The Economist May 21st 2022 31
The Americas
Colombia
The Medellín model
A
licia rivashas lived in Comuna 13, a
slum in Medellín, for most of her 84
years. It used to be the most violent city on
the planet. “We would hide under the bed
when the guerrillas shot at each other, be
cause sometimes a bullet would come into
your house and kill you,” she says. That’s
how her grandson died. Today Medellín,
Colombia’s second city, is safer than Chica
go (see chart). Ms Rivas counts noisy tour
ists among her more serious problems.
Thousands traipse in to gawk at graffiti and
ride the outdoor escalators that climb hun
dreds of metres up the comuna’shills.
Two men who served as mayors during
that transformation, Sergio Fajardo and Fe
derico Gutiérrez, are among the leading
candidates to be Colombia’s next presi
dent. A coalition of rightwing parties
chose Mr Gutiérrez, commonly known as
Fico, in primary season in March. The cen
trists chose Mr Fajardo. (The frontrunner
and main leftwing candidate is Gustavo
Petro, a former guerrilla and exmayor of
Bogotá, the capital, who would be the
country’s first leftist president if elected,
although polls have been tightening.) Co
lombians would do well to understand the
legacies of Mr Gutiérrez and Mr Fajardo be
fore casting their vote.
Medellín’s fortunes waxed as those of
Colombia’s drug cartels waned. In 1991,
when a notorious kingpin, Pablo Escobar,
in effect ran the city, there were 7,000 mur
ders in a single year. Colombia was a global
homicide hotspot. Escobar was killed in
1993; subsequent feuds among paramili
tary groups had fizzled out by the early
2000s. Medellín flourished. The propor
tion of people who are extremely poor, de
fined as earning too little to buy enough
food, fell by half between 2008 and 2016.
The city expanded public transport, con
necting Colombia’s only metro system (Bo
gotá has just started building its own) to a
network of cable cars and escalators, and
so linking slums on the city’s hilly fringes
with its posher centre.
The seeds of Mr Fajardo’s political life
were sown in Medellín in the 1990s. César
Gaviria, Colombia’s president at the time,
appointed a council of advisers to stem vi
olence in the city. That council’s leader,
Maria Emma Mejía, gathered businessfolk,
academics and charity workers to discuss
the problem. Those discussions fed into
the creation of an organisation called Com-
promiso Ciudadano (Citizen Engagement).
Mr Fajardo, a mathematician, became one
of its leaders and won a mayoral election in
2003 by a landslide, running as an inde
pendent against the established parties
that had long governed the city.
Mr Fajardo and his successors ushered
in a battery of new policies. They gave the
comunascontrol over 5% of the municipal
ity’s budget. Investment in primary
schools, libraries and health centres
boomed. Six cablecar lines opened be
tween 2004 and 2021. Five years after the
inauguration of the first, incomes in the
newly connected Comuna 1, the poorest
slum in Medellín, had grown by 56%. Juli
ana, who lives there and works in the city
centre as a maid, says her commute was
cut from three hours to 40 minutes. “We
led a revolution in Medellín,” says Mr Fa
jardo. “We changed the city’s history.”
But Mr Fajardo’s presidential campaign
has been lacklustre. His brand of wonkish
centrism lacks appeal in an increasingly
polarised country. His coalition has been
squabbling, and in 2021 Mr Fajardo was in
dicted for embezzlement, though a court
dismissed the charges in January.
MEDELLÍN
A presidential election draws attention to Colombia’s most successful city
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