From (Most) Violent to Resilient City:

Drug Wars and Conflict Urbanism

Drug trafficking exists because certain substances are legally classified as illicit, where it is the anti-drug policies that have produced and maintain the illegal drug market. When Medellín became “the drug trafficking capital” and “the most violent city in the world” in 1991, the origins of “crime” and “violence” were understood as linked solely to one epicenter, el Cartel de Medellín under the rule of Pablo Emílio Escobar Gavíria. However, the label “cartel” for illicit drugs enterprises and their relations is questionable. Typically, cartels occur as temporary associations for specific purposes, rather than being understood as a union that stipulates and regulates the price of a commodity, thereby acting as associated enterprises to ensure their prosperity. Illegality, of course, is a structuring factor in the patterns of commercial relations between them, and violence and trust are their determining conditions. The organizations from Cali and Medellín were oligopolies of illicit substances, that is, “large independent companies” that absorbed small traders, and were “articulators of their own networks and competition.”^[1] The capos, who in Medellín were Pablo Escobar, Rodriguez Gacha (el Medicago) and the Ochoa Brothers, were at the top of the organization, which, in its hierarchical form, had a network of control over the information that enabled its activities.

In such structures, those who have information are higher up in the hierarchy. They are men of confidence, right-hand men who follow the business closely. Those directly below them are professionals such as lawyers and chemists, “specialists in important roles but with little knowledge of the company’s general activities.” Then there are the mules, security guards, and drivers, who also do not have access to privileged information, but who form the base of the organization.^[2] A vital issue for drug-trafficking companies is coercive resources—violent protection services provided by different groups, whose tasks comprise kidnapping, extortion, eliminating traitors, providing security, or, in rural areas, defending the territory where production laboratories are sited.

In 1984, the biggest cocaine-processing laboratory in the world—Tranquilandia—was destroyed. This destruction was the result of the “total war” declared by Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. Two months later, on April 30, 1984, Bonilla was murdered by a couple riding a motorbike: “we woke up on May 1^st under a state of siege that would last many years,” tells us K-liche,^[3] a punk who lived in Castilla (Noroccidental) during the 1980s.^[4] Until 1991, the group known as Los Extraditables had been either fighting or negotiating with the government against extradition to the US, claiming that “a grave in Colombia is preferable to a cell in the United States.”^[5] In 1989 the presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán was killed, the Cali and Medellín organizations related to each other through violence and los Extraditables stating:

We declare total war on the government, on the industrial and political oligarchy, on journalists who have attacked and abused us, on judges who have sold out to the government, on extraditing magistrates, on the presidents of trade unions and on all who have attacked us.^[6]

After naming narcotics as America’s greatest enemy, in 1971Richard Nixon declared the “war on drugs,” based on a binary opposition which situated Colombia as producer and the US as consumer, an understanding that allowed for exceptional measures in the name of national security. By the 1980s, the Colombian government suggested that there were strong connections between drug trafficking and leftist-guerrillas, a claim that was endorsed by the Reagan administration, thereby aligning the diplomatic-military discourses of Colombia and the US.

Since Nixon declared the war on drugs, drug production tended to symbolically overlap with “communism” as the external enemy in the US national security doctrine and narcoterrorism blurred the borders between left-wing terrorism and drug trafficking. The war on drugs crossed borders dynamically by way of its replication throughout the national territory of the US and via exportation to other Latin American countries. Meanwhile, the binary figure of “consumers/traffickers” (victims/perpetrators) had metamorphosed into a new figuration of many “actors” engaged in decentralized, virtually and spatially distributed, productive chains of democratic exposure to premature death and borderization.^[7]

Conflict urbanization in Medellín in the 1990s made manifest a post-Cold-War tendency on the one hand, in which war was no longer waged between sovereign states, but rather gave way to low intensity wars between multiple state and non-state actors. This development went hand in hand with the increasing prominence of “public security” in the political agenda of the state, as well as with the consolidation of “security” as a commodity. It was also embedded in a predilection to assume liberal democracy as the only possible or desirable model to achieve for individual states. This paper approaches urban production in Medellín, taking into account its metamorphosis since the turn of the present century, considering that a combination of punitive and preventative measures regarding crime have oriented urbanization and security policies.

El patrón is probably the most famous outlaw in American history, a kind of real-life Tony Montana, a self-made man listed year after year by Forbes Magazine as among the world’s richest, and then he died like a dog. The period focused on here could be said to have less to do with Escobar’s ascent to glory than with his fall. The 1990s are known as the end of Medellín’s cartel after Pablo Escobar’s assassination in 1993. The year 1991 was when Escobar surrendered to his incarceration in La Catedral, after the government gave legal assurances that his extradition to the US was off the table. In this same year, a new Colombian constitution was written, moving in step with the wider Latin American enthusiasm for democracy and for the opening up of economies to international capital and “free trade.” That year was also the most violent in Medellín’s history.

(Democratic) Borderization

Some commentators announced that by the end of the twentieth century, the imperatives of societies of control would face the dissolution of borders and the bursting of slums.^[8] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari proposed that capitalism operates like a war machine that takes as given its right of circulation across Earth’s whole surface, redefining war not as conflict among sovereign nations but as a form of preventative control, monitoring and surveillance-oriented to anticipate acts of a generalized enemy that might interrupt its flows and that could potentially come from anyone and anywhere. Security therefore became not only the main goal of the global capitalist order but also a commodity that was no longer subordinated to the sovereign’s putative monopoly of violence.^[9]

Security in this regime of global capital has become the control and distribution of fluxes articulated via local and transnational networks. There were no longer impassable borders, and yet surveillance and the assignment to everyone a status as to whether they can or cannot enter or stay in certain spaces finds the limits of globalization in new modes of borderization. “Increasingly,” Achille Mbembe points out, “[borders] are the name used to describe the organized violence that underpins both contemporary capitalism and our world order in general.”^[10] More precisely, borderization is “the process of transforming certain spaces into impassable places for certain classes of populations.”^[11] Mbembe is particularly thinking of refugees and migrants fleeing from their home territory, drowning during the crossing, enclosed in camps, and banned from Fortress Europe. However, it may help to translate some of his thoughts on borderization to the interior of national territories. Mobility and security are at the center of this debate and to approach the borderization within Medellín’s conflict urbanism it is here understood as the process that is the foundation for urban operations as well as the distribution of exposure to death across the social field.

The assignment of a disposable status to certain populations expresses the desire to target enemies, the desire for separation and enclosure.^[12] This is the production of bodies that are considered to have crossed borders that they should not have crossed, occupying spaces they should not occupy, and living where they should not live. This is people represented as a pollution of a milieu that they should not inhabit and from which they must be expelled. Elsa Dorlin has highlighted a form of violence that sets its sights on “a prey,”^[13] operating so as to produce bodies as targets, engendering a battle that is “fought against certain undesirables, reducing them to heaps of human flesh, in the name of freedom and security.”^[14]

While addressing borderization, Mbembe refers to Gaza (and also to the refugee boats sinking while trying to reach Europe), and African regional conflicts. He writes about the desire for apartheid and the borderization as processes that ban access to rights, identifying these as sites “governed by abandonment,”^[15] where territorial fragmentation orients the right to govern.^[16] Mbembe’s reading is related to Giorgio Agamben’s, however, even if the return of “the camp” is undeniable, walls and “security barriers” are not only physically present when abandonment is made manifest. Urban space can be read as a dynamic and mobile continuation of virtually and physically erected walls. If prison houses are what remains in the Americas as the spatial trace and aftermath of slavery, becoming the present form of colonial enclosure and exclusion and of the concentration camp, Medellín is a privileged site to consider as it emerges as a new high security prison-house-cum-city. The city has become the staging site for new spatial relations that have emerged in the closing decade of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first. It is designated as no longer the most violent city in the world, and hailed instead as a resilient city, now described as providing a laboratory for securitization and urbanism for other Latin American urban areas.

Discourses of war and enmity produce the walls that split inside from outside, that codify the right to use, or authorize the use of force as “justice.” Nevertheless, the martial binary discourse of inside/outside is now also produced through the use of flexible borders based on the relativities of (in)security in the interior—not only of the nation-state, but also in the internal micro-division of different community formations. Thus, enmity is diffusely reproduced within new spatially diffuse regimes of “self”/ “other.”^[17] The permeability of borders moves according to circulation fluxes that are no longer banned or abandoned in the interior of prisons, schools, clinics, and factories. Increasingly architectures of confinement are supplanted—though not completely replaced—by the “new strategic architectures of city life” that expand systems of (attempted) electronic control in the name of security and in order to match the borderless fluxes of circulation.^[18] These two different developments—internal borders based on the relativities of (in)security and diffuse systems of dispersed immobilization for certain populations—can be called borderization.

Increasingly, as Stephen Graham asserts, “nation-states are moving away from their role as guarantors of a community of citizens within a territorial unit, charged with the policing of links between ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’” He argues that states are instead,

becoming internationally organized systems geared towards trying to separate people and circulations deemed risky or malign from those deemed risk-free or worthy of protection. This process increasingly occurs both inside and outside territorial boundaries between nation-states, resulting in a blurring between international borders and urban/local borders. Indeed, the two increasingly seem to meld, to constitute a “multiplicity of control points” that become distributed along key lines of circulation and key geographies of wealth and power, crossing territorial lines between states as well as those within and beyond these boundaries.^[19]

Within this framework, border fluidity is manifested in urban production as a new military urbanism that penetrates civilian life with dispersed and mobile micro-carceral techniques.

Learning from Medellín

Identified throughout the twentieth century as problematic and disorderly, a site favorable to crime, a constant target of police actions, the urban edges of Medellín became the main target of anti-drug/anti-terror actions that combined urban and military interventions. The typically hygienist urbanism—formulated during the last century in terms of moral correctness, population health, and race preservation—encountered some obstacles when faced with the conflict spatialization of the drug wars. Colombia had since 1984 declared a State of Siege, following the murder of Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, attributed to narcoterrorism. The siege period ended with the promulgation of the new Constitution of 1991, which mandated the economic opening up of the country and recruited civil society to the project of “securitization” by attributing to each citizen the right and duty to participate in decisions regarding urban planning.

Before Escobar’s imprisonment, Colombia’s drug wars were framed as countering urban terrorism and waged by military forces against an enemy of the nation-state. By the time the Cold War had ceased, the new constitution was sanctioned, thus enlarging the range of subjects whose human rights should be protected by the rule of law. The “Magna Carta” of 1991 gave autonomy to local authorities and decentralized control of security and urban planning.^[20] The phrase “seguridad ciudadana” appeared for the first time, framing security as no longer a military defense of public order, but as an individual right to protection for citizens, proposing that civil society should come closer to the police and engage in preventative actions. The increasing concern with an “epidemic of violence” in Latin American cities took Medellín as the epitome, where urban violence was seen as the main menace to public order and to civilians’ democratic rights.

After the assassination of Escobar in 1993 by a task force that brought together the US and Colombian armed forces and the police—with the collaboration of Los Pepes, a group headed by paramilitary leaders such as Carlos Castaño and Don Berna—conflicts between guerrillas and paramilitaries, which until then had mainly taken place in rural areas, intensified in urban centers. While the headlines identified Escobar as the face of evil, the guerrilla militias, self-defense groups and petty criminal gangs with different degrees of organization waged their dispute to control Medellín’s territory and fluxes of circulation. During the 1990s, the administration of public spaces was privatized, and community surveillance became a commodity, promoting spatially oriented “protección violenta.”^[21]

Until the 1980s, Colombian internal conflict had been based on a binary differentiation between “rural” and “urban.” Such differentiation traced a line that authorized violence in the countryside as being in the service of civilization. Violence in urban territories in turn was codified as a threat to civility, a threat intensified by growing urbanization and the consolidation of tugurios (slums) at the city borders. Usually, political and social violence were differentiated, the former assuming the character of armed confrontation aimed at maintaining or destroying order, while the latter would start from personal motivations within a neighborhood, a family, a school, and other spaces of sociality. However, this familiar differentiation was dissolved by characterizing violence according to its performance in different territories.

Groups of armed youth provided services as hired killers on demand, acted in their neighborhoods as community surveillance, and as “petty criminals” outside their territory. While in the countryside counterinsurgent paramilitary groups were led by farmers who trained actual (and legitimate) armies, version of vigilante-armed citizens acting in the name of social and moral cleansing grew stronger in the cities. For many decades, landowners formed their own private groups of watchmen to deal with the “invasions” of the tugurios. In May 1982, the largest massacre seen in Medellín until then took place. A group of hooded vigilantes murdered seven inmates of Bellavista prison, a killing enacted under the motto “Love for Medellín.”^[22] On the other hand, youngsters trained by guerrilla groups chose to desert the guerrillas and act locally in their neighborhoods, and new forces of urban guerrilla warfare, called militias, took shape in the city.

In these scenarios, the division between political and social violence was blurred, youth “pandillas” could become “popular militias” linked to guerrillas and vice versa. The same happened with respect to the switching between paramilitary groups and petty criminal gangs.^[23] Self-defense groups spread throughout the city and in the last years of the twentieth century paramilitary groups entered to combat the guerillas who had infiltrated there, but also to occupy strategic sites and reinforce their territories within the narcotics industry. The political character of different actors fluctuates according to their actions, since when guerrilla groups are guarding poppy or coca-growing, they are not only a political actor, while the inverse applies when drug traffickers declare total war.^[24] Even if the most violent deaths in Medellín were more related to honor and revenge than to revolution, it would not be possible to completely detach the political aspect from them, or from crime in general, since the very notion of crime is political.

Against this backdrop of the growing concern with “security” and the “democratic” that a certain kind of neoliberal enthusiasm allowed for in the early 1990s, Medellín became the stage both for the war on narcoterror (understood as a threat to the social order) and for protests by parts of civil society, gathering response to the widespread fear attributed to drug trafficking violence. The guerrilla group M-19 itself demanded the “expansion of spaces for political participation.”^[25] Beyond violence, poverty and vulnerability appear to have become intertwined and were no longer considered in a binary friend/enemy logic, but rather as causes and consequences that are simultaneously each other’s product and producer.

From the mid-1990s onward, local public policies addressed the “security problem” by centering their own obligations on “coexistence matters such as citizen participation strategies, alternative conflict resolution mechanisms, and education.”^[26] More than incarceration, preventative actions with an integral approach were prioritized; security and citizenship were mixed with demands for community participation and state intervention in the name of “establishing rights” and “dignity” through inclusion.

In 1994, agreements to demobilize urban militias led to the creation of COOSERCOM (Cooperativa de Seguridad y Servicio a la Comunidad), a private security company that incorporated the demobilized, who would be made legitimately responsible for maintaining order in poor neighborhoods.^[27] In addition, 1994 saw the creation of CONVIVIR, another private security company that legalized the action of armed groups as surveillance and monitoring civil order. COOSERCOM stopped operating in 1996, but CONVIVIR continued, even after its formal ban in 1997, allied with the paramilitary organization Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-defense Forces of Colombia—AUC). According to the demobilization sentence by the Bloque Cacique Nutibara (an arm of the AUC) “the members of CONVIVIR, which spread throughout the country, were authorized to carry weapons and communication equipment for the exclusive use of the Military Forces and had the mission of collaborating with the latter in the counterinsurgent struggle.”^[28]

If, on the one hand, citizens’ cry for social safety was converted into security companies, “citizen security” began to guide urban projects from the 1990s onward on the other hand.^[29] That aligns with the 1994 United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Report guidelines, indicating that the concept of security should no longer be understood only in terms of the state, but also in terms of the individual and everyday life as “human security.”^[30] By the time COOSERCOM and CONVIVIR were consolidated, PRIMED emerged, a new partnership between Alcadía de Medellín and the German bank KFW, as an intervention plan for peripheral areas labeled “subnormal neighborhoods.”^[31] The plan was divided into two stages, the first active in 1993–97 and the second 1997–2001, the last of which did not go beyond a survey and mapping phase. The dismantling of the Cali and Medellín oligopolies led to a dispute over control of the territory and trafficking networks and those who had weapons enacted violence in the periphery. First published in 1990, UNDP’s report introduced a universal concept of human development. Within its analysis it designated criminal activity as contributing to worsening “the societal imbalances by destroying human lives and encouraging drug use.” ^[32] The document observed that “crime apparently pays” and that “[t]he use of illicit drugs threatens the health and well-being of many millions of people in both developed and developing countries.” In other words, drugs appear linked to both security and moral and health issues. “Drug abuse imposes growing costs on drug users and their families, on governments for prevention, rehabilitation, medical and enforcement programs, and on society for lost output and heightened violence.”^[33] To achieve human development, the UNDP highlighted the importance of the reallocation of resources from military to preventive health measures and primary education, among other measures.^[34]

As a result, urban planning policies began to focus on regions hitherto kept outside the city’s legal limits and “the urbanization of armed confrontation made the city’s security forces redefine ‘war’ no longer in the need to prevent the contamination of the city by the barbarism of the countryside.”^[35] Thus, the internal borders to urban centers became the target of containment policies. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the advocates of interventions in the urban peripheries increasingly focused on so-called “invisible borders.” The term designates regions that have become impassable due to the control of criminal organizations which is commonly attributed to the effect of drug trafficking routes. The sense of insecurity in relation to these borders is generalized as “organized crime” and personified by armed youngsters, by sicários or hired killers, whose employment was attributed to drug lords but who were also hired by politicians and businessmen involved with the capos because the diñero caliente of drug trafficking was laundered within the production chain. Even though the control of territory was indeed related to narcotics and money flows, those living in the most violent areas armed themselves to protect their “home territory,” feeling themselves more secure. The borders were defined according to the influence of different groups within their community, within territorial limits where they had command power and could decide who was allowed to enter. With the spread of a generalized sense of insecurity,

imaginary borders are imposed on the civil population and can be so to speak “semipermeable.” Border controls can apply to the entire population or to certain specific groups (usually young people), and be activated or deactivated depending on the time of day. The “imaginary” borders are invisible to the eyes of the outsider, but to the people of the neighborhood they are clear. And in the popular neighborhoods they are everywhere.^[36]

They become the not-so-invisible lines that delimit who can move freely and who can’t. These are places where the night patrols operate “motivated less by class identity than by familial relations and thus by blood. The old friend/enemy distinction is now embodied in the conflict between kin and non-kin, namely between those linked through blood or origin and those considered to belong to a different blood, culture or religion.” Medellín’s “invisible borders” resemble the scenario suggested by Mbembe in which “a new social division has emerged, separating those who are protected (because they are armed) from those who are not at all.”^[37] Beyond the security forces being activated to reconfigure the control of such borders, planning policies, militias, and paramilitaries appear as promoters of governance and security in these regions. Produced as a “savage urban other”^[38] any “desire to be a man among other men is frustrated by the enactment of difference.”^[39] The youth from the periphery threatens the imaginary of citizens, appearing as the threat of contamination, outsiders defined by difference, racialized subjects who can only play the role of “that portion of men who are kept apart—the part apart.”^[40]

Between 1991 and 2011 Medellín’s image changed, as did the official records of violence. Following international guidelines, conflict in Colombia became increasingly staged as the struggle to protect democracy from a faceless enemy who could be anyone and everywhere, an enemy that might become a target of humanitarian interventions or the war against terror. If security studies faced “ways of killing and dying that no longer obeyed the same logic of state security and that, increasingly, confronted traditional military forces and non-state groups of various shades, and intentions” since the end of the Cold War, it was the 9/11 attacks and the “War on Terror” that allowed President Álvaro Uribe (2002–08) to once again formulate anti-drug policies in terms of anti-terror measures and attributing the narco industry to the guerrillas.^[41] With president Uribe’s declaration of “terrorist threat” in 2002, and the reformulation of national security in terms of democratic security,

security is not understood in the first instance as the security of the State, nor as the security of the citizen without the participation of the State, but as protection of the citizen and democracy by the State, with the cooperation and commitment of the whole society. Democratic security is based on three pillars: protection of the rights of all citizens; protection of democratic values, plurality and institutions and the solidarity and cooperation of all citizens in defense of democratic values.^[42]

Armed groups on the periphery of Medellín were codified as violent threats to democracy and constructed as the other to the righteous bearers of violence who arm themselves, legally and extralegally, to protect their communities. Produced and presupposed as criminals, the stories of young people without fathers, young mothers, armed children, young people who earn money selling sex or drugs, others who gather on street corners to listen to punk music, all of them were deemed disposable lives, not framed in the morality of honorable paisas.^[43] The war on drugs converted the peripheries de facto into places occupied by people considered as criminals, as social enemies who had returned to the state of nature and could be hunted by vigilantes. The interest in dismantling invisible borders appeared not with the intention of ending violence, but rather of disarming specific groups, and a violence management^[44] that reached an optimal level of morbidity.^[45]

In 2003, the new mayor of Medellín, Sérgio Fajardo, supported Uribe’s military intervention process, seeing it as a “an exit from delinquency,” while paramilitary Don Berna kept controlling the illegal market until he was extradited in 2008.^[46] Such a period of “controlled violence” was popularly known as a period of donbernabilidad, a word play on gobernabilidad meaning “governance” and “don” meaning crime boss. While PRIMED followed the trend of (so-called) “good urban governance” with the intention of creating new localities, the end of the 1990s already saw the articulation between paramilitarism and the State, when “the public security forces ‘cleaned up’ an extensive downtown area” and the hitmen from Don Berna “threatened, displaced or murdered ‘disposable’ inhabitants of the sector, […] to make room for urban development.”^[47] It was with the Fajardo City Hall and its successor Alonso Salazar that social urbanism appeared as a discursive strategy—with discourse understood here as a set of practices that produce reality—which started to accompany urban planning and “designates a model that guarantees at the same time governance and governance strategies.”^[48] And while a citizenry that monitors spaces and cries out for security endorses the State occupation of the periphery, the persecutions headed by vigilantes never left the scene, targeting those they considered the rest of the rest, as deviants within the neighborhood.

Uribe’s proposal was in line with the World Bank’s Voices of the Poor, which categorized all aspects of the lives of the poor as vulnerable, attributing a “breakdown of social norms and social solidarity to the lack of regulation of behavior.”^[49] The previous demobilization agreements between militias and national government reappeared after the conquest of the peripheries. Paramilitaries and others demobilized and became increasingly engaged as peace agents and educators who promoted social reintegration and preventative care of those deemed as potential victims or perpetrators. In the systematic efforts to eradicate terrorism, the military occupation was part of policing in the broader sense of population governance. In face of any violence coming from the borderized zones or the people in those zones,

the nation is called upon to shed public tears of rancor and rise up before the enemy. And from weeping to weapons, the path is always traced. Dressed in the garb of international law, human rights, democracy or simply “civilization”, militarism does not need to be disguised.^[50]

Within the framework of the war on drugs, the “enemy” is inexhaustible, since drug trafficking continues at full speed and there is a vast available reserve of work force to meet its needs. Interventions that target the so-called vulnerable/endangered populations weave together both national security and urban planning. A combination of care and control emerges from the perspective of both national security and local policies, within which urban planning discursively constructs urban space as a matter of “citizen security,” harmonizing with military intervention in the peripheries as practices of pacification.

Social urbanism encourages each person to take care of their own community, promoting a “citizen culture” that—it is worth remembering—will only be possible with increased police presence guaranteeing permanent repression. It is a matter of informing “[the] poor of Medellín [that they] are less poor because they have the presence of the State in their lives,” while also enlisting the poor into responsibility for their own security. In this way it is possible to understand militarization and social assistance or welfare not as opposing each other,^[51] but rather as a total influence on all aspects of life, domestic and public: “The increasingly watchful state knows better than us what we should be eating, drinking, smoking, ingesting; what is suitable for us to read, watch, understand; how we should travel, spend our money, and entertain ourselves.” ^[52]

However, it is not only a matter of the watchful state, but also the watchful citizen recruited by the state through social policy. Citizens are required to take care of the community and denounce any suspected of wrongdoing, even to keep track of possible transgressions coming from the state apparatus itself. It emerges as a logic in which “​​[d]emocracy is required with security, that is, investment in containing the forces that herald radicalization.”^[53] Citizens act as forces of contention against any deviant potential within their surroundings. Furthermore,

[i]n name of containing the abuses of the State, of combating corruption and putting an end to State arbitrariness, it is the job of every citizen to denounce, oversee, organize, participate and demand transparency so that a clean game is produced, and all citizens invest themselves in authority. Such police-like subjectivity […] expands itself as conduct and as a norm of social or socio-environmental policies of NGOs, governments and companies.^[54]

Citizen security in Medellín operates on the logic of participation, takes care of the neighborhood and has an entrepreneurial culture as exemplified by the system of CEDEZOs (Centro de Desarollo Empresarial Zonal), a micro-credit system that aims to contribute to the economic development and competitiveness of the city.

Formulated at the national level as democratic security and at the city scale as citizen security, a form of spatial governance emerges that combines militarization and social programs. Democracy is configured as a desire to be governed,^[55] while the desire for democracy legitimizes the desire for the police structure that guarantees the security of the order of “the self”—an order whose malleability allows everyone to exercise citizenship within their communities, and those who do not choose to exercise it can be identified as outsiders. The combination of social urbanism and democratic security results in interventions that redistribute control of spaces in the periphery, where streets and blocks are guarded by the police and cared for by the community attentive to any deviant or suspicious activity. Civil society actively participates in the spatial reorganization of the city, whether personified as citizens who can be both enthusiasts of humanitarian interventions and social assistance, or as vigilantes who hunt and assault deviants. In the face of virulent vulnerability, phobic securitization and welfarism go hand in hand to configure an orderly civilized rationality, within which “the exercise of citizenship is affirmed as a police activity,” as Acácio Augusto points out.^[56]

The borderized zones are at once differentiated and absorbed by civil society through militarization, care, education, and participation and become the subject of major architectural and infrastructural projects, ranging from library parks (parque biblioteca) to cable cars.^[57] There was even a rebranding of Integral Care Centers, police stations “with a friendly aesthetic” built at the highest points of the highest mountains that surround Medellín. Conceived as lighthouses, the CAI aim to “strengthen the positive image of the police and the State within peripheral territories.”^[58] To give one example, the footprint of the CAI Periférico El Salado is 152m². Among other spaces, it has a conciliation center, weapons depot, accommodation for 20 members of the public force, a sentry box, and a reaction terrace.^[59] More than physically asserting state presence, the equipment aims at fulfilling the mission of forming a ring of coexistence and security on Medellín’s “vulnerable” areas.

If the panopticon was once the Benthamite model prison, it has now transformed through expansion to the scale of the city, no longer manifest as a centralized viewing tower, but rather the peripheral distribution of small police stations, “symbolic fortresses” of constant monitoring to which all are submitted. This has resulted in buildings in which basements are for concealed police use, while “the community care workshops are located” in the visible parts.^[60] The materialization of security takes place through the inversion of the panopticon, where the police tower is no longer the “eye of power” but rather has become the borderizing surrounding. The institution that once shaped the prison city in terms of surveillance now takes place horizontally in a network of gazes and cameras—security or smartphones—visible to those who circulate on the ground floor of the building and through the streets of the comunas, of the eyes of those who look after the community and whose conduct is penetrated by the police. The city becomes cared for and controlled, and “everyone knows they are being monitored.”^[61]

In democratic and participatory Medellín, “to govern is a pedagogical act” and urbanization is a police activity.^[62] From drug trafficking capital to resilient city, the incidence of exposure to the chance of premature death continues to be unevenly spatially distributed. Security is enunciated as peace, accompanied by civility and education. Democratic borderization is consolidated in the built environment, inside pacified neighborhoods and throughout the city. Vigilant neighbors ready to denounce suspicious activities in any corner of the city are added to demobilized people of all sorts who play their part in civility promoting “peace culture.” Since 2002, further programs have emerged that promote education and psychological assistance to the demobilized, in addition to those in which different victims/perpetrators act as civic educators and care for each other through mediation and conciliation programs implemented in “high conflict areas.”^[63]

The resilient city is a city of “maternal” citizens who preventatively care for their potentially deviant “children,” while monitoring, punishing, and educating those who choose the criminal path. On the one hand, mass incarcerations and massacres, and the systemically uneven exposure to violent death have never ceased to operate in these spaces, while anyone can open their arms to redemption and reform, embracing subjection to the regime of democratic security and citizen-policing on the other hand. More than an expression of an authoritarian state, borderization becomes the logic of a democratic order in which behaviors and fluxes of circulation are controlled in order to achieve an imagined total peace.