If I’m honest, it just feels a bit weird to talk about leadership and design thinking and all of that without mentioning the background to which all this is going on. Medellin and the content we’re learning seem to quite literally react with each other, so every day I can step out into the city after training and see things differently than they were before. Nothing is about leadership, but then again everything is, which feels quite strange.

 I know these blog posts are supposed to be about my personal leadership journey. I don’t want to make the link between the two – it feels inappropriate to make this about me – so I won’t. What I do want to do is talk about Colombian history, and what I wasn’t taught about before I came here. I’ll probably write something later about resilience and flexibility and teamwork, but right now I want to write about this.

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Colombian violence is not just Narcos and Pablo Escobar, but a complex and confusing negotiation between multiple sides – left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, wealthy families, drug traffickers and the government*. Many people have made their home in the mountains, and so political activation is difficult for a multitude of reasons. The terrain is unforgiving, the weather perfect for growing coffee and exotic fruit but also for producing narcotics. Up in the mountains, the police can’t or won’t get to you. Faced with violence, you’re on your own.

 In any case, the betrayal and violence came from both sides; one of the more heartbreaking stories in Colombian history is the massacre of an estimated 5,000 people by the Colombian army, many of them homeless. They were abducted, often under the guise of job recruitment, dressed up as guerrillas and then murdered because the Colombian government’s reward for a FARC member’s dead body was thirty million pesos, at the time worth £15,000.

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The final exhibit in the Museo Casa de la Memoria in central Medellin is a room painted entirely black.  There are lights throughout the ceiling and on the walls creating the impression of thousands of stars. Inside are screens displaying pictures of people who have died in Colombia’s years of violence, through homicide, kidnapping or just being ‘disappeared’.  

 As you walk through the exhibit, the screens change so that the pictures are in black and white, with only the dead person’s image remaining in colour. These aren’t bland statistics or news reports, but donated family photos of normal people doing normal things; a family barbecue, a school photo. One was a picture of a boy no older than fifteen riding a white pony and laughing. Your breath catches when you look at it. I have an almost identical photo of my older brother.

 What lives among all this pain is a sort of stubborn hope. One of Medellin’s most popular (and best) tourist destinations is Comuna 13, a barrio that was once Medellin’s most violent and is now famed for its street art, music and dancing, even as you can see the scar of a mass grave carved on the mountain behind. Medellin has free wi-fi in at least 20 public spaces, including the Parques del Rio and the Botanical Gardens, because someone in Medellin’s governing body realised that it was an effective way to combat drug activity in a city where many people can’t afford access to the internet. ‘People gather here to send messages and study,’ our guide told us, ‘and drug dealers don’t want to be where people are gathering. So, the free wi-fi means no drug dealers.’ A statue of a bird in San Antonio square by artist Fernando Botero was torn apart by a terrorist attack. Botero made an identical bird and placed it next to the destroyed sculpture, to represent peace.

On a tour of downtown Medellin, the guide pointed to the San Antonio metro station, a structure as safe and fast and seemingly nondescript as the London Underground, and told us that it changed everything. The cable car to the mountains changed everything, because now people could move between the mountains and the city in fifteen minutes instead of hours and hours. The metro is the only one of its kind in Colombia.

Hope and resilience seem woven into Colombian culture. At lunch, we sat together and talked about how welcoming Colombian people were, how we were always being invited to parties and barbecues.

‘They want us to have good memories.’ someone said. ‘They want us to talk about it differently to how it’s been talked about before’.

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On our tour of the Museo Casa de la Memoria, the guide asked us to define what scars are, and what they mean to us. He then asked us, if we were comfortable, to point out some visible scars on our own bodies, explain how we got them and tell the group what we had learned from them. 

The guide then explained how the memory of violence had scarred the countryside, from the displacement of Indigenous people, to the harmful chemicals used in the processing of cocaine, to the soil dug out of the mountainside to make room for graves.

Afterwards, he recited a line from a poem by Piedad Bonnett, a Colombian writer. 

'No hay cicatriz, por brutal que parezca,
que no encierre belleza.'

'There is no scar, however brutal it seems 

that does not contain beauty.'

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*I still find the nuances of Colombian history quite hard to grasp and so if I get something wrong here, I’m very sorry; there are multitudes of brilliant Colombian writers, journalists and filmmakers, who will explain it far better than I can. I’d encourage anyone reading this to look into their work if you’re interested.

Sources:

(I agree this is a bit full on for a blog post but I don't want to misrepresent information, especially for a country that is not my own, and you might want to visit some of these if you ever end up in Medellin. The tours are all very good, run by local people and often free).  

Zippy Tour

Beyond Colombia Tour 

This Guardian article about General Mario Montoya, who oversaw the FARC massacres. 

This report on the Medellin_Digital initiative

The Museo Casa de la Memoria