His leftist rival Gustavo Petro wants to address drug use as a public health problem. Gutierrez, the right-wing candidate in presidential elections later this month, has vowed a harsher police clampdown on domestic drug trafficking. In 2018, then Medellin mayor Federico Gutierrez accompanied nearly 1,000 police who bulldozed the city’s main drug market, known as “The Bronx.” “As long as there are consumers… criminals will see a business opportunity,” he said. “They are delivered (by the narcos) to create the image that… the security strategy is working.”īustamante conceded that some police have been arrested for colluding with traffickers, without giving numbers. “When seizures are made… it is often not the product of (police) intelligence,” Quijano added. There were “pacts,” he said, between narco gangs and some local authorities to allow drug trade in exchange for relative security in their areas. Last year it was down to 15.5, even as drug use has surged.Īccording to Luis Fernando Quijano of social development NGO Corpades, this was more telling of a “mafia peace” than of any real progress. In 1992, at the height of the search for Escobar, the city’s homicide rate was 350 per 100,000. In Medellin, the numbers reveal a paradox. Official data does not distinguish between gangster and civilian deaths. Since 2018, more than 2,500 people have been killed in gang wars nationally, police general Herman Bustamante told AFP.
The Medellin city council estimates that each drug “plaza” can make up to $75,000 a month - the equivalent of some 300 minimum salary earners.īut authorities say the increase in domestic drug use has gone hand-in-hand with rising insecurity. With 2.2 million inhabitants, Medellin is today the city with the highest drug consumption - 15.5 percent - in Colombia. Instead, they are getting hooked on cheaper, low-quality and often dangerous drugs. “A concentration of product was generated… that could not be exported due to this strong anti-drug policy,” said toxicologist Juan Carlos Sanchez.ĭomestic clients, however, are not getting the best of what the world’s largest cocaine exporter has to offer. With aid from the United States, leader in the global “war on drugs”, a Colombian crackdown since the early 2000s has forced traffickers to look homeward. In 2013, some 3.5 percent of Colombians said they had ever taken an illegal substance, according to the state statistics agency.īy 2019, the number had almost tripled to 9.7 percent.
Researchers estimate the figure is now closer to 800. Morales’s downfall, he said, started at a so-called “vice plaza” - drug vending points that numbered about 160 in Medellin ten years ago, according to police. “The truth is that one is less cautious and it (the basuco) can cause you to do stupid things,” said Morales, who lost his job due to drug use.įour brief months later, all his worldly belongings fit into a worn briefcase, and he often sleeps rough. His hands shaking, 32-year-old Morales inhaled a dose in a public park, using a pipe fashioned from a PVC tube, even as pedestrians and police milled around. Even on the floor you find drugs,” Manue Morales, an out-of-work engineer and chronic user of “basuco” - the cheapest drug on the market - told AFP.īasuco is derived from the coca leaf also used to make cocaine, and mixed with other low-grade substances. Junkies frequent hundreds of sales points dotted around Colombia’s second city, which has become the epicenter of the domestic drug trade. Three decades after cartel boss Pablo Escobar was shot dead by police on a rooftop in Medellin, the very city he had sought to uplift with drug money is being ravaged by it.
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