![]() “They watch and it’s a handbook on how to become a sicario. Aspirational bad guys are avid consumers of TV’s narco-centric narratives. And while the murder rate in Medellín has dropped precipitously from Escobar’s time, crime has actually risen over the past two years in the gang-controlled comunas in the western part of the city. Twenty years ago, public schools in Colombia resolved an intractable argument over how to teach modern history by removing the subject entirely from the curriculum. But younger residents, particularly those with little education and few prospects of gainful employment, aren’t always receptive to the historical message polite society wants to impart. ![]() Medellín recently constructed a museum of memory, Museo Casa de la Memoria, to remind everyone what happened and why. In the 80s, more than 600 police officers were murdered after Esobar offered a bounty of over 2 million pesos for each one.Įver since 2016, when the government ended more than 50 years of armed insurrection and signed a peace treaty with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombians have been grappling with the painful and complex question of what they want to remember and what they want to forget. For decades, the violence was inescapable, as narcos, guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, and assorted opportunists clawed at the illicit billions pouring out of the drug trade. That explosion had been planted by revolutionary guerrillas, but Escobar claimed credit for the bombing. Today, Medellín wants to draw attention to the residents who lost their lives, rather than the criminals who took them. troops killed in combat in Vietnam, where 40,934 American troops were killed in action between 19. Between 19, 46,612 people were murdered by Colombia’s drug violence. So much pain still exists.”Įscobar’s reign of terror wiped out not only dueling drug dealers and ordinary citizens caught in the crossfire but also a sizable swath of the city’s moral authorities and best minds-the academics, artists, judges, journalists, politicians, and industrialists who refused to be compromised or bought off, as so many others were. “I would say to people who want to come to our city, you are welcome but please respect the story of our victims. “We want to stop this mafia culture that gives us such terrible values,” Gutiérrez told me. To some, the criminal ideal of easy illegal money still holds sway. Still, the ghost of Pablo hovers over this city of 2.5 million people, especially among the 6,000 youth caught up in drugs and gangs and another several thousand judged to be at risk of joining them. And it’s won enough international awards for its turnaround to sustain dreams of becoming a leading Latin American tech hub, cultural center, and incubator for social experiments. It’s now safe and lively enough to attract all those tourists. In recent years, Medellín has made a striking comeback from its violent past. Mayor Federico Gutiérrez, of the center-right Movimiento Creemos party, wants to fundamentally change the way the world sees his city. Fueling all this curiosity is a relentless stream of narco television series, on Netflix, Nat Geo, Discovery, and other networks, that narrate Medellín’s history from the perspective of the perpetrators, not the victims. Today, Napoles is a theme park, and descendants of Escobar’s hippos roam the towns and rivers nearby. 1 tourist attraction, with visitors from around the globe making pilgrimages to the Monaco building, his family residence in the 1980s, and Napoles, his palatial headquarters that contained a private zoo full of exotic animals. Twenty-five years after Escobar’s death, the notorious cocaine kingpin has become the city’s No. The mayor of Medellín is sick and tired of the world’s fascination with Pablo Escobar.
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