International

Murder rate plummets amid ‘gangster peace’ in Medellin

Photo: Joaquin Sarmiento / AFP

| By AFP | Hervé Bar |

Seven days without a single murder… The month of August marked a security record for Colombia’s second city Medellin, the onetime fiefdom of infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar.

“In Medellin, security is measured in lives” saved, said Mayor Daniel Quintero as he welcomed the breakthrough.

Medellin has seen a vertiginous drop in homicides by 97 percent in the 30 years since Escobar’s death, transforming what used to be one of the most violent cities in the world into a popular tourist destination.

The success is attributed in large part to an unofficial but mutually beneficial understanding between narco gangs, paramilitaries and the security services.

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“Peace is good for business,” explained Medellin drug dealer “Joaquin” (not his real name) of the traffickers’ motivation for avoiding violence.

Joaquin is 37 years old — two of those spent behind bars. He wears an oversized baseball cap and sagging jeans.

A Beretta pistol peaks out from under his hoodie.

Joaquin is a “capo,” a junior boss supervising drug trafficking in the streets of “Comuna 6,” a poor neighborhood perched on a mountain slope in Medellin’s northwest.

He belongs to a gang, which he declined to name, that follows the rules imposed by an organized crime “federation” known as the “Oficina de Envigado” or the “Office of Envigado” after the name of a nearby town.

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Joaquin claimed the Oficina and its member gangs acted “in solidarity with the community.”

This included meting out “parallel justice” when the system fails them.

“Escobar? He was much too violent. Too many deaths for nothing,” Joaquin told AFP.

‘The population with us’

“Everyone lives in peace on our territory,” said the capo, keen to portray himself as a good Samaritan.

“We do not want to frighten the traders and the people. We need the population with us.”

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Thirty years after Escobar was shot dead on a Medellin rooftop while trying to evade capture, the drug trade still dominates many poor neighborhoods of the city of nearly three million people.

A stone’s throw from a football pitch where mothers watch their children play, heavy foot traffic at a small, nondescript house indicates the presence of a drug den.

A black garbage bag covers the window where money trades hands. The purchased merchandise drops down from another floor in a tin can on the end of a string.

A variety of product can be found here: marijuana, cocaine and “tucibi” or “basuco” — two cheap and particularly toxic new drugs akin to unrefined “crack.”

“Everything is organized, it’s like a business. There are those who take care of the sale, the logistics, the soldiers. The bosses pay our salaries, we do the job,” said Joaquin.

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He and his colleagues move with incredible ease and assurance through the maze of sloping alleys and small, rickety brick houses. Neighborhood teenagers skulk around, acting as security.

Joaquin and his accomplices pop into one shop after another, shaking hands with acquaintances everywhere while they casually slip a gun into a bag here, deliver a package there.

For the most part, Medellin’s dealers are able to operate in peace due to an understanding among rival gangs as well as with members of the security forces — many of them on the take.

As long as they keep the streets peaceful, the gangs say police turn a blind eye to their lucrative illegal dealings.

Joaquin calls it a “gangster peace.”

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“There is nothing better than peace,” added “Javier,” an associate who met up with Joaquin and another colleague in a squatted house.

They pack out their guns on a table between religious trinkets in a filthy, lightless living room where horse posters vie with a crude rendition of the Last Supper on the wall.

“Every group manages its territory as it wishes… The bosses talk among themselves. Everything is arranged calmly,” said Javier.

– ‘City of bandits’ –

After Escobar’s demise, the face of organized crime in Medellin changed. Long controlled by a single cartel, the drug trade is now shared between several gangs under the umbrella of the Office.

The gangs had previously collaborated with paramilitary groups and the security forces to help bring an end to Escobar’s Medellin Cartel and oust leftist guerrilla groups that had tried to fill the power void it left.

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As things settled down and every group found its place in the new reality, Medellin’s homicide rate dropped from 350 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1992 to 10.2 per 100,000 so far this year — nearly half the national average.

“The armed groups set the peace and war agenda in the city,” said Luis Fernando Quijano, director of the Corporation for Peace and Social Development, an NGO.

Colombia’s new leftist president, Gustavo Petro, has vowed to bring “total peace” to conflict- and crime-ridden Colombia, including by offering an amnesty to gangsters willing to give themselves up and abandon the trade.

“We are willing to listen. We will do what the bosses decide,” Pedro said of the plan.

But for Joaquin, “to think that everyone will give themselves up is a dream.”

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“Never forget one thing: Medellin is and will always be the city of bandits,” he insisted.

General view of the Comuna 13 neighbourhood in Medellin, Colombia, on February 13, 2022. - One word sums up the history of Medellin over the last twenty years: metamorphosis. After the dark decades of 1970-2000, Colombia's second-largest city is now a transformed, peaceful, dynamic, and attractive city. And one neighborhood, more than any other, symbolizes this renaissance: the famous "Comuna 13". (Photo by JOAQUIN SARMIENTO / AFP)

International

Hiroshima survivor who embraced Obama dies at 88

The emotional embrace between Barack Obama and Hiroshima survivor Mori—who was eight years old when the United States dropped the atomic bomb in 1945—resonated around the world.

According to Asahi Shimbun and other local media, Mori died on Saturday at a hospital in Hiroshima.

Mori, known for his research on the fate of American prisoners of war in Hiroshima, was thrown into a river by the force of the explosion on August 6, 1945, during the atomic bombing of the city.

In a past interview with AFP, ahead of his meeting with Obama at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in 2016, Mori recalled the chaos and desperation that followed the blast.

He described how, after emerging from the water, he encountered injured civilians seeking help amid the devastation, an experience that stayed with him throughout his life.

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In 2016, Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, where he paid tribute to the victims of the first atomic bomb used in warfare. During the visit, Mori was visibly moved as he met the president, sharing a brief but powerful moment that symbolized remembrance and reconciliation.

The bombing of Hiroshima resulted in the deaths of approximately 140,000 people, including those who succumbed to radiation exposure in the aftermath.

Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 74,000 people and contributing to the end of World War II.

International

Colombia seeks ‘total suffocation’ of armed groups with regional support

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According to the minister, coordinated pressure from neighboring countries—backed by United States—aims to dismantle criminal networks that use cross-border routes to traffic Colombian cocaine toward North America and Europe.

For decades, armed groups involved in Colombia’s internal conflict have relied on border territories as strategic rear bases to evade military operations and maintain logistical support.

However, Sánchez said that dynamic is beginning to change.

“We expect a total suffocation between both nations so they have no spaces where they can live or feel safe […] to close off any room they might have,” he stated during the interview in Bogotá, less than five months before the end of President Gustavo Petro’s term.

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Regional developments have reinforced this strategy. Following the capture of Nicolás Maduro in a U.S. military operation, Washington has increased its influence in Caracas, where interim leader Delcy Rodríguez has implemented a renewed anti-narcotics policy.

Meanwhile, in Ecuador, President Daniel Noboa—a key U.S. ally in the region—has launched a two-week security plan under strict curfews to combat criminal gangs, with U.S. support.

Sánchez argued that these combined efforts leave illegal organizations with fewer escape routes and operational spaces, effectively placing them in a “dead end.”

International

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Preliminary findings indicate that an armed individual entered the establishment at around 03:45 local time (02:45 GMT) and opened fire on the victims, who died at the scene from their injuries.

The suspect fled and remains at large, while the motive behind the shooting is still unclear, German media reported. Authorities have launched a large-scale search operation.