The internet is full of advice on Comuna 13, formerly one of the most dangerous urban spaces in the world. This advice is: go with a tour that tells you about the barrio’s sad past and inspiring present, admire the graffiti, don’t stray off the path, learn the history of the area, get over your ghoulish obsession with Pablo Escobar and talk to the locals to learn about their lives. I can’t say I was enamoured of any of this advice (I had no Escobar obsession to get over, so that one didn’t apply): I dislike tours and I really dislike that earnest, slightly ghoulish respectfulness that can underlie such activities.
In the event Comuna 13 was… strange. We fought our way out of the San Javier metro station, through a score or more guides offering tours of Comuna 13 and walked to the start of the escalators. Here there were all the tourists who don’t really seem that visible elsewhere in Medellin: some in Laureles and more in Poblado, but in spaces that don’t seem geared to mass tourism in the sense of shops selling tatty souvenirs, people walking around in technical gear, hiking boots and today’s sola topis: the beige and army green UV protective hats with strings tied under the chin. It was an impressive settlement, certainly, going up the very steep hillside, with narrow stairs and blank walls covered in murals. Everywhere, groups of tourists, about half and half Spanish and English speaking, ferried around by guides taking turns at specific murals. The escalators merged nicely into the landscape, with their orange canopies setting off the blue shades of the murals, and the escalators themselves short and zigzagging up the hill. There were many, many shops catering to the visitors, selling juice, bottles of water, empanadas, posters, mugs, t-shirts, and a fair amount of Escobar tat though not as much as one might have thought. There were also a lot of plays on District 13 from the Hunger Games as that, of course, was the fierce and marginalised district that the heroine Katniss was from. I didn’t buy anything which I have mixed feelings about. On one hand I loathe souvenir tat and bad overpriced food and drink at such sites. On the other… it’s something that might well be turning the barrio’s economy around. And who am I to say it doesn’t feel authentic, that its soul is ebbing out, that there are too many people like me? As for talking to locals to learn about their lives – I have no way of knowing what that was about. It seems disrespectful and intrusive to me, these are people’s homes (although we tried to get off the main tourist bits we turned back whenever we came to areas that were very residential), but maybe that is what they genuinely want, just as in Hawaii attending a resort luau with a hula performance is not usually exploitative, however cringe-inducing it may be?
Strangely, the place it reminded me of most was Hoi An. Maybe that is what it’ll be in a decade or so, if things progress as they are. And by then Escobar will be a distant memory, so I’ll wager that the Pablo Escobar tours will be legit and his face will be found emblazoned on every kind of souvenir.