to clubs and buy bottles and they can go to really nice restaurants, things that they might not be able to do in the U.S.

Hampton is staying in Colombia on what is known as a digital nomad visa. Colombia introduced the visa in 2022. Those who can prove they're employed remotely can work in the country for up to two years. Nearly 60 countries offer some version of the digital nomad visa. It took Hampton less than two weeks to get his. Nomads were already making their way to Medellín before Colombia started issuing the special visa.

But since then, there's been a noticeable spike in foreign arrivals in the city. The floodgates opened up. Out of the nearly 1.5 million people who visited Medellin in 2022, roughly 100,000 were digital nomads who stayed long-term. Every year, this number grows, breaking the record from the year before. And most of those newcomers are Americans.

In his YouTube video, Pablo steers those nomads to places like El Poblado. Yes, this is a third world country, but if you live in these areas, like I'm telling you, you can still experience a really high-end quality lifestyle. Nomads love to talk about how cheap life in the city is. There's this idea that in Medellín, they can enjoy a kind of luxury they couldn't afford in the US or Europe. And that is a huge draw.

You're going to probably spend around $2,000 on a nice place, particularly in En Poblado, the Beverly Hills of Medellin. This is a YouTube video from 2023 with two guys, one Australian, one from the US. It's called Why Everyone is Moving to Medellin. Everything else is cheaper too. Food is cheaper here. Gyms are cheaper here. Uber is cheaper here. But the reality is, for most Colombians, these things are not cheap. And the nomads are setting off a major housing shortage in the city.

Luis Fernando says there is a rental affordability crisis, and it's one of the main problems with the arrival of digital nomads. Luis Fernando says 8,700 digital nomads are coming to Medellín every month.

Although they inject millions of dollars into the economy, they also cause the rising rents, housing costs, and the displacement of residents. Apartments that would typically be available to locals are now rented out to tourists and digital nomads. And this housing shortage has hit our reporter Luis Gallo close to home. A few months ago, my landlord told me he could be getting way more money for my apartment in El Poblado.

he raised my rent by 100%. And because this was happening all over the neighborhood, it didn't make sense for me to stay in El Poblado.

Ana says the same thing happened to one of her good friends. She was pushed out of another upper-middle-class area very popular with nomads. Her friend relocated to a working-class neighborhood where the rents were also going up. And that probably means her new neighbors will soon be forced to move. So this causes a chain reaction that ends up displacing people who can no longer afford the neighborhood they have always lived in.

This chain reaction has rippled throughout Medellín, especially hurting low-income paisas. The lack of affordable housing options in Medellín has also contributed to a nearly 150% rise in homelessness in the last three years. At the WeWork, I asked Hampton, the blonde Texan, what he thought of digital nomads like himself and their role in Medellín's housing crisis. Interesting question. I think...

I'm still processing how I feel. I think there's some real legitimate concerns with having such an influx of foreigners. It's hard for me because I'm part of that influx.

As we spoke, I could tell Hampton was getting a little nervous. And I get it. Here was a Colombian reporter pointing my microphone at him and asking him, a digital nomad, about how people like him might be making life harder for Medellin's locals. And honestly, I like Hampton. We actually got beers after our interview. I don't think any one digital nomad like Hampton is the problem. The issue is not a single digital nomad. It's like a hundred or a thousand of them.

It's nomads swarming Medellín. Back in the 1980s and 90s, when the drug cartels and gangs were fighting in the city, the constant fear in Medellín was that a bomb would go off outside of your home at any moment. The biggest fear in Medellín today is for your landlords to evict you from your home.

This is probably the most frustrating part for locals. Things seem to have drifted really far from the promises of the Medellin miracle. Back then, the city sold us an idea that it would make Medellin more livable, not for nomads, but for its residents. Coming up, Medellin's growing social problems are spreading up to the city's hillside communities, where things are getting a lot more disturbing. That's after the break. One, two, three.

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Before we get back to Luis's report, just a quick heads up that this part of the story talks about the sexual exploitation of minors. Up in the valley hills on the west side of Medellin, there's a neighborhood called Comuna 13. It's only about five miles from Poblado, which is a very different part of town.

During the Pablo Escobar years, Comuna 13 was the epicenter of drug gang violence. It's a place that's often been neglected by city services. It's also been the focus of a lot of social urbanism projects, including those giant, world-famous escalators that we mentioned in the beginning.

Zigzagging along the steep hillside, the escalators run in sections totaling nearly 1,260 feet. That's three and a half football fields. When they were completed in 2011, those escalators instantly improved the lives of Comuna 13's residents. A commute that used to take more than a half an hour was cut to six minutes or less. It's thought of as a start, as a mobility strategy.

These escalators were thought of as a transportation alternative built for elders to carry their groceries to their homes higher up in the hills. Daisy Flores is a community activist from Comuna 13. They were never thought of as a tourist attraction. But today, that's exactly what they are.

Right now, if you Google Medellin escalators, you'll see pictures of U.S. and European tourists posing as they ride up into Medellin's poorest neighborhoods. Nearly 6,000 visitors pass through Camino 13 on weekends, gliding up and down the escalators, past walls covered in giant murals.

Along those escalators, there are hundreds of souvenir shops selling KRLG trucker hats, Medellín keychains, and a lot of Pablo Escobar paraphernalia. And that's not the only trace left of Pablo Escobar in Comuna 13. In the last 20 years, the local street gangs that once worked for Escobar, patrolling neighborhoods and doing his killings for him, have morphed into organized crime enterprises that now want a piece of the city's booming tourism industry.

As millions of foreigners come to visit places like Camuna 13, they're walking right to the gang's doorstep with their dollars and euros, which are helping those gangs thrive. La Oficina de Envigado organization started as Escobar's debt collectors, but has grown to become one of Medellín's most powerful and profitable gangs today. They have taken over the nightclubs and restaurants popular with visitors. When tourists want drugs, the gang supplies it.

There's a new theme park in Comuna 13. It's built on a site where many people are believed to have been disappeared and thrown into mass graves during Colombia's civil war in the 1990s. Gangs like La Oficina have created paintball fields and trails where tourists ride ATVs and horses.

It's a very profitable business. Even tour guides have to pay an extortion fee to be able to give a tour. The gangs have become so organized that if you give a tour or open a business in the tourist area, they approach you and ask you to kindly make a payment. What makes these shakedowns and businesses extra lucrative for gangs is that most of these transactions are done in the high-value currency of dollars and euros.

Once visitors have seen all the murals and picked up their souvenirs, Deysi says that's when the most disturbing part of this relationship between foreigners and gangs really comes to light. When the tour ends, the tourists say, what else is there to do? Implying, where are the drugs and the girls? And where are the girls?

The city's growing sex tourism industry is putting minors increasingly at risk. And most of these girls come from low-income neighborhoods like Comuna 13. Medellín is getting global attention because of this. A popular online movement called Passport Bros encourages American and European men to meet quote-unquote exotic girls abroad.

Videos with the hashtag #PassportBrosMedellin have millions of views on TikTok. Sex work in Colombia is legal. The concern among activists in Medellín is for underage girls who are being sex trafficked, especially by gangs. We have to see how the situation is dramatically worsening. Ivan Muñoz is a public health professor and an expert on sex trafficking in Medellín. He says the sexual exploitation of minors has dramatically worsened in the city.

And a lot of the girls trafficked come from low-income neighborhoods like Comuna 13. Organized crime controls all aspects of the business, Ivan says. The gangs recruit the girls and use online platforms to pimp them out to foreigners. Gang members pick the girls up at their homes and drop them off at tourist hotels and Airbnbs around Medellin.

Daisy works in a youth theater program in Comuna 13. She says the girls from her group are constantly lured into sex work. She can't compete with the money the gangs offer them.

And for her, there's a bigger consequence to all of this. It's a huge problem for the city because the kids are dropping out of school. There are consequences for the whole community. Young girls being forced into sex work can forever change the direction of their lives. And just because you want this service...

The problem is getting worse. The city is attracting pedophiles who can access children at an early age. Earlier this year, a 36-year-old American named Timothy Livingston was found by local authorities in his luxury hotel room with two girls who were 12 and 13 years old. He was arrested, but soon released, and he quickly caught a flight back to the U.S.,

The case created a media storm across Colombia. Thousands of people online were furious at the police for letting him get away and demanded that Livingston be extradited to stand trial in Colombia. Outside the hotel where Livingston was caught with the underage girls, protesters gathered and chanted, gringos, sex tourists, we don't want you here. We don't want you here.

They were holding signs that read women against sexual exploitation and the city's mayor is covering up pedophiles. The Livingston case really galvanized people in Medellin. Frustration has been growing for years over the influx of foreigners and how they're driving up the cost of living, homelessness and feeding gang activity. Paisas feel it, but it's been hard to figure out exactly what to do about any of it.

The Livingston case crystallized outrage that has been simmering in the city. It suddenly became very clear to many Colombians, especially Medellin locals, where to focus their anger, not just on the predators, but also on city leaders. Residents blame them for turning their backs on their own citizens. I'd been hearing about people like Livingston for a while, but stories about foreign pedophiles in Medellin were often swept under the rug. So I was glad to finally see a national outcry.

In 2008, I went with some friends and a cousin to see Parque Biblioteca España, a brand new library that had just opened in Santo Domingo Sabio, a neighborhood like Comuna 13. I remember gliding above the comuna on a cable car and getting off at the last stop on the very top of the mountain. And there was the library, two large black buildings, beautiful, imposing, and edgy, connected with an outdoor balcony overlooking the city.

The library was a vanity project of Mayor Fajardo, the guy who led Medellín's social urbanism revival and its PR campaign. He hired a famous architect to design and build the library in record time before Fajardo left office. But six years after this grand opening, the library had structural problems and began to fall apart. It's been closed since 2015.

While working on this story, I thought about this library a lot. It's the perfect metaphor for what has gone sour with the Medellín miracle. Here was this magnificent building with an ambitious design meant to serve the poor people in the comuna. But soon after all the publicity faded, the library fell into a state of disrepair. And then, I recently found out that the city has started fixing the library. It reminded me that there are people like Daisy and Ana and countless others who haven't given up on Medellín.

As for me, after living in Poblado for the last three years, I reached the point where I couldn't do it anymore. Not only has it become really expensive, but the neighborhood has completely changed. Everything seems catered to foreigners now. Most menus are in English and I feel like I don't belong there. But I knew if I moved to another neighborhood in Medellín, one that was less expensive for me, I would be displacing other long-time residents. And I don't want that.

So I got out. I left Medellín. I haven't left Colombia. I just moved to Cali, where I have friends and family, and there's a robust music scene. I recently went back to Medellín for a visit, and I did all the things I enjoy doing there.

I took the metro downtown to do some shopping and I went to a reggaeton party on a rooftop overlooking Medellín. I really enjoyed myself and it made me miss that city. Medellín needs a lot. Like new policies focused on affordable housing and stronger laws to really protect the most vulnerable, it's time to put the city's residents first. But right now, the best thing I can do for Medellín is to take a break.

Because now that I have a better understanding of the game, I don't want to play it. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Luis Gallo. Edited by Christopher Johnson. Mixed by Zeke Ben-Amad Farid. Music by Swan Real and Keiko Donald. Fact-checking by Nydia Bautista. Special thanks this week to our Columbia fixer, Christina Noriega. Voiceovers by Camila Casare and Luis Felipe Aguilar. And studio engineer, Simone Jaramillo.

Also thanks to Germán Valencia, Dario Ramírez, and Juliana Gomez for their help reporting this story.

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