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Great to be back in El Paso again. I’m here until mid-July, almost to the end of my 2-month work sabbatical. Say hi if you see me at a café or taquería.
I’m off to the airport shortly to return to the United States. I had a few hours off here in Medellín today, though, to see an important part of the city that I’d visited in 2006 and 2013. Here are some quick notes.
Comuna 13 is a set of neighborhoods on the western edge of the city, first settled—often by forcibly displaced people—in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a “no go zone” for the rest of the city for many years, known for government neglect and gang violence. Guerrilla militias were dominant in the 1990s. Then, in 2002, the new government of Álvaro Uribe launched an intense military offensive in the neighborhood, “Operación Orión.” Soldiers and police fought hand-in-hand with brutal paramilitary groups to root out the guerrillas. Dozens were killed and disappeared; people still find bodies buried nearby.
The paramilitaries took over criminality in the neighborhood, which today continues to have a heavy gang presence. But Medellín’s mayors also started investing very heavily in Comuna 13, integrating these abandoned areas into the city’s civic and economic life, often working with community organizations.
See a report from my 2006 visit to Comuna 13 here (starting on page 11), with some photos of what the neighborhood looked like then. See, in Spanish, the National Center for Historical Memory’s report on Comuna 13 in 2001-2003.
So anyway, it was jarring to see the neighborhood now, after so many years. It is far more peaceful and prosperous, as gang disputes have eased and the government’s investments have borne fruit.
But most bizarrely, Comuna 13 is now a tourist destination. Not really because of its violent history—though hired guides will tell you about what happened there—but because it is accessible, has great views, and offers casual travelers a gritty, edgy, graffiti-artist atmosphere that you don’t find elsewhere in this business-friendly city of expressways and shopping centers.
So where not so long ago there were running battles and forced disappearances, you can take a series of escalators to areas stuffed with the kinds of bars and shops where you can buy a cannabis-infused beer and a Pablo Escobar t-shirt, or get tattooed. (There are more creative sites there too, but they’re being crowded out by a lot of stuff that…well, let’s just say it’s not for me.)
Comuna 13’s poverty is still there, very much in plain view, which makes the party vibe even more jarring. What I saw today is preferable to what I saw in 2006, but Comuna 13 is still, without a doubt, a very hard place to grow up or raise a family.
I’m glad I saw it, and I’m glad that Comuna 13 is now easy to get to from the rest of Medellín, and is now considered an important part of the city.
Here are a few things I learned from fellow panelists at today’s sessions of a migration conference at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín.
Here’s today’s panel at Medellín, Colombia’s Universidad de Antioquia, where I presented with Carolina Moreno of Bogotá’s Universidad de los Andes. (It’s in Spanish, which means that viewers have to puzzle through my Spanish. I’m not much more articulate in English, honestly.)
Until I ran out of time, I spoke about current migration trends, what’s happening with U.S. border and migration policy, and the poor choices that countries have for managing in-transit migration.
You can download a PDF file of the slides I used at bit.ly/2024-adam-unal-med.
My deepest thanks to professors Lirio Gutiérrez and Elena Butti of the Universidad Nacional Sede Antioquia for leading the great team of faculty and students who have organized this two-day conference. I’ve learned a lot from the panels.
And there’s another in-person day to go. I’m moderating a panel at 9:00AM tomorrow local time (10:00 on the U.S. east coast) and the discussions of migration go on until 4:00PM.
So it’s time to get some rest. But first, a few snapshots.
Hello from the gate in Miami. Look forward to being back in Medellín, where I’m speaking at an academic conference on migration. It’s been a while since I’ve visited Colombia’s second-largest city.
We’ve successfully driven back to Washington from Massachusetts today, after successfully picking up our daughter at college, where she succeeded in completing her second year. So much success.
Traffic wasn’t bad, and weather was mostly decent, in the northeastern United States today. America really does have an incredible amount of roads. And an incredible amount of people in cars, few of whom know that they’re not supposed to drive slowly in the leftmost lane.
It was too distant to get a picture, but for a moment driving through Baltimore we got a view of the ruins of the Key Bridge. It looks just like the photos in the news—and weeks later, the boat that hit it is still sitting there, right at the impact spot.
In New Jersey, we stopped for lunch with an old friend and his family. (I grew up in New Jersey and attended my town’s public schools from kindergarten all the way through high school.) For some reason, my friend had saved a 35-year-old copy of the high school English department’s “literary magazine.”
I have no memory of writing this incredible bummer of a poem. Nowadays, I feel at least a bit better about my fellow humans: let’s give some credit for art, literature, music, science, philosophy, and similar triumphs. But there are still days when this poem is on the nose.
Ten and a half hours after we’d left our hotel in Massachusetts, we arrived home and unpacked just as a rainstorm was ending. Check out that rainbow.
Hello from Massachusetts. I’m now the proud dad of a kid who is officially halfway through college. Wellesley College has treated her well, but she won’t be back here until 2025 because she’ll be studying abroad (in Asia, not Latin America) in the fall.
Parents in minivans and SUVs (mostly rented, like us) were helping empty out the dorms, where most kids were being kicked out today. At least the weather was pleasant. We’re back to Washington tomorrow.
The Washington Office on Latin America celebrated 50 years since its founding last night. As someone who spent the past 14 of those years with WOLA, I was delighted to be on hand at a party with 400 people, all living former directors, and 3 inspiring human rights awardees.
I was home before midnight, then up four hours later to fly to Massachusetts to pick up my daughter at college. That’s where I’m writing from right now.
A truly great night.
At Washington’s 9:30 Club, Karly Hartzman screams through the harrowing final minutes of “Bull Believer,” from last year’s phenomenal album Rat Saw God.
This is from 2002. The posters look like they were printed by Gutenberg.
Check out these photos from our late-October visit to northwestern Colombia, at the threshold of the Darién Gap migration route.
Our photographer Sergio Ortiz Borbolla did a masterful job here. The kid in the dinosaur costume just guts me.
I just got back to Washington at mid-day today, after two weeks in Colombia. Before I left, I replaced my four-and-a-half year-old phone with a current model, because the old one’s port wasn’t always connecting to the cable and I didn’t want to find myself there with an unpowered phone.
The new phone isn’t much different than the old one, with one huge exception: the camera, which makes me seem like a much better photographer than I actually am.
Here are some images that are less work-related but just pretty cool. Presented in no particular order. Click on any to expand in a new window. (I’ve shared other photos from the trip in two earlier posts.)
Greetings from Bogotá. I’m here until tomorrow night, with 10 meetings on the schedule today and tomorrow.
This was day 13 of a 14-day research trip. I’ve slept in 10 different hotels in 9 places:
The purpose of this insane itinerary was to learn about the latest developments in migration through, and to, Colombia. I was able to visit the Colombia-Panama and Colombia-Ecuador border regions.
With two WOLA colleagues I was on the outskirts of the Darién Gap region straddling Colombia and Panama, through which nearly 500,000 migrants have passed so far this year. With longtime Colombian colleagues I also visited the border between Carchi, Ecuador and Nariño, Colombia, through which hundreds of Darién-bound migrants from dozens of countries pass each day.
While at the Colombia-Ecuador border I was also able to spend a few days in the department of Putumayo, which is where U.S.-backed military and police anti-drug operations began after the 2000 passage of the Clinton administration’s mammoth initial “Plan Colombia” aid package. Twenty-three years later, Putumayo remains a principal zone of coca and cocaine production, under the heavy influence of two feuding armed groups.
I need to go through my tens of thousands of words of notes just to come up with the number of meetings and conversations I’ve had since October 22. It’s more than 50. I’ve talked to people migrating, aid workers, international organizations, migrants associations, Indigenous groups, campesino groups, coca cultivators, mayors and other local officials, national government officials, U.S. diplomats, journalists, human rights defenders, police, scholars, and I’m sure I’m forgetting some sectors.
I’ve barely had time yet to process my notes, much less wrap my head around what I’ve seen and heard. But here are some photos from Putumayo, northern Ecuador, and Nariño. (I posted Darién-area photos about a week ago.)
See also:
I spent the past few days in and around Necoclí, Colombia, an area through which tens of thousands of migrants, from dozens of countries, pass. Here, they take boats across the Gulf of Urabá to the Darién region straddling Colombia and Panama, where they undergo a treacherous several-day journey through dense jungle.
Here are a few photos. I’m in another zone of Colombia now, as research continues, so there’s no time to write much yet. We had our photographer Sergio with us, who took much better photos than the ones here.
I’m not there now, I’m elsewhere. Lots to talk about soon, but way too busy right now for writing text…
Chile President Gabriel Boric right now in Washington’s Sheridan Circle, at today’s memorial of the 1976 state terrorist attack here that killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt.
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