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global drug traffic is no less pronounced now than in the days of the Cartel. The difference today is that nothing is done out in the open. All that has been taken care of. Escobar’s successors are smarter, shrewder businessmen who realise that there is nothing worse for business, and in particular for illegal business, than violence, war, fighting, and media attention. In the 1990s cocaine production doubled in Colombia, but after this Medellín scored praise in headlines around the world for having transformed itself from the ‘city of murder’ to the ‘city of the future’.
    And it wasn’t a lie. In 1991, when it was at its worst, Medellín had a rate of 381 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, a figure that by 2007 had decreased to 26 — comparable to the rates in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. The Washington Post called it ‘The Medellín Miracle’, while The New York Times ran the headline ‘A Drug-Runners’ Stronghold Finds a New Life’, and Newsweek reported ‘Good Times in Medellín’.
    Medellín’s new and improved reputation as a safe, secure city continued to dominate in the media until one of the biggest political scandals in Latin American history broke: the revelation that the principles upon which this newfound virtue were based were not those of basic peace and safety, as widely reported, but rather were firmly rooted in drug money and terror, as in the days of Pablo Escobar. Or, as academic Forrest Hylton later wrote in his essay ‘Extreme Makeover — Medellín in the New Millennium’: ‘Terror was the core of “pacification” after 2000, effecting reforms needed for Medellín’s makeover into a paradise for tourists and investors. This is civilisation as barbarism. As the exhumation of mass graves attests, even the dead are not safe.’
    This is a long, violent, and complicated story. The truth was kept under wraps for many years, until in 2009 undercurrents of the drug industry, which were still very much intact, rose to the surface again. Poverty and violence were reunited — as they had been so many times before in Colombian history — and the result was bloodshed. But all this happened in an underworld conveniently removed from the happy minds of the young people at Pit Stop, Casa Kiwi, or any of the other oases in Medellín.
    THE SHOTS CAME moments after Diego left the house. There were seven. Lina ran into the street in nothing but a towel and a chemise, only to discover the body of the man with whom she had spent her 26 years on earth. He was lying in a pool of blood outside the door. She fainted. He had been shot four times in the head and three in the stomach. Little plastic-like clumps of brain matter were stuck in his hair.
    ‘This was five months and nine days ago.’ Lina Cuevas sits beside a decorated Christmas tree in Comuna 13, one of the most notorious parts of Medellín. She has been counting the days since the incident. Although Lina is 26 she does not look a day over 18, and while she recaps her story she twists her hair into a ponytail behind a round but thin face. She is in control of her emotions, and not the least bit surprised about what happened: ‘They’re fighting over how to divide up Medellín between them.’
    Diego was Lina’s brother and just one of many young men who had lost their lives in recent fighting over hubs of drug activity. Medellín, Cali, and Bogotá are not just financial metropolises and indispensable centres of money laundering, arms trading, and everything else to do with the global export of cocaine; they are also growing markets in their own right. While the powder much coveted in the United States and Europe has never been especially popular in Colombia, this is fast changing. With tourism on the rise, the foreign-aid sector growing, an increasing number of business investments from abroad, and the growth of language schools, awareness of American and European tastes in recreational drugs has also expanded. Domestic demand has