In the fall, I will be teaching a course in urban anthropology at Rutgers University-Newark. This has been an opportunity for me to rethink my own experience with the cities where I lived. Trento, the city were I grew up. Palermo, the city where I became an adult. New York, the city that made me a world citizen. Medellín, the city where I did most of my fieldwork. In Palermo and Medellín, especially, I went in touch with dark side of our societies and democracies. It was an encounter with the murkiness of our realities and with the gray areas where the boundaries between legality and illegality blur. Here are some notes I took about Medellín.

There are invisible boundaries running through Medellin, and invisible walls facing off one sector from the other, thus dividing up the city into poor and wealthy barrios. The well-to-do people withdraw and segregate themselves in the private enclaves of El Poblado or San Luca where they live in fortified villas or luxurious condominiums. As anthropologist Teresa Caldeira noted in her study of crime and segregation in the Brazilian capital São Paolo, "the upper classes have used fear of violence and crime to justify new techniques of exclusion and their withdrawal from traditional quarters of the cities."

In hist lates novel, Medellin writer Héctor Abad Faciolince represented a fantastic and closed city, Angosta, structured in hermetical sectors in which the highland and lowland location of the barrios correspond to the class divide strictly separating the residents from one another. Thus the Angosta residents living in the Secotr C, as in caliente (hot), are the indigents located in hell. In sector T, as in templado (temperate), reside people from the middle-class, while in Sector F, as in Frio (cold), are the well-to-do people. Residents from Sectors C and T, unless provided with a special working visa, are not allowed to go into the Sector F, which is protected by a checkpoint and by armed guards. The novel is a metaphor for the partitioning in today's world between rich and poor, often mantained by sophisticated technology along borders across which commodities travel with greater freedom then people do. In the description of Angosta's social structure, the author offers also a metaphor of the social reality of Medellín, dominated by gangs and paramilitary groups patronized by the elites:

Life is risky and bitter in Sector C, because it is always sprinkled with death. Raped women, children with gun shots in the forehead and young adults assassinated, sometimes beheaded, with the body parts distributed in different bags, appear almost all nights. They leave little notes on them: "So that they learn." So that they learn what? It is unknown. They are killed by the Secur for being terrorists, but they are also assaulted and killed by themselves. In order to attack or to defend themselves, or for both things, they form groups with abstruse abbreviations, the caputos, the mucs, the fendos, and they are supposed to have political or social aims (of cleaning, of dirt, against or for the Apartmento), and between them they get rid of the little money that they get with their informal works in T, or from construction works in Paradiso...

In the 1990s, Medellin was ridden with violence. The decade started with the hunt of Pablo Escobar, who was eventually killed on December 3, 1993. In 1991, the city reached a rate of 381 homicides per 100 thousand people. In 1998 the rate was 154, in 1999 it was 167, and in 2002 it was 184. The rate in Medellin dropped dramatically to 98 the following year when the paramilitaries of Carlos Castaño declared their willingness to demobilize. During the administration of Sergio Fajardo the rate dropped to 22, but today it is again up to about 70.

Colombian writers describing the violence of the 1990s, depicted Medellin as a space where death turned into a contagious disease, ridden by teenagers embellished by golden chains, imposing their law at the barrel of a gun and killing for a pair of new and fashionable Nike sneakers. Medellin writer Jorge Franco in his novel Rosario Tijeras - about a young woman who, born into a world of povery and abuse, works for a professional killer to rise above her misery - portrays Medellin as a woman who is at the same time a mother and a whore:

Medellin is wrapped in the arms of two mountain ranges. A topographical embrace that encloses all of us in the same space. You always dream about what lies beyond the mountains, even though it would be hard to uproot ourselves from this hollow. It's a love-hate relationship, with feelings more like those for a woman than for a city. Medellin is like those matronly ladies of old, the mother of many children, prayerful, pious, and possessive, but it's also a mother who's a seductress, a whore, a flamboyant and flashy woman. Anyone who leaves returns, anyone who denies it retracts, anyone who insults it apologizes, and anyone who attacks it pays. Something very strange happens to us concerning it, because in spite of the fear it instills in us, in spite of the urge to get away that we've all had one time or another, in spite of having killed it many times, Medellin always come out on the top.

David Harvery wrote in an essay that cities are vulnerable forms of human organization and yet they also prove to be remarkably resilient. The understanding of a city as a body politic with a normative goal, says Harvey, can produce an authoritarian and even a fascist ideology rooted in an organic idea of the city that is ruled by a collective will "The desire to purify the body politics can lead to 'cleansing' activities in which unwanted elements are either expelled or repelled as potential pollutants." While Harvey has in mind the transformation of urban settings, in Medellin his idea of 'cleansing' and of 'creative destruction' applies to the violent actions of armed groups taking turns in imposing their domination upon the city. Their deeds have been understood always as a creative and not just destructive. Creating life.