Medellin, Colombia - The Hood

Visiting La Moravia
We booked a walking tour called "Barrio Transformation" and toured one of the Medellin's most notorious neighborhoods - La Moravia.  It's built on and around the city's garbage dump and was once known as Pablo Escobar's "assasin's cradle."  This is a photo of how it used to look.

The dump is no longer active and the government coerced most to take a free apartment elsewhere in the city.  There are holdouts still, refusing to move - what they call the "resistance."  The dump is now covered in greenery and is topped with a giant plant nursery.  Our tour guide Maribell, met us and a few others at a nearby subway stop and walked us through the neighborhood.

La Moravia was completely hand-made by the residents.  They dug the sewer lines, put up the electricity grid and built their houses from scratch.  The local government essentially ignored them for decades.  In the 80s, Pablo Escobar chipped in from time to time, building houses and this soccer field.  There are many in the neighborhood who still see him as a hero - a narcotrafico Robin Hood.

As we walked around many shouted out greetings to our tour guide, who obviously spends quite a bit of time here.  She stopped to chat with people, patted kids on the head, asked old men about their health.  She explained that part of our tour fee is given to the neighborhood's community center.

Maribell explained the history of the neighborhood - as with most of the barrios, the rural poor were pushed off their land either by the leftists guerrillas, the rightist paramilitary or the narcotraficos or all three.  They fled, looking for safety and settled on top of an active garbage dump - a testament to how bad it had been in the countryside.

One of the more progressive mayors in the 90s asked the neighborhood leaders what they were lacking and they asked for a nursery school and a community center.  The nursery, shown below, is free; parents drop off their kids at 7am and come back to get them at 4pm.

As we walked around, kids came up to us shyly, Maribell tried to get them to practice their English with us.  They squirmed and pirouetted, some saying a "Hello" or "Goodbye."  It reminded me of many poor neighborhoods I've been to around the world.  Crowded, dirty, many houses in a shambles, very young girls with small children but plenty of smiles and happiness.  We later climbed to the top of the dump and by doing so got our first perspective of the city, 

From down at the bottom of this bowl of a city you cannot see much, but at the top of the dump, you get a 360 degree view.  You get confirmation of what you suspected - Medellin's surrounding mountains are absolutely packed with hand-made neighborhoods.