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Woah, what a title! So many different levels! What? Have I been abducted? No, I just thought, you know... sometimes along comes something that's pithy, terse and succinct, and that's too damn good not to use. Oh come on! You'd have done the same. Anyway, it's better than this entry's working title "Colombia, Backpack, Graham". Hmmm, is it too late to start again?

FARC off.

Graham Perkins
2006-08-21 12:41:33

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the cartel's bosses were free to live in luxury. They founded two newspapers, their own political party and in 1982 Escobar himself was elected into Congress.

A year later the governmnet began to fight back and gradually an all-out war ensued. In 1989 Luis Carlos Galán - the favoured Liberal presidential candidate - was assassinated. As a result of this the government confiscated 1,000 mafia-owned properties and appeased the US by passing a host of extradition laws.

The Medellin Cartel's response was ruthless, massacring and car-bombing anyone who stood in its way. The following national government opened negotiations with the country's various cartels and a deal was struck repealing the extradition laws while the surviving cartel bosses handed themselves in. Escobar built his own luxury prison and spent a short time there. When the government decided to move him to a more secure location, he fled.

The truth is, Escobar considered himself something of a Robin Hood figure. He certainly had a lot of supporters, as over the years he'd ploughed plenty of money into the
The Main Square, Santa Fe De Antioquia
poorer sections of the communities around Medellin. He'd even built a rather neat-looking shantytown up on the slopes of the city. At weekends he'd take hog-roasts to those with nothing and it's thought that many of his supporters helped him to evade the authorities for so long. In the end it took a special force of 1500 men 499 days to track him down and he was finally killed in December 1993.

Since the cartel's destruction normality has returned to Medellin. It's a friendly lively city of some 3m people. The place has a sizeable (mind-blowingly beautiful) student population and feels full of energy.

I'm sure there was culture in Medellin but no one from my hostel was looking for it! The nightlife is just so good and now Medellin will be forever up there ...