Sergio Fajardo

Sunday's New York Times has an intriguing profile of the Mayor of Medellin, Colombia, Sergio Fajardo. Medellin is the capital city of Antioquia province and the second largest city in Colombia, after Bogota. In the 1980's into the mid-1990's, Medellin was known as the home of Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel, making Medellin at one point, a sum equivalent to fifty US dollars could buy a contract killing, according to Tina Rosenberg's excellent book, Children of Cain. The situation was so bad, homicides in 1991 averaged 17 per day.

Fajardo has made improvements in infrastructure his hallmark since he became mayor.

“Our most beautiful buildings,” said Mr. Fajardo, 51, “must be in our poorest areas.”

With that simple idea, Mr. Fajardo hired renowned architects to design an assemblage of luxurious libraries and other public buildings in this city’s most desperate slums. Their eccentric shapes — one resembles an immense blackened loaf of bread sliced in half — occupy areas where foot soldiers in Colombia’s cocaine wars once died by the thousands each year. But several years ago, residents here say, a tenuous peace was imposed by paramilitary drug traffickers who outfought their rivals.

Now, Medellín is no longer stymied by being described as the world’s deadliest city.

This city of about two million people had 29 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2006, down from 381 per 100,000 when killings peaked in 1991.

He has his detractors, but in my  humble opinion, they are really just carping. By any objective measure, Medellin is better off with him in office. It's heartening to see good news coming out of Colombia for a change.

Comments

[leftside]

I dunno, Medellin is certainly the leading engine of Colombia at the moment - building Bogota and outcooling Cartegena - but I wonder how much is for real and how much is hype when it comes to the great progressivism and resitribution we are told exists. Is building starchitect libraries in poor areas really all that successful when local people seem intimidated and alienated and rich people would still never go near those neighborhods? Mayors have little to do but tinker around the edges and make minor interventions like these.Daley in Chicago got a lot of good press for building cool libraries in nice areas, LA has architecturally different public schools. But more powerful are more radical ideas from Bogota of lanes and streets dedicated to public transportation or Porto Alegre of participatory budgeting.

[Randy Paul]

You never cease to amaze me. By any measure, Medellin's situation has vastly improved under Fajardo and you're busy carping.

The priest at my church lived in Medellin in the early 1990's he recently paid a visit there and upon his return could not stop raving about how great things were.

[leftside]

Sorry, I guess our temperments don't match. You seem like a glass half full kind of guy...

I have no doubt Medellin, like most cities in the hemisphere, has improved since the days of running cartel wars. Much of the improvements in the hillsides, as I remember, stems out of a German funded, Federally directed planning effort called PRIMED. I was merely wondering where the beef was in regards to this great progressivism and "redistribution without a discourse of rage" (nice Chavez shot) from THIS handsome politician was. If I missed something there, let me know.

As for crime, sure things have quieted down since the right-wing paramilitaries have wrestled control of things from the warring factions. There seems little doubt the town military and police (and many politicians) are corrupt and protect the jefes for the sake of peace. Fine. But for this piece to ignore this larger reality hanging over the city - and put ALL credit in the hands of one man seemed a bit forced for me.

[leftside]

There's a piece on Medellin in the New Left Review by Hylton as well as one by Leech at NACLA. Not all is seems well under the surface...

Conclusion of Leech's piece:These efforts (in bogota and medellin), together with the national government’s de-facto endorsement of paramilitary rule, resemble the mixture of ruthless authoritarianism and social programs commonly identified with Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy. Whatever Colombia’s crime statistics, its largest cities remain troubling examples of how “successful” urban security can be when it is built on fear. "Occupied territories" Hylton calls Medellin's barrios.

[leftside]

Oops... let me try those links again.

Garry Leech - Colombia's New Urban Order in NACLA
Forrest Hylton - Medellin's Makeover in New Left review

[Medellin Traveler]

I may not have the answers as to who gets the credit for transforming Medellin, but the fact is that all the locals I spoke to support Sergio Fajardo and his efforts into transforming Medellin into one of the greatest cities in all of Central and South America.

Growing up on the streets in Chicago, I was around gangs on a daily basis and got to know alot of gangmembers in various neighborhoods. From what I remember, they were all young lost kids with nowhere else to turn, at that point in time, in their young lives.

I say build libraries, build public parks, build new homes, continue with the many programs available to offer hope and in return help keep the young lost souls of the streets. If you give someone a reason to live, they will always choose life over death.

I have visited Medellin, Colombia three times this year and have fallen in love with the Paisas and the beautiful Colombian city know as Medellin.

I did some research before my first solo trip, ignored all the US travel warnings about safety in Colombia. But most importantly, reminded myself of the gangs, corruption, Mob influence over my hometown of Chicago, that Medellin wouldn't be too much different.

I stayed in the El Poblado neighborhood but visited many of the hillside shantytonwns.

The locals I met, in the various barrios, treated me like family. They were all as curious about me as I was of them. They opened their homes to me and made me feel like family. They shared many personal stories with me about their lives, hopes and dreams. They all told me to go back to America and let everyone know that the Paisas do not promote violence, that they want to live without fear, they want to be able to walk the streets of their own neighborhoods without risk of being victims for those that choose to commit crimes.

Say what you will, but if you haven't been to Medellin, then you do not know the magic and beauty that this city contains.

I invite you to visit my blog to learn more about Medellin, Colombia http://medellin-colombia.blogspot.com as well as my site http://www.medellintraveler.com

Feel free to contact me with any questions and/or comments you may have about Medellin.

"Medellin, Medellin, Medellin, how I love thee!"

I'M GOING BACK!!

[Diana]

To any one who has been in Medellin in the recent years, having been what it was before Sergio, it is amazing. He is going to be our next president! Sergio Fajardo 2010-2014!

[james]

I was there this spring on a research project, and I was pretty skeptical too. However, its not just fancy libraries - its also about the process. In all of the projects, Fajardo's government worked with the people in the barrios to establish a dialog about what’s needed in the community, generating real buy–in from the people who live there.

Urbanismo Social, Fajardo’s program, isn’t just about building the parques-bibliotheques. The city is going into these neighborhoods and actively integrating them into the city. They are building dozens of new schools in the barrios, and of the same quality that the libraries. Fajardo’s also improving access to these neighborhoods, through the development of the Metrocable (a cable car system up the mountains into the barrios that connects with the subway system), and the Metroplus, a new BRT system based off of the Transmillenial in Bogata. A walk through the barrios of Santo Domingo and La Ladera really exemplify the success of these programs. There are still some places that are quite dangerous, such as the barrio of La Iguana, but contrary to what another poster has implied, these programs have dramatically integrated the haves and have-nots of Medellin. Visiting Bogata revealed a lot more of the ugliness of Latin American racism and classism than Medellin.

As far as the Hylton piece goes, I don’t have a subscription to the New Left Review, but the opening bit I was able to read already has factual errors in it. These are dumb errors that would be easy to avoid if he were basing it on first hand information – such mistaking a children’s science museum for an art museum in a completely different part of town. The Botero Museum is a cultural cornerstone of Medellin. Its like mistaking the Pompidou Center for the Louvre. Its just sloppy, and a review of Hylton’s work shows that he’s got something of an axe to grind with Colombia’s government. I’m not claiming that everything is on the up and up, but that Fajardo and the people he’s gathered around him have a genuine honesty behind their work and beliefs.

The left (and I consider myself a progressive) has something of a kneejerk response when it comes to Latin American politics, especially Colombia. I think it should be particularly difficult for someone intellectually honest from the United States to transfer their leftwing-rightwing political dichotomy into any Latin American context upon visiting. Further, it really needs to vary depending on where you are in Latin America (just like the US, huh?).

On a final note, its really quite degrading to describe the barrios as “shanty-towns.” Although there are physical problems in these neighborhoods, such as a lack of open space or unsafe ground when people build too close to the steep ravines that run down the mountainside, the barrios are a legitimate part of the city. Residents pay taxes and the city provides services. The rather roughshod look of a lot of the dwelling comes about because they are in the process of being developed. It is particularly common to see long strips of rebar emerging from the top of a house – in a few years, that will become the second or third story. Some of the older barrios have effectively been completely absorbed into the “organized” fabric of the city, and with Medellin’s newfound civility, the younger barrios will too. Growing up, my parents lived in (and still live in) the small house they rented in college. They eventually bought it, and were constantly working on our house growing up - a porch here, a second story there – and the house was clad in tar-paper up until I believe I was about twelve. In a world where over 1 billion people (and growing) live in the informal sector of cities, the rest of the world needs to start to understand these environments as legitimate, working societies, and not just aberrations from the mainstream.