Revisiting Medellin's Governance Arrangement After the Dust Settled

Introduction

In the mid-1980s the activities of Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel led to the city of Medellin, Colombia being branded the “cocaine and murder capital of the world” (Borrell 1988). Just two decades later, the 2008 General Assembly of the Organization of American States was held in Medellin in recognition of the city's recovery and set up an observatory to monitor and promote internationally what it called the “Medellin model” (Alcaldía de Medellín/BID 2009; Echeverri and Orsini 2010; Architectural Review 2011). Named in 2013 the World's Most Innovative City (BBC 2013) and selected as host for the World Urban Forum in 2014, Medellin's transformation was portrayed by the Urban Land Institute as “one of the most remarkable turnarounds in modern history” and by Next City, Inspiring Better Cities as “Latin America's new superstar” (Scruggs 2014).

At the core of this shift was an award-winning paradigm of “good governance” implemented by two successive administrations over the period 2004–2011. Their formal platform called for transparency, fiscal discipline and citizen participation with a substantive emphasis adapted to the city's particular challenges relating to education, culture, entrepreneurship, inclusion, and peaceful coexistence. However, its most celebrated program, “social urbanism,” consisted of a set of strategic and highly publicized interventions in the poorest sectors of the city, including a cable-car system, park-libraries designed by prominent architects, “integral urban projects” (PUIs) consisting of multiple, simultaneous programs of transport, landscaping, street lighting, environmentally friendly interventions, cultural centers, new schools and a low-income electric stairway. Publicized as a new “social contract” between the city and its low-income communities (Alcaldía de Medellin/BID op. cit.; Urbam 2015) social urbanism received the full attention of the international media covering repeatedly “Medellin's miracle.” Although widely praised and honored, some critics referred to it as “half a miracle” (Fukuyama and Colby 2011) and a façade for the city's financialized narco-capitalism (Hylton 2010; Franz 2017) while others pointed to its limited transformative effects, a mere case of successful city branding (Maclean 2015) or the absorption of the city in the global circles of capital.

Now that the dust has settled and global attention has turned to other matters, we decided to revisit the city's governance practices. Medellin's now waning celebrity status coincides with a wider recognition of the limits of conventional “good governance” to resolve underlying social problems of cities and the legitimacy crisis of local government. Crucially, our case study approach enabled us to go beyond the procedural dimension of governance and focus on the question of context, or the particular conditions within which a celebrated governance project emerged; and thereby to incorporate key actors usually excluded from governance analysis due to their illegitimate status (such as, militias and paramilitary groups, drug mafias and other criminal organizations). Along these lines, this research suggests that Medellin's governance arrangement rested on the often-tense coexistence of highly unequal forces and questionable partnerships and coalitions. We could address the conflicts and tactics behind temporary alliances as opposed to lasting consensus and trace the co-existence and variable fortunes of contending forces behind the spectacle of signature programs and city branding - all of which resulted in the cooptation of civil society, “institutionalized violence,” a reinvigorated neoliberal agenda and the consolidation of corporate power. Although it adopted the language of white papers rather than a socially engineered miracle, Medellin's governance arrangement was shaped by the actors and circumstances of the times and facilitated by the agreement of criminal forces in cahoots with national government to “pacify” the city.

Starting with a discussion of the polysemic nature of the term governance, this paper goes on to review both the rhetoric and practice of governance and describe our method of inquiry. Next, it develops a brief outline of the structural and historical context of the Medellin experience and discusses each of the major components of the governance arrangement, to conclude with general findings and wider connotations/implications.

Governance Theory and Practice

The term governance acquired widespread currency with the dissemination of neoliberal economic policies and conditionalities by international institutions (e.g., Commission of the European Communities 2001; IEG-World Bank Group 2010) since the 1980s. Arguing that “the state increasingly depends on other organizations to secure its intentions, deliver its policies, and establish a pattern of rule” (Bevir 2016) governance called for the establishment of horizontal, flexible, inclusive, democratic, and transparent partnerships between the public and private sectors and civil society. The World Bank (1997, vii) described it as “[…] predictable, open and enlightened policy making; a bureaucracy imbued with a professional ethos; an executive arm of government accountable for its actions; and a strong civil society participating in public affairs.” Claiming that markets are more efficient than governments, neoliberals advocate rolling back the state and embracing “entrepreneurial government” based on competition, markets, customers, and measurement of outcomes (Bevir op. cit.). Democracy advocates, meanwhile, used the opportunity to endorse the replacement of autocratic government by partnerships centered on civil society.

Across the right-left political spectrum, the governance literature ranges from prescriptive praise at one extreme to structural critique at the other. While the former extols the technical virtues of “good governance,” how to do it, and best practices (e.g., Langseth et al. 1997; Agranoff and McGuire 2003; Grindle 2010; Lupala 2015; Avis 2016), the latter associates it with neoliberalism in the sense of government at the service of powerful private interests (Pierre 2005), market-based policies (Davies 2007), community disempowerment (O’Hare 2018), anti-labor practices (Feuerstein and Herrigel 2017) and social control (Jessop 2002; Moncada 2013). Executive style city mayors – Giuliani in New York for example - emerged as key figures for implementing this approach (Lyne de Ver 2008; see also Maclean 2017, for a critique of its gendered construction with specific reference to Medellin).

How can we characterize the case of Medellin? Peck, Theodore, and Brenner (2013) make the important general point that governance is simultaneously an institutional practice and a political project, involving multiple possibilities of concretion in different times and places. In this sense, the procedural/symbolic practices of governance are evidently crucial in determining the horizon of possible economic, social and political outcomes, though not necessarily in a linear fashion. Medellin exercised a set of symbolic practices with elan but, as we shall describe below, with outcomes radically different from those promised. Violence, poverty and inequality persist in albeit different form, civil society was weakened, and government legitimacy remains in question. For understanding how this occurred it is necessary to go beyond superficial images and procedures to explore the more obscure processes and political undercurrents through which such outcomes emerged.

Research Approach

To explore the Medellin model of governance, we commenced with a systematic review of the governance literature and the literature on the Medellin experience—including official documents of the administrations under examination, NGOs, media and academic publications, and accounts and publications shedding light on the social and political situation from which and within which the “Medellin model” emerged and took form. The presence of non-conventional forces in the coalition, the associated conflicts, and the gap between rationalizations and facts, convinced us to dig beyond the surface. Taking inspiration from realpolitik's (see Frankel 1997; Sleat 2014; Bew 2019) focus on what actually happened and from “realrationalität's” emphasis (Flyvbjerg 1996) on what is actually done, we worked to unveil the nuances and “messiness” of power. We extracted a list of forty informants directly involved in or covering the experience as well as researchers from social and academic institutions and contacted them to request an interview; we added eight names from the suggestions of interviewees for a total list of forty-eight individuals. Although we could not reach all of them, we completed thirty-two in-depth interviews involving forty interviewees.

We used an open format asking all interviewees to provide as complete as possible an account of their participation and to reflect critically on it; we also developed questions specific to each interviewee about the role they played or the issue they knew best. For example, key issues explored with NGO representatives concerned the significance of the experience for their organizations and constituents, their role in the governance arrangement, their interaction with other actors, and the short- and long-term effects of the experience on them. Interviews lasted between one and two hours, some longer, were conducted between August and November 2017, and were evenly distributed between former government officials, academics, NGO representatives, business associations and insiders and media and social activists engaged in documenting or researching the Medellin experience. For reasons of access/security we were unable to interview members of illegal organizations and top representatives of the city's business group GEA; however, their views were covered in reports, documents, and research by or about them or in interviews with representatives of industrial associations and insiders. Upon completion of the list and documentation, we were satisfied that a point of saturation had been reached and that further interviews would provide little significant new information. Interviewees broke sharply between supporters, critics and historians of the experience with the first regurgitating the official, documented line and reluctant to take a critical stance from a distance, the second differing sharply from the experience and the last trying to sort through the differences.

We read the transcribed interviews carefully and constructed a narrative including the agreements across the interviews and making a list of the points of divergence and conflict. To sort through differences we focused on “what actually happened,” verifying the narrative against the documents and written accounts of the various components. Considering the controversial issues emerging from the interviews as “moments of contention” for further analysis, we triangulated (understood here as the use of different data sources in qualitative research to develop a comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon) documentary evidence, interviewees’ views/interpretations and academic accounts. On these bases, we developed factual accounts of the genesis of the movement, the parties involved, and the circumstances surrounding the arrangement. When we ran into gaps and inconsistencies, we consulted sources that could help resolve them.

Differing from more conventional studies, we were most interested in the power structures and strategies behind “good governance” descriptions. At the end of the analysis, we re-examined the literature on governance to determine the contribution of our case to the governance debate. Although the international notoriety of the case, marketed as a model for Global South cities, appeared to justify this inquiry, we realized that the case was unique in the composition of the governance arrangement (it included a disparate set of legal and illegal, conservative and progressive, corporate and grassroots forces) and the conjunctures that made it possible. As for the presentation of findings, we used narrative for reasons of expediency (it allowed us to focus on findings first extracted from the interviews and then verified by other sources) and length (should we use a combination of narrative and interview excerpts the article required far more space than the one customarily established for a journal article of this sort). Still, we inserted excerpts that helped strengthen and enliven the narrative. We made sure to follow the cannons of case studies and qualitative research while using the narrative to describe the experience and to develop the trends. The story as told, we believe, showed that the Medellin experience and “model” was so unique that it could not be presented as a model for the Global South to imitate. At the same time, it served to question the assumptions of “good governance” while calling for analyses that place experiences in their context and determine their uniqueness before they are marketed as replicable solutions for cities in the Global South. By doing this, we combined conjunctural elements with narrative to produce theory.

Structural and Historical Background

The discourse of governance constructed the idea of a break with the past and a sense of renovation of democracy (Harvey 2005). In Latin America, though imposed through the Washington Consensus in the 1990s, it was made palatable and even desirable by the rhetoric of democracy after an extended period of civil war and military dictatorships. However, Colombia was plunged into a series of internal crises from the 1980s onwards with defining consequences for the trajectory of Medellin's governance practices. Firstly, at a strictly economic level, Medellin's traditional manufacturing base, especially the textile/apparel sector, and the governing compact associated with it, were eroded substantially. This crisis forced firms to close or restructure, institutions to fold or reorganize, and workers to seek alternative forms of survival. However, the city's economy retained its national standing through the interlinking of directorates and ownerships of the major companies surviving the crisis or assuming a central place in the new economic order under the Sindicato Antioqueño, later known as the Grupo Empresarial Antioqueño – GEA ¹ (Antioquia Business Group) (Londoño 2004; Restrepo Santamaría 2011). This articulation not only helped reconstitute the local economy around the financial, real estate and service sectors, but also created a new compact that then sought to develop a new public-private partnership.

A second structural factor was the dramatic expansion of informal and illegal economies drawing on the employment void left by deindustrialization. Employment in the former went from 30 percent of all city jobs in 1970 to 50.2 percent in 1984 and to 55.7 percent in 2000. While contraband in goods and illegal drug trafficking grew in many Colombian cities from the 1960s onwards, the Medellin cartel began to dominate the highly lucrative cocaine trade in the 1980s. While much has been made of the violence, lawlessness, and political crisis it caused, the rise of the illegal drugs trade also had great economic significance, bringing new wealth to the city—much of which fed construction, car sales, and commercial activities or made its way to local financial institutions. This “narco-capital,” Hylton (2007) argues, was the bridge between the old manufacturing economy and the new economy dominated by service industries.

A third factor making Medellin's experience particularly complex concerns insurgency and counterinsurgency. Largely contained in the countryside, armed revolutionary organizations formed urban militias in the 1980s that disputed territorial control of inner-city neighborhoods until the early 2000s, subsequently replaced by right-wing paramilitaries and a diverse group of powerful criminal organizations, all involved in violent conflictive operations. From the 1980s on, the poor sectors of the city were subject to the influence and territorial struggles of urban militias, paramilitaries, and illegal drugs organizations. Government persecution especially of the militias led to states of exception, the intensification of armed conflict and human rights abuses (Ceballos Melguizo and Cronshaw 2000; Salazar 2002; Hylton 2010) which still persist today. To address this chaos, state and organized crime engaged in ambiguous relationships producing an uneasy symbiosis, referred to as “íntrico” or intertwining by Cívico (2012). A final factor influential in the emergence of new governance practices consists of legislative changes (an institutional reform of 1986 introducing the election of mayors and the new Constitution enacted in 1991) that deinstitutionalized and fragmented the two-party system opening the door for new coalitions and electoral fronts (Moncada 2016).

These factors produced the perfect storm unleashing a series of reactions and initiatives to restore governability that culminated with the election of Compromiso Ciudadano mayors in 2003 and 2007 and the establishment of the governance arrangement behind the celebrated “Medellin miracle.” The transformation of the 1980s and 1990s panorama of economic decline, endemic violence, and social decomposition into an internationally lauded model of urban development is the heart of the Medellin storyline. The “miraculous” nature of the shift, we argue, only makes sense against the backdrop of the dramatic severity of the initial situation (and less so on actual outcomes) and was made possible by pragmatic accommodations between legal and illegal forces. Fajardo's mayoralty was depicted in public discourses as based on modern, rational, transparent principles; honest, inclusive, and innovative in its practices; and above all, achieving the elusive task of appearing to be simultaneously both economically competitive and socially progressive. In contrast, Franz (2017) depicts it as the culmination of the process of socioeconomic restructuring of the city through a partnership between a populist administration and the business group GEA marking the “shift in the interests of the region's elites” (p. 65) and in the economic policies of the city. This arrangement, we argue, evolved from organized responses to the structural challenges of the 1980s and 1990s and can be described best as a new hegemony dominated by the economic elites of the new economy, endorsed by the leaders of the grassroots, and made possible by the acquiescence of illegal forces.

We present the main findings in the following subsections, starting with the three conventional components of Medellin's governance arrangement (the public and private sectors and civil society) and a fourth, the criminal economy. Although we identified other actors (e.g., the informal economy and small-scale enterprises; community-based groups; professional organizations), analytically we persisted with these four components since they managed to subsume, coopt, or suppress the rest. Whilst the literature on governance includes only legitimate actors, in Medellin only the acquiescence of criminal actors and pacts of non-aggression with the city made the whole experiment possible (Arratia Sandoval 2017).

The Public Sector

Leading the governance arrangement of 2004–2011 were two independent mayors and a movement that won the elections with the support of groups coalescing in the 1990s to address the crises plaguing the city since the 1980s. The new administration broke the monopoly of the conservative and liberal parties (or segments within them) governing the country and the city ancestrally (Gilbert 2015). It was led by Sergio Fajardo (2004–2007), a young, charismatic leader from a well-to-do Medellin family, son of a prominent architect owner of a family construction firm, doctor in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and professor at the prestigious private Los Andes University in Bogotá. Fajardo entered electoral politics as candidate of a diverse aggrupation of social organizations, known as Compromiso Comunitario, but had been active in the local scene previously as member of the Comisión Facilitadora de Paz de Antioquia, alongside Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oscar Arias (1995), as subdirector of the local conservative newspaper El Colombiano, as contributor to various other media, and as a consultant of Pro-Antioquia, the non-profit arm of GEA.

Fajardo's family and institutional background clearly facilitated support for the movement from Colombia's hardline conservative president Uribe, the GEA and other establishment bodies, animated by their opposition to the previous mayor Luis Pérez (2001–2003) who had threatened the close traditional relationship between the city administration and traditional business interests in Medellín (Restrepo Santamaría 2011). A parallel factor of key importance in the election of Fajardo were the dialogical encounters during the 1990s, energized by the presidential program (see previous section). These programs brought together community leaders, NGOs, academics, and businesses around practical solutions to the inner city's grave social problems, collaborations which produced a series of plans (e.g., the Social Pact of 1993 and the Strategic Plan of 1997) that became the basis for the establishment of the Compromiso Ciudadano platform. Supported by fifty associates, some of them associated with the Barcelona experiment, Fajardo became the voice of the movement and of GEA, presiding over an administration that earned multiple awards (Devlin and Chaskel 2010) for its social programs, and launched a new economic agenda of competitiveness that advanced the international standing of GEA (Moncada 2016). ²

Fajardo's government secretary and close colleague, Alonso Salazar, succeeded Fajardo as mayor and continued the same policy line, social programs, and urban projects. Salazar, however, according to our informants and sources had a more difficult time politically. From a modest background, he had his political origins in NGOs and in investigative journalism on the social impact of the drugs trade on the poor sectors of the city. His background, sources and interviewees agreed, deprived him of the class solidarity of the local ruling elite enjoyed by Fajardo; moreover, his combative character immersed him in conflicts with both institutional and illegal actors.

The verdict on the Fajardo-Salazar governance regime is split. On the one hand, they brought a refreshing air to city government and an accessible jeans-and-shirt-sleeves style while changing an old tradition of political quotas for a highly capable bureaucracy; they aligned with the politics of diversity (Bell and Binnie 2004) issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and disablement; and carried out high aesthetic impact projects built quickly and efficiently (although some, especially the emblematic España park-library, have since suffered serious construction problems involving considerable economic and social costs) that earned this regime tremendous visibility (Hein, Ngalamulume and Robinson 2010). In a context of militarized authoritarianism in national government and conflict, violence, and a local tradition of corruption, they personified an ideal of transparent, progressive, inclusive, and technocratic government. On the other hand, despite high levels of social spending, inequality remained unchanged, a highly publicized program of school construction had little effect on the city's education rating, and the decrease in violence often attributed to social urbanism had little to do with it (Borráez 2014). Various interviewees agreed with researchers, such as, Franz (2017) and Maclean (2015) that the neoliberal policies and practices benefitting primarily the private sector that was at the core of these administrations were hidden from view. Informants and researchers agreed that the much hailed social urbanism programs were cleverly executed and highly publicized adaptations of experiments taken from Barcelona, Brazil and Bogotá that failed to produce the “urban acupuncture” effects in the vast low-income sectors of the city (Brand and Dávila 2011; Brand 2013; Dávila 2013; Reimerink 2014; Capillé and Psarra 2016; Sotomayor 2017; García, Smith and Calderon 2018) that were so heavily advertised, whilst the flexibilization of planning regulations accelerated the ongoing property boom and produced far greater urban transformations in the wealthy than in the poor sectors of the city (García Bocanegra 2014).

Nevertheless, social urbanism had important effects in destigmatizing the popular sectors and linking their neighborhoods to the city through infrastructure developments. The permanence of these symbolic effects relied on two main supports: discursive production and city marketing, the first especially important for internal consumption (Quinchía Roldán 2012) and the second for export. Between 2004 and 2015, Medellín received twenty-one national and thirty international awards (Mazo 2016). The subsequent mayor Anibal Gaviria (2012–2015) marked the transition of ensuing administrations by abandoning the discourse and spatial representations of social urbanism and re-embracing party politics. However, vigorous city promotion continued to attract international business, cultural, academic and sporting events to the city, a recent prize being its designation during the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos to represent Latin America as a Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Perhaps the most visible impact of this regime was the reenactment of the founding myth that made the citizens of the city/province embrace an identity of exception in the Colombian concert (Leyva 2014, 129).

The Private Sector

The second and most defining component of Medellin's award-winning governance arrangement was the private sector that not only had many of its top executives appointed to critical boards and policy making positions and gave its companies a central place in finances, insurance, and public works within the Fajardo and Salazar administrations but that also transformed the city's political economy into a market-based subsidiary of global capital—completing a process started in 1978 with the constitution of GEA. Deeply engaged in the competition for control of the city's polity associated with the shift from appointed to elected mayors (1988) and the end of the two-party monopoly of power (1991), GEA and its non-profit arm, Pro-Antioquia, joined Consejeria and civil society's efforts to gain control of local politics. With the election of its own, independent candidate Sergio Fajardo in 2003, it moved center stage in city politics (Moncada 2016).

Historically, Medellin had been the industrial city of Colombia featuring large, locally owned firms in textiles, liquor, food and beverages, cement, and light manufacturing. The decline of manufacturing in the late 1970s resulted in a flurry of hostile takeover bids by Bogota-based speculative finance capital. In response, in 1978 and in line with global trends, the four largest remaining corporations, Argos (cement, power and infrastructure), Bancolombia (banking), Suramericana de Seguros or Sura (pensions and insurance), Nutresa (food processing) interlocked forming the Grupo Empresarial Antioqueño (GEA – Antioquia Business Group) along with over 125 affiliates. With accelerating deregulation and economic internationalization in the 1990s, GEA extended its operations to other countries (Londoño 2004), becoming the largest such group in Colombia and one of the largest in Latin America while retaining its local roots. A fifth, publicly owned corporation, linked with GEA companies was Empresas Públicas de Medellín, a leader in energy (production, transmission, and supply) and water services with operations in several Latin American countries.

As the city deindustrialized a new, increasingly globalized corporate elite clashed with the traditional parties’ system of patronage politics that had kept them in power for decades. While the neoliberal agenda dominated national politics through the 1990s, “old” politics continued dominating the local scene denying GEA and its affiliated institutions (e.g., the Chambers of Commerce and Construction, the National Association of Industry-ANDI, and Pro-Antioquia) the pursuit of an agenda of local competitiveness (clusters, infrastructure, internationalization, financialization and deregulation) (Franco 2006). Meanwhile, the image and safety of the city compromised their efforts to attract investment and to create the conditions necessary for success in international markets. To overcome this impasse, they joined national government and civil society organizations making Fajardo their candidate (interview of director of a major policy NGO in the city, and Restrepo Santamaría 2011, 275). Having contributed decisively to his election, GEA and its institutions assumed control of the public economy introducing a market-based agenda and extending their influence over all manner of social and cultural enterprises. Interviewees testified widely to this alliance while reports and other written sources confirmed that the administration deposited public funds in GEA's banking arm (Bancolombia), purchased insurance from its corresponding corporation, Sura, and contracted heavily with its manufacturing and infrastructure division (Argos). Since then, GEA has made sure that all city administrations apply “all the regulatory measures we have set up” (cited in Franz 2018, 95; see also Moncada 2016). Along with this, private sector interests consolidated their grip over city affairs by monitoring performance through Medellín Cómo Vamos (created in 2006 by a consortium of pro-business organizations including ProAntioquia, El Colombiano, Caracol TV/radio, and the leading private university Eafit), and through its involvement in planning processes and development regulations. To give an example, the introduction of flexible planning regulations (especially building height and density controls) (García Bocanegra 2014) spurred a property development in the city that benefited the construction business of his family, opening Fajardo to conflict-of-interest accusations.

In his analysis of the policy shift Franz (2017) argued that the city followed to the letter the World Bank governance model of market-driven, results based economic governance starting with a concerted effort to improve the city's image and instill business confidence among potential investors. As part of this, the administration carried out a frontal attack on corruption in public finances achieving a record in tax collections that not only generated confidence among the public and private sectors but allowed the city to increase its expenditures exponentially. The administration of Fajardo endorsed the private sector proposal to work on the development of inter-linked clusters prioritizing professional services, health, tourism, and information technology and seeking to turn Medellin into a service hub of information and communication technology. To market the city to potential investors, he created the Agencia de Cooperacion e Inversion de Medellin y el Area Metropolitana (Agency for Cooperation and Investment in Medellín and its Metropolitan area, or ACI) that earned Medellin a position in the list of best Latin America cities for foreign investment. One of the sales pitches used by the city was the advantage of its low-cost, flexible labor. This “neoliberal” approach to local governance, Franz concludes, benefitted a small group of stakeholders in the internationally competitive formal sector at the expense of smaller businesses and the large informal sector while perpetuating a low productivity, low-wage, and high-unemployment economy.

Civil Society

Under the old order of a stable state-church-business “compact” (Botero 1996; Hylton 2010) in the manufacturing era, the Catholic church provided moral authority, the private sector oversaw infrastructure provision, and the state, controlled by clientelist politics, lined up the inner city through official neighborhood committees (juntas de acción comunal), vital cogs in the system of hierarchical political patronage, and electioneering. Deindustrialization, political reforms, and the irruption of the drugs trade shook to pieces this order. The corrupting power of cartels permeated businesses, commerce, finance, real estate, politics, the judiciary, public administration, and social life in general. The influence of state-controlled entities waned, traditional political patronage was overwhelmed, and parts of the local bourgeoisie fled the country. Easy money, new forms of social status, generalized violence and fear took over (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2017). A new elite of entrepreneurs and impresarios emerged, associated with construction, commerce, contracting and drug trafficking, open to the “construction of very partial forms of domination in the midst of a limited state, and [to] the reproduction of certain forms of antagonism that have characterized the city for the last thirty years” (Leyva 2014, 128).

In this context new social groups took form, both citywide and in low-income neighborhoods, seeking to provide alternatives for young people, protection of rights, day-care and neighborhood advocacy. While many received support from and followed church agendas, most consisted of lay organizations of self-help and social protection. Equally, city-wide NGOs, such as the Instituto Popular de Capacitación (Institute for Popular Training created in 1982)) promoting labor rights, sustainable economic development and citizen participation, and Corporación Región para la Paz y la Democracia (Region Corporation for Peace and Democracy, created in 1987)) also promoting empowerment and popular participation, worked closely with labor organizations and academic groups in the search for solutions, and helped develop neighborhood NGOs, prepare leaders, secure funding, and launch platforms of demands on society and government. A wide range of social groups, remarkable in their autonomy, resilience, energy, capacity, and plurality consolidated into the Red de Organizaciones Comunitarias de Medellin (ROC or Community Organization Network) and became a formidable force to contend with (see ROC and Equipo Red Juvenil 2011). Generally resisted by the traditional local political class, fiercely autonomous and engaged in local planning processes, they achieved recognition and spaces for activism through the national programs of Consejería Presidencial and the assistance of international donors. Leaders of these organizations worked on the idea of political representation through the creation of Compromiso Comunitario, later renamed Compromiso Ciudadano with Sergio Fajardo as its mayoral candidate in 2000 and again in 2003; some members of this coalition would participate in the cabinet of Fajardo (Urán 2013). Interviewees from this sector insist that Compromiso Ciudadano and the election of Fajardo were only possible due to some 20 years of previous community, social and civic activism, while recognizing that Fajardo was certainly their most electable candidate due to the support of GEA. Although their participation in a government of the economic elites posed major challenges, it gave them legitimacy by replacing the clientelist structure of neighborhood boards for a more independent and activist force—or so they thought.

Once elected, Fajardo subcontracted heavily with NGOs that facilitated the work of city departments and agencies dealing with social issues and that implemented many of their social programs. In this role, NGOs found themselves absorbed by/serving government. According to interviewees in this group (as confirmed by other sources), NGOs fell short for three main reasons, i) armed groups kept a close watch on them, intimidating their staff and constituency, ii) resources did not go very far and in fact paled compared to those of gangs and mafias, and iii) neighborhoods and residents were trapped in vicious circles of poverty that they could alleviate a little but not resolve. Furthermore, to access public funds and to counter grassroots CBOs, criminal forces formed their own nonprofits, intimidated neighborhood NGOS and worked to limit their potential and reach. Drastic reductions in social investments by subsequent city administrations caused many of these NGOs to fold or severely reduce their operations.

Blinded by the prospects of the new regime, deprived of core leaders that had joined the administration, and overwhelmed by their new role of subcontractors, this independent, critical, and vibrant civil society force became an extension of government. Community leaders assessed this period with a mixture of excitement, frustration, and disappointment, lamenting the way in which urban projects in the inner city coopted their communities and detracted them from the earlier drives for grassroots empowerment. Summarizing these perceptions, one of them said, “they almost managed to encase us in the neoliberal organizational model” and a former cabinet member regretted the conversion of NGOs into i) public officials, “we all went into public office, which meant we emptied social organizations of many people” and (ii) “we converted NGOs into project operators, losing independent thinking.”

Was this fate inevitable? While the potential of NGOs for achieving social transformation has been questioned (Forte 2014; Nasir 2014; Ismail and Kamal 2018), many NGOs and activist groups, both local and international, continue to lead their constituents in movements of resistance and empowerment while experimenting with alternative agendas. In the words of a core leader, “Interestingly, under a government we opposed, the network of community organizations gained strength; but during their government [Compromiso Ciudadano] the community movement weakened. This is paradoxical […] the NGO became a continuation of the state rather than a transformation of the state to the point that […] many people say, we are PP-dependent [participatory-budget dependent], we depend on it, without it, there would be no NGO.” The grassroots movement had provided many of the votes giving Compromiso Ciudadano access to power, power subsequently usurped by GEA. Despite their absorption, a stubborn permanence of independent community-based organizations and a recent upsurge in youth culture groups, most visibly around hip-hop and graffiti, though not exempt from intimidation, continue struggling for social equity (Jaramillo Morales 2015). One young cultural activist from a poor neighborhood told us, “The armed groups won’t go away, we just wish they would be less violent, more civilized.”

The Criminal Component

The Compromiso Ciudadano movement and regime could not have carried out its social agenda without appeasement of the city's criminal forces which had formed over the previous two decades. The term criminal sector is used here as an umbrella for an array of illegal activities that in Medellin are inseparable from municipal politics and institutional life and that controlled (and continue controlling under new incarnations) entire economic sectors and territories in the city. The inevitable starting point is the illegal cocaine trade for which Medellin became famous internationally, bringing huge flows of black-market cash and laundered money into the city. Crude all-out confrontations among drugs factions and between them and the state, especially over extradition to the United States, resulted in the bloodiest period in Medellin's history; a homicide peak of 381/100.000 in 1991 made the city the “murder capital of the world” condemning it to an indelible association with drugs and violence. Whilst in the city the emerging drugs mafia sat uneasily with left-wing community-based groups (aka militias) active in state-abandoned neighborhoods, in the countryside guerrilla movements were extending their control over large sections of the national territory. From the mid-1990s, small cells of government-approved self-defense groups called Convivir were set up to protect rural elites (Bargent 2015), becoming the legal façade for burgeoning regional “self-defense” organizations which soon formed a single front: the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia - AUC), a heavily armed and sanguinary paramilitary organization, allegedly operating with widespread complicity of landowners, big business, the army, police and regional politicians (Barry 2003; Human Rights Watch 2010).

As the US-backed war on drugs intensified throughout the 1980s and beyond, the streets of Medellin became a battlefield with the police, its violent tentacles entangling politicians, government officials, human rights activists and even the judiciary. But the cartel was not the only source of violence: myriad bands and armed groups competed for control of the inner city and the illicit extraction of rents in the peripheral sectors under their control, resolving their disputes by force (Salazar 1990; Vélez Rendon 2001). Death squads and paid assassins further ignited a war of all against all. Paramilitary groups joined the fray, with the local Bloque Cacique Nutibara – BCN, establishing itself in the low-income neighborhoods of Medellin. Having achieved dominance over local militias and criminal gangs, it was alleged to be complicit with the police and army in the heavy military occupations involving widespread human rights abuses in several low-income neighborhoods in the city in 2002, which effectively wiped out the militia presence in the city.

In its wake, the so-called Oficina de Envigado (Envigado Office) became the dominant paramilitary faction in Medellin, under the control of alias Don Berna (Hylton 2010). With demobilization of paramilitary groups following national government negotiations in 2003, Don Berna emerged as the key interlocutor in Medellin between local government and the demobilized paramilitaries, being head of a hierarchically organized criminal structure built on the remnants of the BCN's territorial control. President Uribe's peace agreement reincorporated them into civil life whilst allowing their criminal proceeds and organizational structure to remain largely intact (Gutiérrez Sanín and Jaramillo 2004; Cívico 2012; Arratia Sandoval 2017). When Fajardo took office in 2004 Don Berna was already imposing a dramatic reduction in homicides and consolidating control over ever larger sectors of the city, including those where “social urbanism” began to take shape; urban projects had to be negotiated within this new urban political reality. This period of “para-tranquillity” or “Donbernabilidad” as it was known commonly in Medellin, was to last until his extradition to the USA in 2008 (Bargent 2016). The director of an NGO studying the criminal economy explained, “Medellin was pacified by blood and fire; there is no peace but an armed pacification.” The head of a citywide NGO added, “Fajardo received a pacified city […] in which legal and illegal forces shared the administration of the city.”

Upon deportation of the head of BCN, a violent power struggle between illegal factions plagued the administration of Alonso Salazar (2008–2011); then, a relative peace was re-established when the “Office” took the form of an association of criminal groups with non-aggression pacts (pactos del fusil). Through these moves, criminal organizations demonstrated an ability to control crime that government evidently lacked. This reality was formally elided by city mayors, substantially avoided in city discourse, and hushed up on the few occasions when the deficiencies and “dark side” of social urbanism and the Medellin model in general were publicly criticized, as for example by the bishop of Medellin (El Colombiano 2013).

Fluctuations in the city's homicide rate have been ascribed, erroneously, to social urbanism (Cerdá et al. 2012) but resulted from an accommodation / concertation between illegal and state actors (Moncada 2016; Arratia Sandoval 2017) and the intervention of the central state (Giraldo-Ramírez and Preciado-Restrepo 2015). Meanwhile, by focusing on homicides at the expense of other forms of violence (e.g., political violence, internal displacement, and human rights violations), such appraisals underrate the underlying transformation of power relations within the city. Without doubt the homicide rate, as a simplified measure of security, became a sensitive issue for all administrations attempting to transform the image of Medellín and attract foreign investment and tourism. It in fact played into the hands of criminal groups’ threats to increase the levels of crime if the city did not please them. The head of an NGO explained that “The Office” could “spoil big city events, such as, the annual Festival of Flowers, the visit by the Pope, or whatever”; another interviewee argued that “Crime survives because segments of the state protect it in exchange for ‘acclimatizing’ the city, lowering the levels of violence.” In line with this, studies on urban violence have argued that criminal organizations in Medellin see themselves as “illegal but legitimate actors” (Cívico 2012) constituting “embedded, coherent, and functional players” within a structurally unequal and institutionally fragile society (Doyle 2016).

A second major fallout concerns the commercial and geographical expansion of criminal activity. As narco-paramilitary groups consolidated their presence in the poor areas of the city and the control of illegal activities throughout the city, they mutated into business-oriented concerns with ever-wider fields of activity. According to an interviewee, “peace became more profitable for them than war.” Along with drug distribution for local consumption, these groups expanded into the business of extortion, direct control of goods circulation, charges to public transport services on claims that they are protecting them, subcontracting, prostitution, and predatory loans; in short, an economy of turf wars, intimidation, and forced intra-urban displacement (Codhes 2013; Observatorio de Derechos Humanos y Paz 2017; McDermott 2018). Many interviewees argued that the criminal economy has become so extensive as to be indispensable to the city and so threatening as to intimidate government into turning its head or becoming complicit, and so imbricated with the economy at large as to become undistinguishable. These factors converted criminal organizations into powerful actors in urban management and everyday life.

Medellin's Governance Arrangement After the Dust Settled

Although Compromiso Ciudadano tried to appeal to the two extremes in the governance literature (market-led government and deepening of democratization), this analysis suggests that it followed the prescriptions of the former while dressing its market-driven agenda under the mantle of horizontal, flexible, inclusive, democratic, and transparent partnerships. This veil facilitated the subjection of the interests of the grassroots to those of the elites and the implementation of a neoliberal agenda under the mantle of social urbanism. Presented as a meeting of minds by its architects, the partnership was an arrangement of convenience made possible by crisis, the desperate conditions of the inner-city population, cohabitation with organized crime and the opportunism of the corporate sector. The enthusiasm with which civil society greeted Compromiso Ciudadano is explained more by the sense of hope it conveyed through its rhetoric and symbols than by its actual practices and record. To its merit were Compromiso Ciudadano’s efforts to leave clientelism and corruption behind and insert transparency, accountability, and civil society participation in its work. Viewed from this angle, Compromiso was a breath of fresh air after decades of horror and dead ends. However, its clever marketing and its opportunistic embrace of progressive interventions turned it into a cult blinding supporters and admirers to its commitment to a market-driven government and to the interests of the corporate sector.

As is often the case with abstract commitments, however, Compromiso Ciudadano used transparency, accountability and participation as a marketing front while many of its practices did the opposite. For instance, while marketing heavily its social investments to the world, it kept para-pacification out of view and, in fact, presented the change in homicide rates as an achievement of its social agenda pairing social urbanism with pacification. While presenting itself as a paradigm of social equity, its economic development strategy focused on the sale of cheap and flexible (aka deregulated) labor to international investors. Then, Compromiso Ciudadano patented its flagship program, social urbanism, keeping quiet the fact that it was a package of earlier interventions promoted by Consejería (specially PRIMED and Nucleos de Vida Ciudadana), the previous administration (cable cars and library programs) and imports from other latitudes (e.g., participatory budgeting and signature architectures) and received awards for it before the record demonstrated its potential for reducing inequality. Regarding horizontality and participation, we ask how horizontal can be a partnership that turns a grassroots social movement into a tool of service delivery? Lastly, how accountable is a movement that turns itself into a cult and ignores independent assessments of its work?

Altogether, contradicting its claims and perhaps its own aspirations, the governance model of the Medellin model was a highly uneven arrangement dominated by a market-driven public-private partnership with a corporate agenda that came to power on the shoulders of a grassroots movement and whose cohabitation with organized crime demonstrated its willingness to do whatever it took to advance a corporate agenda by using the polity to disarm the opposition and to generate the business climate required by the corporate sector to succeed. This arrangement not only makes the preaching of the good government literature and white papers suspicious but also confirms their efficacy in the cooptation of civil society. It in fact suggests that the “Medellin model” is unique and irreplicable. ³ In other words, there is no paradigm to export but a series of award-winning programs with enormous appeal but no proven record. It, in fact, confirms literatures arguing that few lessons can be extracted from historically specific conjunctures and points to a pragmatic arrangement that renders little credence to claims. While agreeing to the litany of aspirations listed in governance manuals, down to earth and critical analysts may see them as facades for undemocratic practices. Compromiso's governance arrangement successfully rode a conjuncture of crisis and opportunistically appropriated languages of good government and social equity to turn power over to the new economic hegemons.

Ultimately, Compromiso Ciudadano empowered an internationalizing segment of Medellin's economy that would become the dominant sector for the years to come but that provided far less jobs to the citizenry than the informal economy ⁴ and that continues leaning heavily on narco-savers and narco-consumers. While alleviating the conditions of the inner city for a period long enough to diffuse organizing and active resistance, most of its social programs of assistance to families were discontinued and some of its inner-city icons are crumbling. Criminal forces continue controlling the inner city and expanding their operations by investing the proceeds of drugs in selected industries and expanding their reach to other areas of the city. If anything, though, the governance arrangement of Compromiso Ciudadano made the city a major candidate for sourcing and launched a new industry of inner-city tourism while creating the conditions GEA needed to increase its assets and consolidate its presence in international markets through selling itself as an urban miracle: a record that contrasts radically with the promises of social justice that sold the “model” to the world.