This article provides a picture of the political economy of tourism and violence in Medellín. It analyses the way criminal actors and tourism entrepreneurs share a territory, by shedding light on the extortion of tour guides, street performers and business owners in some of its barrios populares (poor neighbourhoods). The main objective is to demonstrate how intimate relationships – between and among kin, friends, long-term acquaintances – impact what is considered the criminal governance of tourism. This contribution shows that extortion in Medellín meets only limited resistance from tourism entrepreneurs. It also emphasises how criminals, tourism actors and tourists themselves contribute to the creation of fragile secured spaces in the developing touristscapes of Colombia's second city.

Catholic Social Teaching in Latin America—portrayed in the documents of the Conference of Latin American Episcopal Conferences (Río, Medellín, Puebla, Santo Domingo, and Aparecida)—seeks to provide pastoral orientations to the social problems of the subcontinent, analyzing reality from a concrete theological perspective: the perspective of the poor. This article analyzes how Latin American problems and the way to diagnose them also appear in the pontifical documents of Pope Francis, especially in Evangelii Gaudium and Laudato Si’, applied to the world context. We conclude that the perspective of Latin American theology continues to be valid and relevant for the faithful throughout the world.

Drawing on ethnographic research in El Oasis, a highly precarious self-built settlement in Medellín, Colombia, this article examines the illegal practice of autoconstruction as a material expression of hope. It focuses on the multilayered, symbolic meaning of self-built housing, as it represents the pursuit of dignity, permanence, and agency—as opposed to poverty, uncertainty, and lack of agency—and an active and material form of hoping for a better future in the city. The state plays an ambiguous role in residents’ perspectives, who conceive of it, simultaneously, as a threat to and a guarantor of their future in the city. This ambiguity becomes materialized in the physical form of residents’ self-built housing, as residents either embrace or refrain from making improvements to their houses in response to shifting perceptions about the state’s intentions regarding the future of the settlement.

In the last ten years, Medellín, Colombia has undergone significant socioeconomic improvements and a reduction in homicides. By drawing from qualitative data collected in Medellín, this article shows how, despite these improvements, residents in the marginalized neighborhoods maintain a perception that the state is unable or unwilling to provide them with services, such as employment and order or social control. Criminal gangs in these neighborhoods appear to rely on, and even exploit, the weakness of the state, as they are able to get citizens to perceive them as more reliable and legitimate than the state. This article argues that it is important for Latin American policymakers to promote citizen engagement in the design and implementation of policies to reduce current levels of violence.

Drawing upon 40 life-history interviews with gang members in Medellín, Colombia, this paper argues that many young men join gangs to emulate and reproduce ‘successful’ local male identities. The accumulation by the gang of ‘masculine capital’, the material and symbolic signifiers of manhood, and the accompanying stylistic and timely displays of this capital, means that youths often perceive gangs to be spaces of male success. This drives the social reproduction of gangs. Once in the gang, the youths become increasingly ‘bad’, using violence to defend the gang's interests in exchange for masculine capital. Gang leaders, colloquially known as duros or ‘hard men’, tend to be the más malos, the ‘baddest’. The ‘ganging process’ should not be understood in terms of aberrant youth behaviour; rather there is practical logic to joining the gang as a site of identity formation for aspirational young men who are coming of age when conditions of structural exclusion conspire against them.

This article argues that the prepaid energy system put into operation in Medellín and across Colombia worked as an expression of ‘energopower’; that is, energy as a means to govern societies. The article uses press archives and company statements, official statistics and group interviews to show how energopower operates in Medellín along three lines: that Empresas Públicas de Medellín, the city's public utility company, encouraged disconnected and displaced people as new buyers of prepaid energy services instead of citizens entitled to those services; that the implementation of the prepaid energy system coincided with the vertiginous capitalisation that allowed the city to fund its ‘Social Urbanism’ and EPM to expand operations across Colombia and other countries in Latin America; and, that prepaid electricity as a tool of energopower subjugated displaced and disconnected populations to new forms of affordability that prompted barrio women to understand and oppose its disciplining methods of domination.

While most scientific studies on disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) of former combatants focus on the countryside, the case of the paramilitaries in Medellín, Colombia, provides an exceptional opportunity to study such a process in a metropolitan environment. Analysis reveals how an urban DDR-process may lead to highly contradictory results: a strong decrease in the number of homicides and at the same time a consolidation of networks of criminal groups. Extralegal combatants, especially in an urban environment, are able to form extensive networks with criminal organisations. Although DDR-approaches warn of the risk that ex-combatants may resort to violence, scholars tend to disregard existing networks of groups of combatants and powerful criminal organisations in their analyses. Taking theories on DDR as a starting point and reflecting on earlier local peace initiatives, this article analyses the process with paramilitaries in Medellín. It argues that although, the local peace process has led to some significant results, it has to date failed to address the wider network of criminal organisations within which former paramilitaries were and continue to be involved.