Localized Thoughts

Mobile Diaries Part 5: Hitting Refresh in Medellin

As part of the Remote Year program, Our developer Teju Prasad is journeying through Latin America for 4 months.

Say the city “Medellin” to someone who’s never been there, or never considered going, and it’s fairly certain who or what would come to their mind.

I had the luxury of knowing some people who had traveled to the “City of Eternal Spring” (another name for Medellin), so I came here with a bit more of a varied perspective.

However, I’ll admit I was at least curious about how the awful legacy of Pablo Escobar and the narco-traffickers has affected the people and the town at large.

The best I can describe it is, a town that’s decided to “hit refresh.” For me, this was most evident in a tour I took through Remote Year, to Comuna Trece (or Comuna 13) A barrio that was hugely affected by the cartel activities.

Our tour guide, who grew up in Comuna 13 and who was directly and visceral affected by the violence common to the region, started our tour by saying, “Pablo Escobar is a *@&$, but without that *@&$ the world wouldn’t know Medellin.”

Now, with a set of escalators to help ascend the steep hills common to Medellin, Comuna 13 is an epicenter of street art and a draw for tourist groups (when our tour arrived at around 10 am, three others were already in progress)

Technology is a big part of the town’s rebirth as well, creating an environment that encourages communication both digital and physical. One of our other tour guides described how a cable car system and publicly available wifi in the parks was a large part of bringing about transformation to Medellin.

These weren’t simply “nice-to-haves” that acted as window dressing, rather they were essential in making the people feel a sense of normalcy and connectedness, and in the case of the cable cars, actually a mode of transportation for people that live in the hills to travel to different parts of town.