Remaking Medellín
As mayor of Medellín, Colombia, Sergio Fajardo has helped transform one of the world’s most violent cities by bringing beauty and culture to its meanest streets.
By Andres Schipani
“Let me show you,”Raúl tells me, pointing with his left index finger down a street in Medellín, Colombia.
“In that corner, I received a bullet in my head and lost sight in my left eye during an ambush by left-wing guerrillas while I was in a paramilitary group. … A few blocks from here, I had a motorbike accident while I was escaping after shooting somebody in the head when I was a triggerman for a big drug lord, and now I can’t use my right arm.”
While scrambling through the streets of the city of Medellín, before arriving at a square full of the chubby statues by world-renowned artist Fernando Botero, Raúl told me his story. After living for almost fifteen years on the margins of the law, he is now following a recovery program, working as an intern at the mayor’s office, and considering enrolling at a university.
“This place was hell, hell on earth, I can assure you,” he adds, nodding his head, “but things have changed, things have changed for good, and I think we now have one of the most beautiful cities in Latin America … and this is all thanks to Fajardo.”
“Fajardo” is Sergio Fajardo MA’81, PhD’84, the recently retired mayor of Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city. A native of Colombia, he says he came to UW-Madison to get his doctorate in math “because it had the best program in mathematical logic in the whole world.”
After Fajardo returned to his home country, he became a lecturer in mathematics and a researcher at the University of Los Andes in Bogotá, while also working as a newspaper columnist, until he decided to run for mayor of Medellín.
As decades of violence rocked Colombia, Medellín became synonymous with kidnappings, murders, and drug trafficking. During the nineties, there were about 300 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants a year. However, Fajardo did not get the memo. In 2004, a year after he took office, the city saw its least violent year in two decades, with 57 homicides per 100,000; by 2007, the number had dropped to 26.
“We have had to struggle with the label of the most violent city in the world, the city of the [cocaine] cartels, of the paramilitaries. … Medellín was inherently associated with violence,” explains Fajardo, pushing back his unruly curls. In 2002 there was a strong intervention by the central government that started to make things a bit better, but that was not enough for Fajardo. The key issue that he sensed everywhere, on every corner, in every shop, was that the city had “lost its self-esteem … [It] was then a city without a path, without an identity.”
Then, a group of “friends” from various professions — business owners, scientists, members of civic organizations — started to push for more changes. “We always ended up being frustrated,” Fajardo explains. “The challenges coming from the traditional political sectors were very tough.” Fed up with the status quo and tired of hearing excuses from politicians that things were too difficult to change, they stepped in with the attitude that nothing was too difficult, and to their surprise, they found out that people were supporting them. It was a gamble that paid off, especially when Fajardo sought and won the office of mayor as an independent candidate.
By Andres Schipani
“Let me show you,”Raúl tells me, pointing with his left index finger down a street in Medellín, Colombia.
“In that corner, I received a bullet in my head and lost sight in my left eye during an ambush by left-wing guerrillas while I was in a paramilitary group. … A few blocks from here, I had a motorbike accident while I was escaping after shooting somebody in the head when I was a triggerman for a big drug lord, and now I can’t use my right arm.”
While scrambling through the streets of the city of Medellín, before arriving at a square full of the chubby statues by world-renowned artist Fernando Botero, Raúl told me his story. After living for almost fifteen years on the margins of the law, he is now following a recovery program, working as an intern at the mayor’s office, and considering enrolling at a university.
“This place was hell, hell on earth, I can assure you,” he adds, nodding his head, “but things have changed, things have changed for good, and I think we now have one of the most beautiful cities in Latin America … and this is all thanks to Fajardo.”
“Fajardo” is Sergio Fajardo MA’81, PhD’84, the recently retired mayor of Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city. A native of Colombia, he says he came to UW-Madison to get his doctorate in math “because it had the best program in mathematical logic in the whole world.”
After Fajardo returned to his home country, he became a lecturer in mathematics and a researcher at the University of Los Andes in Bogotá, while also working as a newspaper columnist, until he decided to run for mayor of Medellín.
As decades of violence rocked Colombia, Medellín became synonymous with kidnappings, murders, and drug trafficking. During the nineties, there were about 300 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants a year. However, Fajardo did not get the memo. In 2004, a year after he took office, the city saw its least violent year in two decades, with 57 homicides per 100,000; by 2007, the number had dropped to 26.
“We have had to struggle with the label of the most violent city in the world, the city of the [cocaine] cartels, of the paramilitaries. … Medellín was inherently associated with violence,” explains Fajardo, pushing back his unruly curls. In 2002 there was a strong intervention by the central government that started to make things a bit better, but that was not enough for Fajardo. The key issue that he sensed everywhere, on every corner, in every shop, was that the city had “lost its self-esteem … [It] was then a city without a path, without an identity.”
Then, a group of “friends” from various professions — business owners, scientists, members of civic organizations — started to push for more changes. “We always ended up being frustrated,” Fajardo explains. “The challenges coming from the traditional political sectors were very tough.” Fed up with the status quo and tired of hearing excuses from politicians that things were too difficult to change, they stepped in with the attitude that nothing was too difficult, and to their surprise, they found out that people were supporting them. It was a gamble that paid off, especially when Fajardo sought and won the office of mayor as an independent candidate.
But paramilitary groups provided another major obstacle. Immediately after taking office in 2003, Fajardo and his team sought to orchestrate the re-insertion of these group members into society in an effort to decrease the violence. “The [previous] government was the one doing secret settlements and arrangements in dark rooms, and we were never part of those,” he says. “We always acted transparently, and from the start, we made it very clear to the paramilitaries what the rules of the game were.”
Fajardo’s openness was seen as a novelty, and that transparency gained the people’s confidence. So, what was once a hot spot for skirmishes between right-wing paramilitary groups and left-wing guerrillas is now, after his four years in office, a place of artfully designed buildings where a host of cultural, social, and educational projects are mushrooming in the old battlefields.
“To the poorest people, the most beautiful buildings,” he says with a smile. He owes that very particular vision to his father, Raúl, a renowned architect who gave the younger Fajardo a keen sense of the role that architecture can play in society.
Fajardo and his highly enthusiastic team have made a large investment in something that, for him, has been crucial for Medellín. He describes it as “changing the skin of the city.”
Being a pragmatic mathematician with a well-rooted social consciousness, he is convincing when he talks about the changes the city has seen. “When you have gone through many years of violence, then public spaces begin to represent that violence — somebody was killed here in this corner; three years ago, four people were killed in this field. Every corner in this city holds a message saying, ‘There was violence here,’ and that is what people remember,” he explains, echoing what my unofficial tour guide Raúl had told me earlier.
“Changing the skin” means that the mayoral administration has built an impressive social urban transformation in those places that are generally the most humble spots in the city. Where there used to be violence, Fajardo put up the kinds of buildings that most of the residents of Medellín had never had before, including what he calls “park-libraries.”
“We use those words because this is a novel concept,” he says. “There are no words to describe what they are — it is place where we can get together, a park where everybody can be there and get there.”
The park-libraries are indeed a novelty. Directly opposite a crowded women’s prison, a stunning yellow-and-grey structure rises from the edge of a green hill. A metal-and-concrete work of art that would amaze many— even if it were to appear on the streets of Paris — faces a slum.
“That is the idea,” Fajardo claims. “The worst places are now something beautiful with the highest standards.”
Marina, an eighteen-year-old social worker who works part time at this park-library, shows me around as we pass a young, working-class mother carrying her child in one arm and a book by French writer Emile Zola in the other.
Fajardo’s openness was seen as a novelty, and that transparency gained the people’s confidence. So, what was once a hot spot for skirmishes between right-wing paramilitary groups and left-wing guerrillas is now, after his four years in office, a place of artfully designed buildings where a host of cultural, social, and educational projects are mushrooming in the old battlefields.
“To the poorest people, the most beautiful buildings,” he says with a smile. He owes that very particular vision to his father, Raúl, a renowned architect who gave the younger Fajardo a keen sense of the role that architecture can play in society.
Fajardo and his highly enthusiastic team have made a large investment in something that, for him, has been crucial for Medellín. He describes it as “changing the skin of the city.”
Being a pragmatic mathematician with a well-rooted social consciousness, he is convincing when he talks about the changes the city has seen. “When you have gone through many years of violence, then public spaces begin to represent that violence — somebody was killed here in this corner; three years ago, four people were killed in this field. Every corner in this city holds a message saying, ‘There was violence here,’ and that is what people remember,” he explains, echoing what my unofficial tour guide Raúl had told me earlier.
“Changing the skin” means that the mayoral administration has built an impressive social urban transformation in those places that are generally the most humble spots in the city. Where there used to be violence, Fajardo put up the kinds of buildings that most of the residents of Medellín had never had before, including what he calls “park-libraries.”
“We use those words because this is a novel concept,” he says. “There are no words to describe what they are — it is place where we can get together, a park where everybody can be there and get there.”
The park-libraries are indeed a novelty. Directly opposite a crowded women’s prison, a stunning yellow-and-grey structure rises from the edge of a green hill. A metal-and-concrete work of art that would amaze many— even if it were to appear on the streets of Paris — faces a slum.
“That is the idea,” Fajardo claims. “The worst places are now something beautiful with the highest standards.”
Marina, an eighteen-year-old social worker who works part time at this park-library, shows me around as we pass a young, working-class mother carrying her child in one arm and a book by French writer Emile Zola in the other.
“Inside here, you will find an auditorium, books, films, a micro-credit loan office, and an office for entrepreneurialism,” Marina explains. “So what people find here are not just access to culture or a place to hang out — what they find are opportunities.”
Knowledge and culture seem to be behind many of Fajardo’s projects, as he has increased city spending on education, bringing it to 40 percent of the annual budget. “We have built the greatest schools in places where the poorest child in Medellín goes to a school as good as the private one where the rich kid goes,” he says. Fajardo expects that the effects of his spending will resonate beyond the classroom.
However, the former mayor is not without his detractors. Some in Medellín feel he has been wasting their money. At one of the arteries of the city, staring at a boulevard where trees grow from colorful pyramids, Miguel, a local small- business owner, asks, “Why did we let him spend so much money on his useless and pretty projects? We are a very Latin American city — why do we want to be like an American or European one? We might look a bit alike on the surface now, but we will never be one — be sure of that. What this city needs are stronger and more experienced politicians, not a fashionable one.”
Yet Fajardo seems to be learning fast. About five years ago, while campaigning, he crisscrossed the city on foot, talking to people. Until recently, he was crisscrossing the country as the main star of a radio show, trying to understand the realities of other Colombian communities — and gauging whether he feels ready to run in the next presidential race, probably against the incumbent, Alvaro Uribe.
“He would probably be the strongest candidate the center-left has,” according to Adam Isacson, director of programs at the Center for International Policy’s Colombia Program in Washington, D.C. Fajardo is “a very skilled politician, very charismatic, not corrupt, and seems to have a vision for how to govern. On the other hand, he does have a hyper-inflated opinion of himself — the same ‘arrogance’ argument the [Republicans] have used against Obama.”
Isacson adds that some of the credit for transforming his troubled city is shared with Uribe, who increased its security force. Indeed, Uribe is very popular and could be re-elected if the constitution is amended to allow him to seek another term, according to Hernando Rojas, a UW-Madison assistant professor of life sciences communication with a focus on Latin American politics. “I think [Fajardo] will continue to play a very important leadership role in Colombia for years to come, even if he doesn’t get elected,” Rojas says. “Fajardo is very young, and he probably has many years and many elections to come.”
The politician’s youth has also contributed to a rapport with young people that began at Wisconsin, where he was a math teaching assistant. Remarkably, this academic with no prior political affiliation has evolved into a political symbol, especially for young people, his most loyal fans. They have even created more than forty Fajardo groups on Facebook, the social networking Web site.
“I come from the academic world, so my relationship with youngsters is something natural,” he says. “Somehow I became a symbol of youth, without being one, as they felt confident simply because I was close to them.”
He points at his Levis and casual shirt, saying, “I dress up like this all the time, this is the real me, somebody that will never put distance.”
Reaching out to youth has been central to the transformation of the city. “For years and years, the youngsters of Medellín had violence as the only option in life,” Fajardo says. Determined to change that bleak scenario, his team of specialists employed a broad formula tailored for each young person that combined psychological attention with educational and vocational training. Since then, many youths have seen that positive things were happening in their communities and that, as one of Fajardo’s slogans says, “Being good pays good.”
“Violence was our pain, our tumor, and we needed to do something for our community so the youngsters were able to realize the magnitude of the problem. … Helping them find their own talents was a good idea, helping them to grow as musicians, mathematicians, waiters … because when you are young is when you build the way toward a prosperous life,” Fajardo says.
He believes that Medellín’s younger generation needs to develop its own talent — talent that will have nothing to do with crime and violence. “If you have people that have a wall in front of them,” he says, “you need to help them to build doors in that wall.”
And some did build those doors. At the business office of a sports shop close to Barrio Triste, Yuli, a twenty-year-old single mother of a paraplegic child, talks with me over a cup of sublime Colombian coffee.
“I come from a humble family,” she says. “My mother abandoned me when I was twelve, and I used to live with my sick uncle in what used to be a very dangerous neighborhood. I gave birth three years ago, and at the beginning [that] was very hard for me, to raise a kid and support myself. I wanted to study, but my family was pressuring me not to do it.
“I thought there was no way out, no future,” she tells me, adding with a growing smile, “but now, after attending one of the courses the mayor’s office started to offer, I’ve got an internship here [at the shop], and now they’ve offered me a full-time position. I am now attending another course and I feel I am growing. I see a future now, for my kid and me. I see a future for this city. And if Medellín and I now have a future, it is because of Sergio Fajardo.”
Andres Schipani is an Argentine-born Latin America correspondent for the BBC. Educated at Oxford, Cardiff, and London, he also writes regularly on Latin American issues for newspapers such as The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, and the Financial Times.
Knowledge and culture seem to be behind many of Fajardo’s projects, as he has increased city spending on education, bringing it to 40 percent of the annual budget. “We have built the greatest schools in places where the poorest child in Medellín goes to a school as good as the private one where the rich kid goes,” he says. Fajardo expects that the effects of his spending will resonate beyond the classroom.
However, the former mayor is not without his detractors. Some in Medellín feel he has been wasting their money. At one of the arteries of the city, staring at a boulevard where trees grow from colorful pyramids, Miguel, a local small- business owner, asks, “Why did we let him spend so much money on his useless and pretty projects? We are a very Latin American city — why do we want to be like an American or European one? We might look a bit alike on the surface now, but we will never be one — be sure of that. What this city needs are stronger and more experienced politicians, not a fashionable one.”
Yet Fajardo seems to be learning fast. About five years ago, while campaigning, he crisscrossed the city on foot, talking to people. Until recently, he was crisscrossing the country as the main star of a radio show, trying to understand the realities of other Colombian communities — and gauging whether he feels ready to run in the next presidential race, probably against the incumbent, Alvaro Uribe.
“He would probably be the strongest candidate the center-left has,” according to Adam Isacson, director of programs at the Center for International Policy’s Colombia Program in Washington, D.C. Fajardo is “a very skilled politician, very charismatic, not corrupt, and seems to have a vision for how to govern. On the other hand, he does have a hyper-inflated opinion of himself — the same ‘arrogance’ argument the [Republicans] have used against Obama.”
Isacson adds that some of the credit for transforming his troubled city is shared with Uribe, who increased its security force. Indeed, Uribe is very popular and could be re-elected if the constitution is amended to allow him to seek another term, according to Hernando Rojas, a UW-Madison assistant professor of life sciences communication with a focus on Latin American politics. “I think [Fajardo] will continue to play a very important leadership role in Colombia for years to come, even if he doesn’t get elected,” Rojas says. “Fajardo is very young, and he probably has many years and many elections to come.”
The politician’s youth has also contributed to a rapport with young people that began at Wisconsin, where he was a math teaching assistant. Remarkably, this academic with no prior political affiliation has evolved into a political symbol, especially for young people, his most loyal fans. They have even created more than forty Fajardo groups on Facebook, the social networking Web site.
“I come from the academic world, so my relationship with youngsters is something natural,” he says. “Somehow I became a symbol of youth, without being one, as they felt confident simply because I was close to them.”
He points at his Levis and casual shirt, saying, “I dress up like this all the time, this is the real me, somebody that will never put distance.”
Reaching out to youth has been central to the transformation of the city. “For years and years, the youngsters of Medellín had violence as the only option in life,” Fajardo says. Determined to change that bleak scenario, his team of specialists employed a broad formula tailored for each young person that combined psychological attention with educational and vocational training. Since then, many youths have seen that positive things were happening in their communities and that, as one of Fajardo’s slogans says, “Being good pays good.”
“Violence was our pain, our tumor, and we needed to do something for our community so the youngsters were able to realize the magnitude of the problem. … Helping them find their own talents was a good idea, helping them to grow as musicians, mathematicians, waiters … because when you are young is when you build the way toward a prosperous life,” Fajardo says.
He believes that Medellín’s younger generation needs to develop its own talent — talent that will have nothing to do with crime and violence. “If you have people that have a wall in front of them,” he says, “you need to help them to build doors in that wall.”
And some did build those doors. At the business office of a sports shop close to Barrio Triste, Yuli, a twenty-year-old single mother of a paraplegic child, talks with me over a cup of sublime Colombian coffee.
“I come from a humble family,” she says. “My mother abandoned me when I was twelve, and I used to live with my sick uncle in what used to be a very dangerous neighborhood. I gave birth three years ago, and at the beginning [that] was very hard for me, to raise a kid and support myself. I wanted to study, but my family was pressuring me not to do it.
“I thought there was no way out, no future,” she tells me, adding with a growing smile, “but now, after attending one of the courses the mayor’s office started to offer, I’ve got an internship here [at the shop], and now they’ve offered me a full-time position. I am now attending another course and I feel I am growing. I see a future now, for my kid and me. I see a future for this city. And if Medellín and I now have a future, it is because of Sergio Fajardo.”
Andres Schipani is an Argentine-born Latin America correspondent for the BBC. Educated at Oxford, Cardiff, and London, he also writes regularly on Latin American issues for newspapers such as The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, and the Financial Times.
Events
- Global Hot Spots Lecture Series - December 11
