136,000 Tourists a Month. The Escalators Were Not Built for Them.

The 360 Steps

A Woman Who Can No Longer Sit Outside Her Door

She is sixty-seven years old. She has lived in the same house on the steep hillside of San Javier — the neighborhood the city calls Comuna 13 — for thirty-eight years. She arrived in 1988, one of the displaced farming families who settled on the western slopes of the Aburrá Valley because no one else wanted the land. The gradient was too steep. The city did not extend services there. There were no paved roads, no sewage lines, no formal addresses. People built with what they had: cinder block, corrugated metal, hope calibrated to the minimum viable standard. To reach her house from the base of the hill, she climbed 360 stairs.

In 2012, the city built six outdoor escalators covering 384 meters of vertical terrain. They were an engineering intervention aimed at a specific population: residents like her, elderly and physically limited, who faced a 35-minute climb to reach their front doors. The escalators reduced that commute to six minutes. They were covered, lit, integrated into the existing pedestrian infrastructure. The international press called them a symbol of urban innovation. Medellín won awards. The escalators appeared in architecture magazines, TED talks, CNN features. The narrative was irresistible: a city that had been synonymous with cartel violence was reinventing itself through infrastructure.

Now she cannot sit outside her front door. The corridor that runs past her house — the one she used for thirty years as an extension of her living space, where she kept a plastic chair and drank coffee in the morning and spoke to neighbors in the evening — is a tourist thoroughfare. Groups of fifteen to twenty-five people pass every few minutes, led by guides with portable speakers. They photograph her door. They photograph her laundry. They photograph the view from her corridor without asking whether she is in the frame. "Before, the street was part of my house," she told a local reporter. "Now my house is part of the street."^[1]

She is not unique. She is representative. Comuna 13 now receives approximately 136,000 tourists per month — roughly 25,000 per week, 4,500 per day.^[2] It is Medellín's number one tourist destination, surpassing the Botanical Garden, Parque Arví, and the Fernando Botero Plaza combined. The escalators — built for residents — are overwhelmed by visitors. The murals — painted by community artists to process collective trauma — are backdrops for Instagram content. The neighborhood that survived Operación Orión is now surviving something else: the conversion of its pain into a consumable experience.

John Ramirez, the founder of one of the earliest community-based tour companies in the area, has described the situation in terms that deserve direct quotation. The community, he said, has "become unbearable."^[1] This is not a man opposed to tourism. He built his livelihood on it. What he is describing is a saturation threshold — the point at which the volume of visitors exceeds the carrying capacity of the social fabric, and the economic activity that was supposed to benefit the community begins to displace it instead.

Structural Read

The Machinery of the Second Displacement

To understand what is happening in Comuna 13, you must understand that this is a community that has already been displaced once. The distinction matters, because the second displacement operates through entirely different mechanisms while producing remarkably similar outcomes: the original residents leave.

The first displacement was military. On October 16, 2002, the Colombian government launched Operación Orión — the largest urban military operation in the country's history at that time. The stated objective was to clear FARC and ELN guerrilla positions from the hillside neighborhoods of western Medellín. The operation involved helicopters, armored vehicles, and approximately 1,500 soldiers and police. The results, documented by human rights organizations over the subsequent two decades: 450 detentions, 75 confirmed casualties, approximately 100 people disappeared, and more than 2,000 residents displaced.^[3]

The disappeared did not stay disappeared in the abstract. Between 2003 and 2004, more than 200 people vanished from the area under circumstances that human rights investigators have connected to paramilitary groups operating with state acquiescence. Many are believed to be buried in La Escombrera, a massive landfill on the hillside above the neighborhood. Corpse recoveries from La Escombrera continued as recently as December 2024.^[3] The tourism narrative — the one told on the guided tours, the one presented on travel blogs and in airline magazines — tends to compress this history into a sentence: "the neighborhood used to be dangerous." What it does not say is that the state was one of the primary agents of that danger, and that the bodies of the victims are still being pulled from the earth while tourists pose for photographs 300 meters away.

The second displacement is economic. It operates through four interlocking mechanisms:

Mechanism 1: Rent extraction. As tourist foot traffic increased, property values in the immediate escalator corridor rose. Landlords who had rented to longtime residents discovered they could earn more from commercial tenants — souvenir shops, tattoo parlors, graffiti tour staging areas, beer vendors. Long-term residents on informal or verbal lease agreements — common in neighborhoods built through informal settlement — found themselves priced out or directly evicted. The community has implemented restrictive policies to prevent tourist rental conversions and overnight stays, but these have been only partially successful.^[4]

Mechanism 2: Public space privatization. The corridors, stairways, and escalator landings that served as communal space — the infrastructure of daily social life in a neighborhood built on a hillside where flat ground is scarce — have been functionally annexed by the tourism economy. The escalators, designed for six-minute resident commutes, now experience wait times as tour groups queue. The murals that lined the stairways were originally painted by local artists like Chota, Jeihhco, and the Casa Kolacho collective as acts of memory — visual processing of armed conflict, displacement, and community rebuilding. Many of those original murals have faded or been replaced by sponsored works. In their place: advertisements for beer brands, tattoo parlors, and commercial graffiti commissions that reference the neighborhood's aesthetic without engaging its history.^[5]

Mechanism 3: Narrative capture. The community coined a term for what has happened to their neighborhood: "Comuna-land" — a deliberate reference to theme parks, to Disneyland, to the conversion of a living place into a simulated experience.^[5] The signal embedded in that coinage is precise. Locals are not objecting to visitors. They are objecting to the replacement of their lived reality with a consumable version of it. The most visible symptom is the narco-themed merchandise — tourists posing with actors dressed as Pablo Escobar, Escobar-branded souvenirs sold in a neighborhood where Escobar's organization was responsible for much of the violence the murals were painted to process. Community leaders have issued a specific warning: "We are losing the true memory of the armed conflict."^[5] This is not nostalgia. It is an institutional observation about the erasure of historical accountability. When the tourism narrative reduces Operación Orión to "the neighborhood used to be dangerous," it erases the state's role. When it reduces the armed conflict to "Escobar era," it erases the paramilitaries, the guerrillas, the forced displacement, and the ongoing forensic recoveries at La Escombrera. The memory is not being preserved by the tours. It is being replaced by a simpler, more marketable version.

Mechanism 4: Criminal governance of tourism. This is the mechanism that receives the least international attention and may be the most structurally significant. More than 30 street gangs — locally called "combos" — operate throughout Comuna 13.^[6] These organizations did not disappear after Operación Orión. They reorganized. And they have integrated the tourism economy into their existing extortion infrastructure with remarkable efficiency. The primary instrument is the vacuna — literally "vaccine," the Colombian euphemism for protection money. Tour guides operating in the neighborhood pay a weekly vacuna to the combo controlling their specific route. In 2021, the gangs imposed a restriction limiting guides to one tour per day — not out of concern for community well-being, but to regulate the market and prevent guides from earning enough to operate independently of gang oversight.^[6]

A Cambridge University Press paper titled "The Criminal Governance of Tourism" documents this system in detail, describing how criminal organizations in Comuna 13 have developed a parallel regulatory structure for the tourism industry — setting prices, controlling access, mediating disputes between guides, and extracting rent at every level of the value chain.^[6] The paper's framework is significant because it reframes what is happening from "crime in a tourist area" to "criminal governance of an economic sector." The gangs are not disrupting the tourism economy. They are administering it. They have become the de facto regulatory authority in the absence of effective state regulation of an industry that generates millions of dollars annually in an area where the state's historical intervention was a military operation that produced mass graves.

The fourth mechanism intersects with all three others. Gang-controlled tourism creates an environment where rent extraction is enforced rather than merely economic, where public space privatization occurs under threat, and where narrative capture serves the interests of organizations that profit from a simplified, consumable version of the neighborhood's history. The system is self-reinforcing: more tourists generate more revenue, more revenue attracts more gang interest, more gang involvement restricts community agency, reduced community agency accelerates displacement.

The Children

There is a fifth mechanism that operates at the intersection of the other four, and it concerns children. In the corridors and stairways of the escalator zone, children as young as ten and eleven work as informal guides, performers, and vendors.^[7] They are visible daily: dancing for tips, offering to lead tourists through "secret" routes, selling candy and water. They have learned, through observation, that tourist attention can be monetized. Some have dropped out of school. The economics are simple and devastating: a twelve-year-old who earns the equivalent of $15-20 USD in tips on a busy Saturday has an immediate incentive to skip Monday's classes. Multiply this across dozens of children, across months and years, and you have a generation being pulled out of education by the same tourism economy that is supposed to represent the neighborhood's transformation.

The gangs exploit this vulnerability with precision. Children are useful because they are sympathetic to tourists, unlikely to be questioned by police, and easy to control. They occupy the lowest rung of the informal tourism labor chain, and their presence normalizes child labor within a narrative framework — "community entrepreneurship," "local kids showing their neighborhood" — that obscures what is structurally occurring: the conversion of minors into an unregulated labor force serving an industry governed by criminal organizations.

The Comuna Project, operated by Design Network for Good (DNfG), has attempted to offer an alternative model — structured programs that redirect children toward education while providing modest economic support.^[7] It is a genuine effort. It is also vastly outscaled by the problem. A single NGO program cannot counterbalance the economic incentives generated by 4,500 daily tourists in a neighborhood where formal employment opportunities remain scarce and gang structures actively recruit from the same demographic.

Pattern Confirmation

Where Trauma Tourism Meets Structural Displacement

Comuna 13 is not an anomaly. It is an advanced case of a pattern observable in conflict-affected communities worldwide that have been converted into tourism products. The structural sequence is consistent:

Phase 1: A community survives a period of extreme violence or crisis. Phase 2: The survival narrative attracts international attention. Phase 3: The attention generates tourism. Phase 4: The tourism economy displaces the community that generated the narrative. Phase 5: The original residents are replaced by the commercial infrastructure serving visitors who came to witness "resilience."

This sequence has been documented in the District Six Museum area of Cape Town, where the community displaced by apartheid-era forced removals has been partially displaced again by tourism-driven gentrification. It has been documented in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, where post-Katrina "disaster tourism" contributed to property value increases that priced out returning residents. It has been documented in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, where pacification operations preceded tourism development that preceded displacement — a sequence so structurally similar to Comuna 13's trajectory that it functions as a near-parallel case study.

What distinguishes Comuna 13 from these parallels is the criminal governance layer. In Cape Town, Rio, and New Orleans, the tourism economy operates within (however imperfectly) state regulatory frameworks. In Comuna 13, the regulatory framework is substantially controlled by the same criminal organizations that the original military intervention was supposed to eliminate. The state cleared the guerrillas. The paramilitaries filled the vacuum. The paramilitaries fragmented into combos. The combos now administer the tourism economy. The arc from Operación Orión to the vacuna is not a sequence of unrelated events. It is a continuous structural line.

Georgetown University has studied the community's resistance mechanisms — the restrictive policies on tourist rentals, the prohibition on overnight stays, the community agreements designed to maintain affordable housing.^[4] The researchers found these measures "partially successful," which is academic language for "insufficient but not futile." The community is fighting back. It is fighting with the tools available to an informal settlement population against an economic force backed by international demand and administered by armed organizations. The asymmetry is structural, and the outcome trajectory is predictable without intervention at a scale that has not yet materialized.

The industry itself has begun to respond — not through regulation, but through withdrawal. Much Better Adventures, CAS Trips, and Kagumu Adventures have all stopped sending groups to Comuna 13, redirecting instead to Comuna 3 and other neighborhoods.^[8] This is not altruism. It is risk management. The companies assessed that the reputational cost of participating in a system governed by criminal organizations, exploiting child labor, and displacing a post-conflict community exceeded the commercial value of offering "the real Medellín" experience. Their departure is a market signal: the ethical tourism industry has concluded that Comuna 13 tourism, in its current form, is unsalvageable from within.

But the departure of ethical operators does not reduce tourist volume. It shifts the composition. The operators who remain are those least concerned with the structural dynamics described above — the ones willing to pay the vacuna, employ children as attractions, and sell narco-themed content. The market selects for the worst actors precisely because the best actors have left.

Alternative Explanations

It is possible to argue that the tourism economy, despite its distortions, has produced net positive outcomes for Comuna 13. The argument runs as follows: before tourism, the neighborhood had no significant formal economy. The escalators, murals, and guided tours have created employment for hundreds of residents — guides, vendors, artists, restaurateurs. Average household income in the escalator corridor has risen measurably since 2015. The community's international visibility provides a degree of protection against the kind of state violence that produced Operación Orión, because any future military action would now occur under global media scrutiny. Under this reading, the displacement effects are real but represent the inevitable friction of economic development in a previously marginalized community, and the alternative — no tourism, no international attention, no economic activity — would be worse.

This argument has structural merit and should not be dismissed. It fails, however, on two specific grounds. First, it treats displacement as friction rather than as the primary outcome. When the residents who survived the armed conflict are replaced by commercial tenants serving tourists who came to learn about the armed conflict, the "development" has not served the community — it has consumed it. Second, the argument assumes that tourism revenue flows primarily to residents. The criminal governance structure documented by Cambridge University Press demonstrates that a significant portion of tourism revenue is extracted by gang organizations through the vacuna system, meaning the economic benefits are captured disproportionately by the same criminal infrastructure that the community's "transformation narrative" claims to have overcome.^[6]

A second counterargument holds that the community's own residents are the primary agents of the tourism economy — that this is not something being done to them but something they are doing. Many guides are local. Many vendors are local. The murals were created by local artists. Under this reading, the agency belongs to the community, and external critics are imposing a victimhood narrative on people who have chosen to monetize their own story. This argument, too, has partial validity. It fails when it encounters the children. A twelve-year-old dropping out of school to dance for tourist tips has not made an informed economic choice. A guide paying weekly protection money to an armed gang has not freely chosen to participate in the tourism economy. Agency exists on a spectrum, and the spectrum in Comuna 13 runs from genuine entrepreneurship at one end to coerced participation at the other, with most actors occupying positions between these poles that are difficult to classify as fully voluntary.

What is not known: The exact percentage of tourism revenue captured by gang organizations through the vacuna system. The Cambridge University Press paper documents the system's structure but does not quantify total extraction. The actual number of children working in the informal tourism economy is also unmeasured — estimates range from "dozens" to "over a hundred" depending on the source, and the seasonal variation is significant. The precise number of original residents who have been displaced by rising rents and commercial conversion is not tracked by any institution.

What is not confirmed: Whether the community's restrictive policies on tourist rentals and overnight stays have measurably slowed displacement or merely shifted it to adjacent blocks outside the policy zone. Whether the departure of ethical tour operators has increased or decreased total tourist volume — it may have simply changed the composition without affecting the count.

What would change the signal: If the Medellín municipal government implemented and enforced a formal regulatory framework for tourism in Comuna 13 — including licensed guides, maximum group sizes, prohibited routes near residential areas, and the elimination of gang-administered access fees — the displacement trajectory could be altered. No such framework currently exists at enforcement scale. If La Escombrera forensic recoveries produce definitive evidence of state involvement in post-Orión disappearances, the tourism narrative would face a reckoning that could reshape the entire experience. If Colombia's national tourism authority classified Comuna 13 as a "saturated destination" subject to capacity controls (a mechanism that exists in Colombian law but has never been applied to an urban neighborhood), the volume problem could be addressed structurally.

Monitoring indicators: Track monthly tourist volume figures for the escalator corridor (currently self-reported by tour operators and cross-referenced by municipal transport data). Monitor La Escombrera forensic recovery announcements — each recovery reopens the historical narrative that tourism compresses. Track the number of ethical tour operators active in the area quarterly. Monitor school enrollment rates in the immediate escalator zone for children aged 10-14. Watch for municipal regulatory proposals targeting informal tourism governance. Track Georgetown University's ongoing research for updated displacement metrics.