A neighborhood on the hillside
Comuna 13, San Javier, sits on the western hillside of Medellín. More than 150,000 people live in neighborhoods that grew without planning, house upon house, as families displaced from the countryside arrived in the city between the sixties and the eighties. That geography of alleys and stairways explains much of what came next: it was easy to enter and hard to control.
The years of violence
In the nineties and early two-thousands, urban guerrilla militias, paramilitary groups and gangs fought for control of the comuna. For residents that meant invisible borders between neighborhoods, unwritten curfews and families burying their children. Nobody from here talks about that time with nostalgia; it is talked about so it is not forgotten.
Operation Orión, October 2002
On October 16, 2002, the State launched Operation Orión: hundreds of soldiers and police officers, helicopters and days of combat inside an inhabited neighborhood. It was the largest urban military operation in the country's recent history. It left dead, wounded, detained and, above all, disappeared people, whose families still look for answers at La Escombrera, the rubble dump in the upper part of the comuna. On the tour we pass places that lived through those days, and the guide tells what their family saw from the window.
The escalators
In December 2011 the city inaugurated 384 meters of outdoor escalators, in six sections, in the Independencias sector. They replaced a climb of hundreds of steps that residents made daily with groceries, children and the sick. They are the symbol of another way of intervening in a neighborhood: instead of tanks, infrastructure. Today they are also the place from which you see the whole city.
Graffiti and hip hop as memory
The murals of Comuna 13 were born from youth collectives that, in the middle of the violence, chose rap, breakdance and paint. Each mural says something: the elephants that never forget, the women who held the neighborhood together, the white handkerchiefs of the peace march. That is why on our tour we do not say "look how pretty": we say who painted it and why. Many of the artists still live two blocks away.
How to visit it well
Go with someone from the neighborhood, ask before photographing people, buy from local shops and do not reduce it to a backdrop for photos. Our Graffiti Tour lasts three hours, leaves every day at 9:30 a.m., 1:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. from Garden Coffee, in the 20 de Julio neighborhood, and includes patacón with hogao and the mango biche ice cream we make at the house of one of our grandmothers.
