Doyle has written a book of welcome originality in engaging not only with the problematic of crime and violence in Medellín but with the challenges of researching it. It is a refreshingly honest account of how a young Australian woman, with a lot of prior lived experiences in Latin America, takes on the academic challenge of understanding Medellín. For those beginning their research careers, the book offers alerts and guidance, while for those, like myself, with a long experience researching in the city, it opens a debate on how we know what we think we know.
For the former category, Doyle traces her experiences of navigating the city’s social expectations in order to carry out research in difficult areas of the city, but also to conduct interviews with a range of governmental and nongovernmental actors. How does a tall fair-haired young Australian woman with a strange accent from having learned Spanish in Bolivia and Cuba, walk around safely, present herself to different interviewees, and convince them she knows what she is doing. Doyle shares her doubts and fears in ways few researchers do. She reminds her readers of the ethical demands of her university, and the forms her interviewees need to sign. She navigates the challenges but not without anxieties. In this research, which took place in 2014 and 2015, she recounts openly how she feels in interviews, her self-consciousness about how she is perceived, and whether she is framing her questions appropriately. She also reveals her journey as an academic researcher, from fearing silences in interviews to valuing them. She acknowledges the nervousness of knowing where to walk safely, when the only way to get to grips with what is going on in the city is to visit the comunas where the problems play out. Rather than the intrepid researcher, Doyle demonstrates that fear must be confronted, and reliable information sought about visits to the “field,” whose parameters and uncertainties shift.
Doyle is consciously helping younger and newer researchers to be aware of these subjective factors in the research process, and how they impact on data collection. Not only is it vital to recognize that researching in these environments is emotionally as well as practically demanding, what I particularly welcomed was the way Doyle integrates them into the research process itself. They are factored in to help the researcher accept that nothing is straightforward, that a constant process of critical self-reflection is vital not just for safety reasons but also for the quality of the research process itself and the connections with local actors to be built, if a deep and reliable process of data collection is to take place. Questioning rather than assuming “truth” is vital to the research process and the methods it relies on.
This leads me to the discussion on what can the experienced researcher learn from the book. Doyle really has an important message to communicate which is in the subtitle of the book: Truth versus Truths. The point is that critical reflection as a researcher also enables critical reflection about data itself, qualitative and quantitative. This is another aspect of this book that commends it to those of us working for years on these themes. How do we make sense of realities which by their nature have limitations in terms of the possibilities of serious and safe connections with criminal actors, but which also have limitations in terms of interpretations of what civil society, academic and governmental actors have to say about the reality of their city. And I would add here, as it is something I work on a lot, the challenges of engaging with communities who live these realities but with distinct experiences within communities.
Doyle’s text is about how, as she gets to know Medellín and its history better, she comes to recognize the complexity (it’s the word that emerges most strongly from her field work she points out) of the urban dynamics and the relationship of state and criminal actors and the nature of the latter. She thus comes to question a great deal of the literature, conceptual and empirical, that has sought to give “definitive” conclusions to the Medellín reality. The gathering of statistics is itself a major challenge, in which she cites, for instance, the wide range of estimates on the number of combos (as the “gangs” are called in Medellín) from different sources, between 250 and 400 with a membership between 6,000 and 10,000. A healthy skepticism around the claims to grasp the city’s dynamics is very important, while not abandoning the search for greater accuracy.
Having worked in Medellín since the late 1980s, it has been apparent to me that there are a range of understandings of the city, which depend a great deal on civic and political affiliations, as well as on philosophical and epistemological approaches amongst academics. Another value of this book is that it encourages us to grasp these varied positions, from those who claim that Social Urbanism in the early 2000s was rightly Medellín’s globally recognized achievement and responsible for a dramatic fall in homicides, and those who argue that the latter was more a result of a pact (Pacto de Fusiles) between municipal actors and the combos.
Doyle understandably concentrates on the discussion around Medellín’s effective or not security and violence reducing strategies of the 2000s. Perhaps the book is missing a deeper historical approach and the mutations of criminality and violence in the city. In the first place, although Doyle notes through her interviews the significance of Medellín as an industrial economy—in particular the textile industry—it was the collapse of this industry in the 1980s which severely impacted labor market opportunities and played a role in the search for alternatives among a population that (as Doyle recounts) had often migrated to the city in the wake of the decades of severe rural violence of the late 1940s and 1950s. The impact of having to protect the city spaces they occupied and struggle for services is acknowledged. However, it is the contextual shift in the economics of the city which helps us grasp the initial attraction of drug trafficking and the early sense that Pablo Escobar was a savior not a villain.
Even more significant, however, is the way the criminalities mutated. I particularly recall the moments when narcomenudeo (local sales of drugs, notably the less pricey ones) became a feature of the poorest areas of the city in the course of the 1990s, growing more over the next decade. It meant that recruitment into groups gained new traction as young men in particular could be enticed into taking drugs and then into supplying or working in other spheres of criminality. Previously, Medellín had been the trafficking not consuming hub. Another mutation, which Doyle addresses, has been the growth of extortion, a form of illegal enterprise which also has its history, with direct impacts on local comuna residents rather than links to external markets. The loanshark system to residents is another mutation (so-called Gota a Gota, drop by drop) which grew in the 1990s and continues, whereby residents excluded from the credit market take loans from drug traffickers (a means of money laundering) at a high daily interest rate. Yet another mutation which I can confirm from visits to the comunas is when combos recognized the need to reduce homicides in the 2000s when Medellín was trying to transform its reputation, and they began to engage in sexual trafficking, including selling the virginity of young girls. This has now been recognized by the current Mayor of Medellín, Frederico Gutiérrez, as it has involved US tourists coming to the richer quarter of the city to take advantage of this “market.” Yet another important aspect, also with a long history, is the role of the richer residents and the mutations in their economic investments towards external markets rather than local needs for jobs and services, a focus which had once given a special reputation to the city’s elites. This cannot be delinked from its reproduction of violences and criminalities.
There are many aspects therefore to the mutations of crime and violences in Medellín. And I have only referenced the drug trafficking/criminal economies, not the variation in armed groups including those which emerged from political visions, a problem of conceptualization that Doyle discusses. She acknowledges the challenges of getting to grips with the politicized armed groups alongside and sometimes entwined with criminal activities. Doyle’s reflexive approach to research opens up important questions about how we conceptualize the phenomena under study. The issue of what is political and what is criminal in Medellín, is even more significant to the city as its struggles to engage with President Petro’s Total Peace strategy, and in Medellín, that of urban peace.
Doyle delves into the studies that offer explanations while counter referencing this with her own field research and to the variations in the evidence. I have certain doubts about the paradigm of “criminal governance” which Doyle refers to and which is the dominant discourse for capturing how criminal groups connect with local populations. The problem I have with the way this is conceptualized, is that it gives almost exclusive agency to the criminal groups who impose and police the norms that enable them to act, acknowledging that state actors collude at times, including the police. My problem is that not enough attention is given to the potential agency and limitations on that agency of citizens who are presented with few choices than “accepting” what is on offer. Such acceptance does not mean that criminal actors are “legitimate,” I would argue, something that can only emerge in conditions where there is no threat of violence. That there are few choices other than accepting what the armed actors offer, is recognized by Doyle and others. However, the possibility that citizens could exercise choice if it is nurtured and protected is rarely discussed.
I was in comuna 13, one of the most violent of Medellín’s Communes in the early 1990s, and one of the local NGOs was helping them articulate their own development plan for the comuna in the midst of the violences. They called it Realizadores de los Sueños—Realizers of Dreams. In her conclusion, Doyle recognizes the importance of researchers connecting with actors on the ground, involving them in their research and feeding it back, what I call “non extractive research.” Doyle’s book ends also with a reference to the new strategy of peace, Total Peace, of President Petro. This is a very complex proposition. However it has put on the agenda a new approach to the multiple problems of violence in Colombia. In Medellín, a controversial process of building “urban peace” has begun, based on an entirely new set of propositions including negotiations with armed actors. It is precisely the participation of Medellín’s citizens that is opening up, amidst many difficulties. Reducing violence in Medellín in my research experience, cannot be reduced to its varied armed actors and the political visions of municipal actors and external supporters as happened with Social Urbanism. There is a history also of community groups in the city working for this goal, and of organizations that work with them. This needs to be acknowledged and researched more deeply. Doyle’s book offers a great opportunity to open up these wider debates.
