The gondola rises fast from Acevedo transit station, hard beside the Medellín River. After a rush of vertigo, The Travelers settle. Their eyes see beyond the car’s seven tired occupants—working people with one of the world’s most unusual daily commutes. They ride an airborne cable-hoisted gondola to and from Santo Domingo, a red-brick crumble and jumble of a barrio high on an eastern mountain face over Colombia’s second-largest city.
Magnificent Medellín, with 2 million people, stretches up and down the river valley. Santo Domingo and other hillside settlements rise from both sides of the river, great red suburban wings fanning up the steep slopes of the Andes. In the valley, skyscrapers climb, showing prosperity’s bright, modern glitter.
The higher The Travelers cable the mountainsides here, the poorer the houses. This flips the model familiar to those of us raised in the United States, where Beverly Hills and Druid Hills and Brooklyn Heights signify comfort and, often, luxury.
Here, we dangle in space over Medellín neighborhoods that made the city notorious in the 1980s. Pablo Escobar rose to power here in these slums above the graceful city. Escobar made a name first as a street hood, then apprenticed to a powerful drug baron. He outgrew his master, ultimately amassing an estimated $30 billion in wealth (in some estimates) by smuggling 80 percent of the cocaine used in the United States during the high-flying 1980s.
Escobar functioned in those times with showy ostentation, protected by corruption and the mega-dollars he made supplying the eager noses of customers in Miami, Las Vegas, L.A., New York … anywhere the cool, rich, party people gathered.
The cartel boss also became a Colombian senator, endearing himself to many of Medellín’s desperately poor in their houses of stolen planks and unpainted red cinder blocks, their tin roofs held down by black stones.
He cultivated a Robin Hood image in the barrios 100 meters beneath the shoes of the people in the cable car. Escobar parked cars on the unpaved streets of Santo Domingo, opened their trunks, and handed out guns. These weapons gave many poor Colombians their first taste of empowerment, their first feelings of value. They willingly hid Escobar when he needed hiding, and they kept his secrets.
Escobar died at the hands of the Colombian National Police nearly a quarter century ago. Since the last shovelful of dirt fell on his grave, Medellín has managed one of the greatest image make-overs in world history.
Today, the broad swath of Medellín along the river buzzes with vitality, its streets florid with life and color. Banks and hospitals and businesses fill high towers. Escalators, not stairs, glide citizens and visitors up mountain slopes in places. A sprawling plaza around the Botero Museum constantly hums with life, people posing, often in risqué positions, on the 23 bronze Botero sculptures. (Fernando Botero, a native of Medellín, claims an international reputation for whimsical artworks of impossibly plus-sized humans.)
The nightclubs and restaurants of Parque Lleras surely make up one of the liveliest weekend scenes in Latin America. Colombians generally consider the girls of Medellín to be the most beautiful in the nation (rivaled only by those of Cali to the south). These chicas go partying in little twittering flocks, trailed by wolf packs of lean-and-hungry paisa boys. (People in Antioquia, this part of Colombia, call themselves paisas.) Euro-kids stump past under worn backpacks, headed for youth hostels. Gringos arrive from Cincinnati and San Diego and all points north, flashing dollars and hoping to dance till dawn at expensive discos … and maybe get lucky.
There’s a kid, a boy, in the cable car. He acts shy, barnacled to his mother, pressing himself into a corner. Behind his head, the afternoon sun lights Medellín, now far below.