Medellín to the Moon

The names of certain cities stick to the tongue like a loogie on a brick wall in early August. Medellín is one of them. Though not quite world-famous, it still lingers for some reason: is it because of Dan Rather, the history channel or PBS? You know it’s a bad place – beautiful, hot and dangerous – but you can’t remember why.  

The city’s two most famous sons are Fernando Botero and Pablo Escobar: as one ridiculed the country’s ruling classes, the other hunted them down. In what many consider Colombia’s most conservative city, that is saying quite a lot.  

As many of you have no doubt heard, Medellín was the world’s most violent city 20 years ago. In 1991, its murder rate was 381 per 100,000 inhabitants – more than twenty-five times the murder rate of Chicago in 2013, the deadliest American city that year. In 2013, however, the Urban Land Institute voted Medellín the world’s most innovative city – just above New York and Tel Aviv. Last month, it hosted the UN Habitat’s 7^th Annual World Urban Forum. Clichés and attention-grabbing, international competitions aside, they did choose the right town.

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Medellín is also famous for being the heart of Colombian industry. Well before Bogotá became more than a backward bureaucratic outpost high on the Andean plain, Medellín was the national center of banking, commerce, coffee trading and textile manufacturing. As the relative power of the caffeinated bean declined in the latter half of the 20^th century, the city lost some of its economic muscle, but remained the headquarters of the all-powerful National Association of Colombian Enterprises (ANDI), a union representing the interests of the country’s most powerful industrial firms. Then as now, socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor is alive and well in Colombia’s most dynamic city.

Flying into the city is a strange sensation. Though 8 hours by bus, the 400km from Bogotá take scarcely 25 minutes by plane. After hundreds of miles of rugged, uninhabited mountains interspersed by snaking rivers, the plane lowers its flight over a vivid green patchwork of hillside country manors sown into the earth like juxtaposing puzzle pieces. The domineering capital of a rich and fertile region, Medellín has scrills.

But as a Midwestern sage once said: with great privilege comes great responsibility. Despite the city’s rightly commended efforts to enfranchise much of its poor, the gap between the city’s light-skinned lords and its darker-skinned peons looms large. The booming hillside slums, however, are far from the saddest – or scariest – part of town.

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Halfway into the hour-long bus-ride from the airport to the city, the sky morphs into a dark and ominous purple. Since entering any “world” city for the first time is a memorable, enduring and eye-opening experience, the threat of a nasty storm only added to its allure. As the black clouds gathered their thoughts, we pulled over at the intersection of a busy thoroughfare to let our first passenger out. While the guitar-doting man in the Marlins hat descended, I made eye contact with another gentleman standing nearby. The latter was around 30, clutching a little Chihuahua in one arm and smoking a cigarette with the other. Just beneath his baggy athletic shorts was a large tattoo of a woman in suggestive attire (I even put on my glasses to verify it wasn’t a lizard or a dinosaur).

As we entered the city center, the skies came crashing down like a glass ceiling at Smith College. As sheets of rain fell upon merchants and schoolchildren scrambling for shelter, a new element emerged to the surface. Like a flood, they arose from every direction: fiends, cluckers, glue- and crackheads of every extraction – as far as the eye could see. Though it only lasted a moment – 3-4 blocks at most – it felt like the opening scene of a dystopian English film (Children of Men? 28 Days Later?). I saw more shoeless, disheveled fiends in three minutes in Medellín than I have seen in the past five years alone.

Nor were they simply homeless: they were young, skinny, strung-out, dirty and desperate; clutching little glass capsules and darting between cars – an army of indigents reclaiming the streets at the only moment possible. Here in the center of the city, under a dark sheet of rain, our bus careening past cathedrals and Botero sculptures, there were more vulnerable, crazed and cracked-out young people than any parent, municipality or country might care to admit.

Five minutes later, we crossed a bridge and left the center for the leafier part of town we were staying. As if magically, the avenues widened, the trees grew tall and the buildings all turned to brick. Once again we were surrounded by well-heeled Colombo-Spaniards, Toyota 4-runners and Japanese take-out joints. We had crossed the threshold. 

It rained without stop for the next 12 hours.

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To awake in Medellín is to awake in a paradise lost. It is 68 degrees and sunny, and a slight breeze has managed to penetrate the bamboo and flower-studded courtyard. The window perpetually ajar, you awake to the sound of birds chirping. If it weren’t me arising to these circumstances, I would condemn them as decadent, bourgeois and cliché. But it was, so I won’t. If good Americans die in Paris, the middling ones at least go to Medellín.  

We have breakfast and walk to the metro station. There is a café or a pool-hall on every corner of the tree-lined boulevard en route. Men lounge in white pants and adolescent boys ride shirtless by on their friends’ pegs. Women with gigantic bundas saunter on down the sidewalk like they’re selling caramel apples at the Alabama State Fair.

Unlike many parts of Bogotá, the street that leads to the metro, 70^th Avenue, is neither boogie and benumbed nor prolie and depressing. Many neighborhoods have achieved that cool, calm and collected self-confidence of a people mostly happy in their ways. Every establishment has outdoor seating – even the barber shops. Life is conducted in the open air rather than the under horrible white hospital lights most Colombians install in their homes and places of work. Perhaps it is the weather: as anyone who has been to the beach can attest, vitamin D is a powerfully democratizing force. And when it’s a little too warm to stay inside, it matters far less where you live.

But it’s not just the weather. Residents of Medellín are on the whole warmer, fresher, friendlier and more curious than the counterparts in the capital. A 7-year old girl dressed up as a police officer came up to us on the metro to ask us where we were from; she then inquired about which part of the United States Switzerland was in. The rest of the passengers in the train car, mostly young mothers, smiled and turned to listen as we told our little volunteer representative of the Law what we were up to in her neck of the woods.

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Medellín installed an above-ground metro in 1995 in the aftermath of some of the worst violence to befall any city in Latin American history. In no time it became the pride of the city, if not the country; and with good reason. It is clean, attractive, fast, effective, inexpensive and, once again, above ground. From its spacious, air-conditioned cars the passenger has a 360-degree vista of the city in every direction. Downtown, a series of daring new skyscrapers and 19^th century churches dot the immediate cityscape. Further afield, relentless orange-brick slums creep up the sides of the mountain ranges that flank the city to the east and west. They resemble an avalanche in reverse, only trickling off at the top.

With the exception of tall and balding men, most things are prettier from above. Even the rotting carcass of Calcutta is mysterious and stunning from the sky. Viewed from the elevated train, Medellín is a city of myth and wonder; of Spanish tiles and lush green gardens; colorful, bustling markets and towering steeples. It is hard not to see why paisas, as people from the region are known, take such immaculately curated pride in their little corner of the world.

We get off near the end of the line to transfer to the cable-car that slices up into the mountain through Santo Domingo, one of the city’s largest – and previously one of the continent’s most dangerous – slums. As recently as 2003, a year before it was opened, there was a 5pm nightly curfew. After sundown, the streets were policed by urban militias.

Today, Santo Domingo is (literally) one of the city’s most colorful neighborhoods (pictures on book of face forthcoming). The cable-car stops two times as it ascends the hillside slum before reaching the Biblioteca España, a daring, award-winning new library near the top of the mountain. The black, boulder-like structures, which not only blend into the mountainous landscape but boldly defy it, were specifically placed in on the outskirts of one of the neighborhood’s roughest patches. It is also 5-6 blocks from the immaculate and modern cable-car – so even for the intrepid tourist, there is no escaping some “minimal” contact with the community.

Inside, a group of adolescent boys giggle, stare and follow us up three flights of stairs before working up the courage to ask for an interview for a school project. They are each wear baseball caps with silly headings like “RIOT” and “I LOVE RASBERRY PASTRIES” etched across the front. None of them have creased the bill of their hats; instead of wearing it, they simply place it on top of their head, rather like the old Bolivian women in their miniature English bowlers.

We sit down at a table in the library and the boys ask 3-4 questions. “What ees your name, sur?” and “How do you like May-day-jeen?” Before long, however, comes the almost inevitable “What do you thinks of May-day-jeen’s womans?” Though two of them are quite tall, they cannot be older than 14 or 15. I wanted to ask if they or their teacher had come up with the questions, but they didn’t seem to understand anything I said outside their prescribed questions.

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Leaving the library, two 5 or 6 year-olds approach us. Maybe they were 7: in my mind, anyone under three and a half feet isn’t beyond kindergarten, but I could be wrong. They offer to give us a historical tour of the neighborhood: adorable but commanding, we had to accept.

The little rascals didn’t have much to say: “cable-car this, crime that; city government this, people living here and there that.” Though the one doing the talking didn’t utter a complete sentence or a single fact, he spoke with remarkable grace, confidence and charm: a born salesman (politician, pundit or PR-man), he could have sold water to a drowning man. This, they say, is another legendary paisa capacity: though inhabitants of a deep valley, surrounded by two mountain ranges and largely cut off from the world – and even most of their country – they are remarkably talented merchants, businessmen and spin-doctors.  

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Apart from being friendly, warm, gregarious, sharp and shrewd, paisas are simply gangster. Though the thuggish affliction often translates into higher crime, addiction and pregnancy rates – all of which are extremely prevalent in Medellín – it means they also live more fun, exciting and (momentarily) meaningful lives. The city of “eternal spring”, it is always early June in Medellin: high 60s in the early morning and low 80s in the afternoon. At least in the hood, no male under 18 wears a shirt. Instead, they carve mullets and Mohawks into the back of their heads and spend the day shooting pool, watching soccer and flying around on motorbikes. Poor and ostensibly jobless, they have made permanent professions of what gap-year English lads can only dream of doing on holiday in Cambodia for several months at a time.

Residents of the Santo Domingo slum also grow up far earlier than most people on earth. After parting ways with our 5 year-old historian, we decide to descend the hill by the winding, curving, cascading series of steps that plunge from the top of the slum back down to the rest of the city. With two exceptions (one: an adolescent throwing rocks at us and two, a clucker coming up to me to declare that “he love money”), it was surprisingly safe. In some of the most commendable urban planning I have ever seen, there were soccer fields, piazzas and skate parks built around each stop of the cable car.

Within these public spaces mingled every walk of life, from young mothers to old paisa men. The best, however, were the two 2-year-olds with buzz cuts and overalls marching up the stairs – by themselves – as we went down. Less than two feet tall, for all I know they were still shitting themselves; but that wasn’t going to keep them from posting up in the piazza to peep game. Those who’ve seen Dave Chappelle’s “Baby on the corner” skit have a rough estimate of what the deal is. Across the way lingered a group of older kids, this time leaning against the back of the bench. None of them could have been older than six. If Allen Iverson was smoking blunts and drinking 40s at age eleven, kids in San Domingo have the block on lock by seven.

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Unfortunately, instant gratification usually has its darker side – and the ability to live a thuggish, carefree existence is rarely distributed equitably across gender: for every shirtless 11-year old boy on the back of a motorbike in Medellín, there is a 12-year old girl doused in make-up, a cutoff shirt far above the bellybutton, booty-pants and cheap stilettos. Throughout the whole city, girls that couldn’t have been older than ten were not only donning coochie-cutters and platform shoes – they were still clutching their mothers’ hands as they did so. On the metro, girls as young as five were wearing lip gloss.

Beyond the age of puberty, this was practically the norm. For 5-6 years, young, poor and pretty women are ostensibly the talk of the town. By the end of their teenage years, however, there was not a single girl in Santo Domingo not toting around one or two children – and sometimes three. And it wasn’t just in Santo Domingo. Everywhere on the metro and all over downtown, mothers were extremely young, and young children were extremely abundant. For better or worse, Medellín must be one of the most fertile places on earth.

If only procreating were enough. Women in Medellín are also famous for squeezing themselves into comically revealing attire: scarcely a lady under 40 goes by that doesn’t give you a very accurate idea of her exact physical dimensions. But it is not just the balmy weather: the pressure to don makeup and cutoff blouses, painfully tight jeans and heels is ubiquitous in both myth and reality. The side of every other building downtown is draped with 30-feet ads for different no-name jean companies: donning a denim cowboy hat, the women in the ads scarcely wear anything else.

One cannot take public transport anywhere in Medellín without being reminded every 30 seconds of exactly what Colombian advertizing agencies and their clients think women should resemble: smiling, half-naked and pumped full of silicon. From the persistently pervy stares they illicit, their men seemed to agree.

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Such is the paradox of Medellín that is hard to describe. Warm, sunny, funky, fun and friendly, it is also deeply conservative, if not reactionary, in its approach to gender and economics. Socially, however, it is on the cutting edge: no city in North or South America has better parks, squares, plazas, open spaces or public transport that I know of.

The Sunday we were there was also election-day, and public transport was free. However crowded the metro, people still waited for others to exit before boarding (something unheard of in Bogotá’s morally disastrous Transmilenio) and meticulously gave up their seat whenever a pregnant woman or elderly person boarded.

Everywhere we went – the botanical gardens, the Barefoot Park (a zen-like park of sand and fountains for children to run around barefoot and “feel their connection with the Earth”) or the typically-named Park of Desires – there were throngs of people – couples, families and extended clans alike – lounging, laughing, sipping fresh-squeezed lemonade and losing count of how long they’d been there. It seemed the most harmonious, civically-minded and family-oriented polity I’ve ever come across.

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Yet as good privileged gringos, we were still obliged to head south to finish our day in the posh area of El Poblado, where rich, white and globalized Colombians mix almost exclusively with their European and American expatriate counterparts. For better or worse, such neighborhoods are usually the only place to find decent coffee or good books in Colombia, so with a mix of guilt and guilty pleasure we hopped on the southbound metro.

Whatever their claims to driving the cultural life of the capital, richer areas of Bogotá are as sterile as North Carolina’s eugenics program of the 1960s. Paisas being known for their notorious sense of humor, on the other hand, I was hoping Medellín’s boogified bits would be a livelier affair.

There was only one catch. Election-day in Colombia is more than an opportunity to elect the most extremist of various right-wing candidates: it is also a chance to sober up. Since no booze can be sold in the 24 hours prior to or during voting, many retreat from public places en masse. Indeed, that Sunday in El Poblado was the embodiment of the ancient dilemma one learns the hard way at some point in high school: “we’re best friends, but have I ever met you sober? This might not work.”

It was mid-afternoon on a beautiful Sunday afternoon and the neighborhood and its hundreds of bars and restaurants were completely empty. Worse, these are outdoor establishments – and they were still open. There were nothing but barren, empty tables as far as the eye could see. Nor were these bistros along the side of the Luxembourg Gardens: they were empty Hooters, abandoned burrito joints, endless barbecue cocktail bars and – wealthy, young Colombians’ all-time favorite – the ubiquitous, expensive and beautifully named establishment, Buffalo Wings.

Whether or not they were deserted didn’t seem to matter: each establishment was still blasting techno into the street on a Sunday at 3pm. It looked, felt, seemed and smelled like an abandoned playground for wealthy and deranged adults; some dystopian, tropical telenovela where “the worst of Dayton Beach” meets “the worst of Dubai.” More so than in Bogotá, rich, young and white residents of Medellín seem condemned to blindly imitating the miserable, overpriced, cultural nightmare they imagine their American counterparts to be living. As long as there’s booze involved, I guess it’s just about tolerable.