Medellín

Last week closed with a couple of interesting stories about Medellín, Colombia, one from the Washington Post and the other from International Crisis Group. Both articles offer a guardedly optimistic picture of a city that has largely overcome its notoriously violent past. The Post story attributes this to export-led growth driving the local economy, and warns that the defeat of the Colombia free trade deal could push the city back toward chaos.

The ICG piece is more circumspect, offering a number of different reasons for the increase in livability (I can’t believe that’s a word), but also noting that in recent years crime has risen. This paragraph stood out:

There is also the problem of drug-trafficking, which continues to haunt Colombia. The kingpin, Escobarian style of centralised distribution may be gone, but cocaine is still flowing on a massive scale through more cellular structures. The enormous resources spent internationally every year on interdiction and crop eradication - including the perennially flawed policy of aerial spraying, which is now failing to stem opium production in Afghanistan, too - have little effect in containing, far less curbing, the problem. Colombia still leads the world in cocaine exports; imports are increasing in Europe and in emerging drug markets like Brazil, Argentina and Chile, while stable over several years in the US. All the huge sums Washington and Europe have made available to Álvaro Uribe, Colombia's president, for use against the drug-money-fuelled Farc and other armed groups have been ineffective in staunching the flow.

That doesn’t read as glowing praise, but as far as I am concerned, it’s a success story. The absence of the “kingpin, Escobarian style of centralized distribution” and the concomitant disappearance of trafficking organizations’ ability to corrupt and threaten the state on a wide scale are about all we can hope for, whether in Colombia, Mexico, or the Bronx.