A rchive Date
[ 17-02-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Colombia ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/TravelSouthAmerica/medellin_020215.html
Days gone by
Scarred by its days as drug centre, Colombian city tries to leave its past behind
By JARED KOTLER - Associated Press
MEDELLIN, Colombia (AP) - A block from the church where cocaine lord Pablo Escobar's hired guns once prayed for their souls, people stroll through a newly opened art museum and sculpture garden.
High fashion is replacing the tacky style of drug traffickers as glamorous models grace catwalks at fashion shows attended by the likes of designer Oscar de la Renta.
Officials are drawing up plans to export software. And in a barrio that was a recruiting ground for hit men who killed for the Medellin cartel, former gang members now help keep kids off the streets.
Eight years after police gunned down Escobar, the people of Medellin are trying to emerge from his shadow and transform a city whose name was synonymous with drug trafficking and violence into a peaceful, modern metropolis blooming with culture, fashion and high technology.
Remaking Medellin - against not only its past, but a 37-year guerrilla war that is flooding the city with refugees and stoking violence in its slums - will be no easy achievement.
"The idea is to support everything aimed at building society and oppose all that destroys it," said Mayor Luis Perez Gutierrez. "We suffered greatly from Pablo Escobar, and we have little to show in return."
Perez hopes to turn the city of 2.2 million people in Colombia's central Andes into a technological hub. As a start, he plans to buy 200,000 computers and resell them at a discount to students and others around the city to build computer literacy.
He is also offering tax incentives for software companies to set up assembly plants, and is negotiating with companies interested in turning Medellin - with its strong phone service - into a base for international call centres employing thousands of workers.
"Today, the wealthy of the world are in telecommunications, software and tourism," said Perez, who studied at the University of Michigan. "We, too, must head in that direction."
Even as they curse Escobar's memory, many here say his global cocaine business reflected the industriousness for which people from this region, called Paisas, are known.
Medellin's hospitals are Latin American leaders in organ transplants. The city has Colombia's only subway, a spotless line completed in 1995, and efficient public services.
Drinkable water, reliable electricity and prompt trash pickup "may not sound like much, but in Latin America it's a great source of pride," said Hector Abad, a novelist and magazine columnist.
Medellin's downtown streets are clean and its traffic manageable. Plazas abound with fountains, statues and bright flowers. An annual international poetry festival attracts thousands of spectators.
Colombia Fashion, a yearly show that drew hundreds of foreigners to Medellin last week, highlights the area's growing importance in clothing manufacturing and design.
De la Renta has attended two shows since 1999, helping cement Medellin's reputation as one of Latin America's centres of style.
Local factories make socks, jeans, lingerie and other apparel for export for brands including Levi Strauss, Liz Claiborne, and Donna Karan.
Symbolizing Medellin's revival is the recent $25 million US renovation, in a rough downtown district, of a museum featuring paintings and sculpture by Medellin native Fernando Botero, the city's most famous son after Escobar.
Over a three-block area where street crime and drug addiction abounded, people now chat casually on park benches beneath Botero's bronzes of chubby nudes, cats and horses.
There are no monuments here to Escobar, shot by police on a Medellin rooftop in 1993, but his presence is felt. Vendors hawk his biographies at traffic lights. Some residents of slums, where Escobar built houses and soccer fields and was considered a hero, visit his grave marked by a simple white headstone.
Escobar's most lasting legacy is in the poor neighbourhoods where he recruited young assassins who placed bombs in public places and killed dozens of politicians, police officers, judges and journalists.
The terror campaign, was waged to pressure the government against extraditing drug traffickers to the United States.
The murder rate has halved since Escobar's days. Still, some 3,000 homicides occur every year, making Medellin one of the deadliest places in the Americas.
Three car bombings this year, blamed by officials on a gang that once worked with the Medellin cartel, killed eight people and brought back memories of Escobar's terror.
But hope exists even in the vast slums ringing the city.
Casa Mia, a neighbourhood centre for troubled youths started by former gangsters in a northwest Medellin barrio, has words by Gandhi and Martin Luther King on its walls.
Supported by private and city donations, it sponsor classes in subjects from music to astronomy, holds sports events and helps find jobs for youngsters.
Thanks to a neighbourhood-level peace pact the centre helped mediate, children play without a care in a spot where gang shootings were so frequent that it was nicknamed "the devil's block."
"We are trying to turn something negative into something positive," said Dario Arias, a former drug addict and thief who helps manage the centre. "We hope our experience can be a model for the city."
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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