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This is a day in the life in Medellín. One recent morning, students waved white flags calling for peace - even as they mourned a 13-year-old classmate killed by a stray bullet just days before. In the afternoon, police captured 21 alleged criminal gang members who had slipped back into the paramilitary drug world after pledging to give it up. By night, around 10:30 p.m., police were hauling a dead body into their "necro-mobile" - a truck that collects bodies - and remarking how light a night it had been so far. It was only the second...
Medellín has always had trouble living down its reputation. In the 1980s and '90s it was one of the most dangerous cities in the world - first as the headquarters of Pablo Escobar's cocaine cartel and then as the playground of right-wing paramilitary groups. But Medellín's murder rate dropped steadily after paramilitary fighters started putting down their arms in 2003 as part of a peace agreement with the government - and the city, one of the most dynamic industrial centers of Colombia, slowly re-established itself as a metropolis to reckon with. (See pictures from...
...last year was not a good one for Medellín. Murders doubled in 2009, to 2,899, according to the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Science. It was the largest number of homicides since 2002, when there were some 5,000 murders (there were an estimated 6,500 in 1991). The situation is directly attributable to a drug war that has once again engulfed the hillsides ringing the city. Reports in the Colombian press had the number of murders at 230 in January of this year. Behind the surge of violence is a battle over power...
...prominent group of Medellín citizens, dubbed the Notables, recently negotiated a cease-fire between the feuding gangs. "We approached them with one request: stop the killings," says Jorge Gaviria, a member of the Notables and the former director of Medellín's peace-and-reconciliation program. Since Feb. 1, the first day of the truce, Gaviria says, murders have dropped significantly and conditions are ripe to negotiate a more permanent peace. But the green light the government in Bogotá had granted the Notables to hold talks wasn't renewed after Feb. 12, stoking fears that bullets...
...leaders of the Office of Envigado, whose aliases are "Sebastian" and "Valenciano," are feuding for total control over its drug-trafficking network. "There are two bosses, and there can only be one," says "Eduardo," a pseudonym given to a narco-trafficker ruling over several of Medellín's most violent neighborhoods, who spoke on condition of anonymity. As an estimated 150 to 300 criminal bands fight over control and turf, "the civilian population is caught in the middle," says Ana Patricia Aristizábal, the human-rights delegate of Medellín's ombudsman's office...