This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.
Medi in 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 Terna 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 Managin.
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 smelted 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
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 Medellin launched in the mid-1990s. As part of that plan,
the city built parks and libraries and public spaces. Medellin'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 Jay Balvin. The city inside of the
mountains knows a lot of nature around. You just gotta go. I guarantee that you'll be back
2000% if not I give you your money back. In 2020, I decided to move back to Medellin.
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 a 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.
Medellin 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 Medellin 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 Medellin 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 Medellin 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 Medellin 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 Medellin's skyline.
I was obsessed. I think a lot of people in Medellin 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. Medellin'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
Camuna 13. The city also added more metro stations and cable cars going up into the Camunas.
Luis Fernando Gonzalez is a professor of architecture at Columbia's National University.
He says the metro broke down barriers in social segregation and it's one of the main symbols of
the city's revival. Neighborhoods all over Medellin were now linked by a web of trains,
streetcars, and buses stretching across the city. The transit system became the crown jewel of the
Medellin 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 Medellin to learn
how they got it so right. And as the city's profile rose, Medellin's leaders saw a huge opportunity.
In 2003, a handsome charismatic mathematician and professor named Sergio Fajardo was elected mayor.
Inspired by Medellin's revival, he and other leaders decided to go even bigger.
Luis Fernando says Medellin'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 projects 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.
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 Medellin.
Puig's marketing team created beautiful books showcasing Medellin's new libraries
and parks and cable cars flying above the Comunas. Every aspect of the new Medellin
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 Medellin are known,
are the best salespeople because they can talk you into buying anything.
And Medellin's leaders sold a new vision of the city.
The campaign takes Medellin in a new direction that sells the city,
is 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 Medellin's, quote-unquote, renaissance.
Anthony Bourdain visited Medellin, ate a repas and rode one of the cable cars.
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 Medellin 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 Medellin. 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 moisteras 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 Medellin
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 Medellin.
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
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
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.
There has been an explosion of digital nomadism over the last several years,
thanks to the rise of remote work. Those who can travel freely and work from any place where
there's internet have fanned out to beautiful cities and towns around the world. Many of them
have chosen Medellin, where their vacations can start as soon as they log off. TikTok is
filled with videos of nomads, mostly young white Americans and Europeans, telling their peers why
they should come and stay long term. Medellin, 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. Some people come for a couple
weeks, I wanted to go for one or two months, and then I ended up staying for five months, and then
I came right back. 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 Pueblado, not far from where Ana put up her
posters. The scene looks like any other cork in 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 Medellin. I just fell in love with the city like Medellin is
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 Pueblado, an upper middle class district of 400,000 people
south of downtown. Foreigners love El Pueblado. They call it the Beverly Hills of Medellin.
It's the epicenter of nightlife, shopping, and entertainment with boutique hotels rising
above treetops. Rainbow color macaws add to Pueblado's lush tropical vibe. Hampton also
thinks that a big drop for foreigners is the neighborhood's party scene. You hear a lot of
those beautiful women, and so I think you see I have a lot more male digital nomads than I have
seen female digital nomads. They can go to like 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 Medellin 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 one and a half 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 Pueblado.
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 Medellin, they can enjoy a kind of luxury
they couldn't afford in the U.S. or Europe. And that is a huge draw. You're going to probably
spend around $2,000 on a nice place, particularly in Impolalo, the Beverly Hills of Medellin.
This is a YouTube video from 2023 with two guys, one Australian, one from the U.S.
It's called Why Everyone is Moving to Medellin.
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 Medellin every month.
Although they inject millions of dollars into the economy, they also cost the
rent, 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.
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
Medellin, especially hurting low-income paisas. The lack of affordable housing options in Medellin
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 Medellin'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 Medellin.
Back in the 1980s and 90s, when the drug cartels and gangs were fighting in the city,
the constant fear in Medellin was that a bomb would go off outside of your home at any moment.
The biggest fear in Medellin 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 will 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.
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
Camuna 13. It's only about five miles from Poblado, which is a very different part of town.
During the Pablo Escobar years, Camuna 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
video. Sagging along the steep hillside, the escalators run in sections totaling nearly 1260 feet.
That's three and a half football fields. When they were completed in 2011,
those escalators instantly improved the lives of Camuna 13's residents.
A commute that used to take more than a half an hour was cut to six minutes or less.
These escalators were thought of as a transportation alternative,
built for elders to carry their groceries to their homes higher up in the hills.
Desi Flores is a community activist from Camuna 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 Camuna 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 Carol G. trucker hats, Medellin keychains, and a lot of Pablo Escobar paraphernalia.
And that's not the only trace left of Pablo Escobar in Camuna 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 Ambigado organization started as Escobar's debt collectors,
but has grown to become one of Medellin'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 Camuna 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,
Desi 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?
The city's growing sex tourism industry is putting minors increasingly at risk.
And most of these girls come from low-income neighborhoods like Camuna 13.
Medellin 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 Passport Bros Medellin have millions of views on TikTok.
Sex work in Colombia is legal.
The concern among activists in Medellin is for underage girls who are being sex trafficked,
especially by gangs.
Ivan Munoz is a public health professor and an expert on sex trafficking in Medellin.
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 Camuna 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 Camuna 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.
They can access millions of people from all over the world.
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.
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.
Pious does 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 Bilioteca Espana,
a brand new library that had just opened in Santo Domingo Savio, 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 Medellin'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 Medellin 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 Medellin.
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 Medellin,
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 Medellin.
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 Medellin for a visit
and I did all the things I enjoyed doing there.
I took the metro downtown to do some shopping
and I went to a reggaeton party on a rooftop overlooking Medellin.
I really enjoyed myself and it made me miss that city.
Medellin 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 Medellin is to take a break.
Because now that I have a better understanding of the game, I don't want to play it.
The
99% Invisible was produced this week by Luis Gao.
Edited by Christopher Johnson.
Mixed by Hizik Bin Ahmad for Reed.
Music by Juan Real and Keqo 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 Harmon Valencia, Dario Vermires,
and Juliana Gomez for their help reporting this story.
Cathy Tu is our executive producer.
Colstead is the digital director.
Delaney Hall is our senior editor.
The rest of the team includes Chris Perube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald,
Gabriela Gladney, Vivian Lay, Lasha Madone, Jacob Maldonado-Madina, Nina Patek,
Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars.
The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.
We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family,
now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California.
You can find us on all the usual social media sites,
as well as our brand new Discord server.
There are about 4,500 people talking about architecture.
They're talking about the power broker.
They're talking about all kinds of fun things.
That's where I'm hanging out most of the time.
Please join us there.
There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.
