Medellín and Bogotá: The global cities of the other globalization

Abstract

Two cities from Colombia, Medellín and Bogotá, are studied as exemplars of the ways in which globalization and colonialism have shaped and continue to shape the cartographies of global mega‐urbanization. The first part offers a discussion of the processes of political integration without territorial unification that characterized the development of the emergent nations in Latin America after independence in the early part of the 19th century. In the next section we focus directly on the object investigation by looking at a crucial period in the history of Colombia, the period of a bloody and savage civil war called La Violencia [The Violence], which lasted from 1946 through 1957, which resulted in a political compromise called the National Front (1958–78). In the last section we look at the 1980s and 1990s as periods in which ‘the wars of the peace’ of the stalemate between two forms of military violence turned into ‘drug wars’ that spawned a paramilitary para‐state. These two Latin American cities offer the face of the reverse of globalization, namely, the globalization of the drug trade and the paramilitarization of de‐colonial, neo‐imperialized nations.