Colombia the Most Dangerous City

By John Borrell/Medellin

In the outer office of the mayor of Medellin, a thickset bodyguard cradles a Remington pump shotgun in his arms. A revolver is shoved into the waistband of his trousers, and a two-way radio is recharging in a unit near his feet. Down the hall, only a whistle away, are more armed men. Outside city hall, a uniformed policeman shoulders an Israeli-manufactured Galil automatic rifle as he casts a careful eye on passersby.

Who said you can't fight city hall? For more than a decade, the drug barons of the Medellin cartel have been using murder and corruption in an attempt to cow or co-opt elected officials of this pleasant, bustling Colombian city of 2 million people and turn it into the world capital of the cocaine business. In the process, Medellin, known locally as the "city of eternal spring" for its mild mountain climate, has become the city of eternal violence. More than 3,000 people were murdered there last year, a homicide rate about five times . as high as New York City's and most likely the world's steepest. In one 18- hour period at the beginning of February, Medellin police reported 13 killings. "It has other values not known to the world," says a defensive Mayor William Jaramillo Gomez. "But yes, as a result of drug trafficking we have to admit it is also a dangerous city."

Jaramillo, an outspoken critic of the cartel as well as of Washington's drug policies, leaves office this week to make way for the first freely elected mayor in the city's history. Some 12 million Colombians went to the polls on March 13 to elect the mayors of nearly 1,000 cities and towns. The exercise in democracy -- until now the country's mayors have been appointed by Bogota -- is designed in part to give cities like Medellin new powers to fight such menaces as organized crime and drugs. Some feel that an administration with a direct mandate to govern will find it easier to face these challenges than an outside appointee with no popular support. Yet many fear that decentralization of power will make cities even less governable than in the past. Nowhere are the concerns greater than in Medellin, where the cartel, a loose association of drug lords who control an estimated 80% of the cocaine entering the U.S., has long wielded lethal power.

So dangerous is Medellin that the U.S. consulate was closed in 1981 mainly for security reasons. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration pulled its employees out in 1984, and two months ago the U.S. State Department issued a travel advisory warning Americans not to visit Medellin. Those who do come find a city in which past and potential violence are quite visible. Guards outside apartment blocks carry shotguns, police shoulder automatic weapons, and occasionally a pistol is glimpsed tucked into a civilian's waistband. Some of the drug barons maintain armories that include U.S.-made AR-15 automatic rifles and Israeli-made Uzis with silencers and infrared sights for shooting at night. Says Jaramillo, pointing out of his office window to the hills: "They could be taking aim at me from two miles away over there." A U.S. embassy official in Bogota is more specific. "They will know you are there and what you are up to the minute you arrive," he warns a visitor.

Established in the 16th century by Spanish conquistadors looking for the fabled riches of El Dorado, Medellin has long been Colombia's main industrial center. On windless days, the skyline is smothered in smog, and a blue haze of pollution drifts upward into the Andes. Medellin-born Fernando Botero, probably Latin America's most renowned contemporary artist, captures the city's self-assuredness in his exaggerated canvases of local life, several of which hang in the Medellin museum. The pinched mouths and tiny noses of Botero's overfed men and women suggest the provincial smugness of an entrepreneurial society that honors the self-made man.

That spirit found a new expression in the late 1970s when the cocaine business came to town. The coca plant, from which the substance is derived, grows best not in Colombia but in Bolivia and Peru, where the leaves are made into a rough paste. But turning the paste into the white powder that foreigners consume in such prodigious quantities requires laboratory facilities and technical skills. Medellin had them, as well as convenient proximity to the huge U.S. market and a work force willing to take risks. "There has always been an entrepreneurial spirit in this city," says Jaramillo. "These people found a way of controlling a big business with a growing demand in the U.S."

At first the arrival of the drug lords generated only mild concern. "They were getting rich off the gringos, an entirely respectable way for a Latin to accumulate wealth," says Maria Alves Osorio, a middle-class mother of three who is now alarmed at Medellin's lawlessness. "Our children weren't taking cocaine, so everything was fine." Many residents welcomed the money that drugs brought to the city and the jobs they created, however temporarily, in the construction and retail businesses. The old estates on the surrounding hills of El Poblado were replaced by luxurious red-brick apartment buildings topped with satellite dishes to enable tenants to watch Miami Vice and other U.S. programs. Shopping malls proliferated, and land values soared.

Pablo Escobar Gaviria, generally acknowledged to be head of the Mafia, as the cartel is known locally, became something of a local philanthropist, building a zoo, soccer fields and an entire suburb of low-cost houses that is still called Barrio Escobar. In the manner of feudal serfs, residents in Barrio Escobar refer to their benefactor with cap-doffing deference and slip the Spanish honorific Don in front of his name.

For all their money, the drug barons may have brought only a superficial prosperity to Medellin. "Their money hasn't created much employment because they haven't invested in productive infrastructure," says Juan Gomez Martinez, publisher of Medellin's biggest daily newspaper, El Colombiano (circ. 100,000), and a candidate for mayor. "They have spent a lot of money on imported luxuries." Escobar, for example, is said to have imported gold-plated bathroom fittings for a penthouse he frequently used. His wife had more shoes in her closet, according to local lore, than Imelda Marcos. The penthouse was abandoned by the Escobars last January, after a car bomb blew the side off the six-story apartment building and wrecked neighboring houses.

While drug-related violence once touched mostly those in the business, no one is safe today. Basuco, a crude, habit-forming derivative of coca paste, was introduced into the local market by the cartel in 1984, when it had excess low-grade Colombian coca paste on its hands. Now there are thousands of addicts in the city, many of them knife-wielding street criminals who will kill for the price of a fix, less than a dollar. "Ten years ago you could stroll the city streets after dark," recalls Gomez. "That's suicidal now."

The city's 1,200-member police force is overwhelmed by the violence. Minor offenses like a traffic violation generally receive more attention than serious crimes because they are easier and safer to deal with. "The cartel cannot be tackled in Medellin alone," Jaramillo says. "It is a worldwide problem and one that is created by demand in the U.S. Why doesn't the U.S. tackle consumption and then stop things like U.S.-made guns from reaching the cartel? Then we might get somewhere."

Five years ago there were 15 private security companies in Medellin, with perhaps 1,500 men on their payrolls. Now the city has 32 such firms employing 5,000 guards. Scores of new gun permits are issued weekly to private citizens. "People are afraid, even in their own homes," says the manager of the city's largest security concern, whose guards carry shotguns and pistols. "They are turning to us for help."

Sicarios, paid killers, will fulfill a contract on someone's life for as little as a few hundred dollars. The cartel uses sicarios frequently, though many murders have no apparent perpetrator or motive. Early last month, for instance, Jorge Antonio Restrepo Monslave, 29, a shop assistant with no known drug connections, was shot in the head outside his home by two attackers who took nothing from him. His murder was one of a dozen that day, none of which received more than a token investigation by police.

With all its wealth, the cartel need not stoop to violence to get its way. Up to 80% of the police force in Medellin is suspected of working for the Mafia. Last December the cartel was able to secure the release from a Bogota jail of Jorge Luis, a brother of Jorge Ochoa Vasquez's, a reputed drug billionaire whose sudden release from a Colombian prison last January infuriated the Reagan Administration.

Though their leaders are seldom seen on the streets, many of the hundreds of cartel employees -- the hit men, the chemists and the so-called mules who transport the cocaine, among others -- move about openly in Medellin. They can be spotted spending freely at the glitzy restaurants and nightclubs, some of which are said to be owned by the Mafia, on Las Palmas road. Young women in stone-washed jeans and high-heeled shoes often accompany the members of the drug-industry proletariat. On occasion the four-wheel-drive vehicles they favor cruise the streets in force. The cartel's thugs will sometimes clear a traffic jam by blazing away with their guns pointed in the air.

While many of the city's residents resent the presence of the drug lords, others have developed a grudging pride concerning their town's prominence -- and a visible annoyance at recent U.S. attempts to have those responsible extradited to the U.S. One afternoon, as a foreigner got up to leave Medellin's Macarena bullring, someone in the crowd shouted, "Hey, you, what about extradition?" It was an unfriendly, almost chilling challenge. The crowd parted to allow the stranger through and then closed ranks around the man again -- just as Medellin sometimes seems to shelter the wealthy cartel that has made the city the most dangerous in the world.