Postcards to Iowa

The Back of the Postcard

If you ask the average American what they know about Medellín, they’ll probably answer with remarkable confidence. They’ll mention Pablo Escobar, cocaine, cartels, Narcos, perhaps a rooftop chase or a grainy mugshot from the evening news. It’s astonishing how much certainty can be built from so little firsthand knowledge.

I wasn’t immune to that story. Long before I booked a flight to Colombia, I’d absorbed it through documentaries, television shows, newspaper headlines, and the casual shorthand that often follows places with complicated histories. I knew Medellín was no longer the world’s most dangerous city. I knew tourism had returned, international companies had invested, and urban planners now studied it as one of the most remarkable examples of civic transformation in the world. Yet facts have a curious way of coexisting with assumptions. Beneath everything I knew was something I simply felt: that Medellín was still somehow defined by the darkest chapter of its history.

It’s a strange thing we do, reducing an entire place to a single story. We instinctively understand that people are more complicated than the worst thing they’ve ever done or the hardest thing they’ve ever survived. We don’t introduce someone at a dinner party by their divorce, their addiction, or the year everything fell apart. We allow people the dignity of growth, contradiction, and reinvention. Somehow, cities rarely receive the same generosity.

That realization didn’t arrive all at once. It began on a train platform.

Our walking tour started with the Medellín Metro, which initially struck me as an odd choice. I had expected history lessons about Pablo Escobar or conversations about the cartel years. Instead, our guide, Luis, spent the first part of the morning talking about public transportation with an enthusiasm that bordered on contagious. Before long it became obvious that he wasn’t simply explaining how the Metro worked. He was explaining why it mattered.

Back home, public transportation is usually something we tolerate rather than celebrate. We complain about delayed trains, overcrowded buses, broken escalators, and routes that never seem to run on time. They’re practical necessities, useful only because they help us get somewhere else. Luis spoke about Medellín’s Metro with an entirely different kind of affection. He described it the way someone might talk about a family tradition or a neighborhood they loved growing up—not as a piece of infrastructure, but as something that belonged to the community itself.

That sense of ownership wasn’t accidental. Before the first train ever carried passengers, the city spent years teaching residents how to care for the system. Schools participated. Community organizations participated. Public campaigns reminded people that the Metro wasn’t someone else’s responsibility; it belonged to everyone. The goal wasn’t simply to teach people how to ride the trains. It was to create a culture in which caring for shared spaces became an expression of civic pride rather than a matter of enforcement.

Standing on the platform, I found myself smiling at the thought of introducing a campaign like that back home. The idea that Americans would collectively care for public transportation simply because it belonged to all of us felt almost impossibly optimistic. Then the train arrived. The station was spotless. People quietly stepped aside to let passengers exit before boarding. Conversations stayed low. Nothing about the experience felt staged or unusually orderly. Respect had simply become ordinary, so ordinary that no one seemed to notice it anymore.

Somewhere between stations, I realized I had stopped paying attention to the trains altogether. What fascinated me wasn’t the transportation system itself but what it represented. The Metro wasn’t simply moving people across the city; it was carrying trust. Thousands of strangers had agreed, day after day, that this shared space deserved care because it belonged to all of them. For a city rebuilding after decades of violence, that quiet agreement felt every bit as remarkable as the steel tracks beneath it.

As we left the station and continued climbing toward the hills surrounding Medellín, I found myself wondering whether I’d misunderstood the city before I’d ever set foot inside it. Perhaps the story worth telling wasn’t how Medellín had fallen apart. Perhaps it was how, piece by piece, it had decided to put itself back together.

The deeper we traveled into Medellín, the more that idea revealed itself. The Metro had been my first clue that the city was quietly rebuilding itself through trust, but it wasn’t the only example. As we climbed higher into the Aburrá Valley, it became clear that Medellín’s transformation wasn’t built around grand monuments or sweeping declarations. It was woven into ordinary decisions about how people moved through the city and, more importantly, who was given access to opportunity.

Medellín rises dramatically up the surrounding mountainsides, neighborhoods stacked one above another until the city seems to disappear into the clouds. The view is spectacular, but for decades the geography carried a hidden cost. The communities highest on the hills were often the most isolated, requiring long, exhausting commutes to reach jobs, schools, healthcare, and other services in the valley below. The mountain itself became another form of inequality, creating physical distance that gradually turned into economic and social distance as well.

Many cities might have accepted that reality as unavoidable. Medellín chose to challenge it. Rather than expecting residents to overcome the mountain every day, the city extended its Metro system into the hills using an aerial cable car network. To visitors, the gondolas offer breathtaking views of the valley. To the people who live there, they represent something much more meaningful. They are a daily reminder that the city considered these neighborhoods worth connecting rather than leaving behind.

As our gondola climbed above the rooftops, I found myself paying less attention to the panorama and more attention to the lives unfolding beneath us. Laundry hung from balconies. Children chased soccer balls through narrow streets. Small corner stores opened onto sidewalks barely wide enough for two people to pass. From above, the neighborhoods looked less like distant communities and more like ordinary places where ordinary lives were being lived. It struck me that infrastructure, at its best, isn’t simply about efficiency. It’s a declaration about who belongs.

That realization followed us into Plaza Botero later that afternoon. Most visitors come for Fernando Botero’s oversized bronze sculptures, which have become one of Medellín’s most recognizable landmarks. Their exaggerated proportions invite smiles and photographs, creating the sort of playful public space that draws both tourists and locals. Yet in the middle of the plaza stands a sculpture that asks for something quieter than amusement.

In 1995, a bomb hidden beneath Botero’s Bird of Peace exploded during an outdoor concert, killing more than twenty people and injuring hundreds more. The blast tore through the bronze sculpture, leaving it permanently twisted and scarred. Several years later, Botero donated an identical bird to the city, but only after making one request: the damaged sculpture should remain exactly where it was. Today the two birds stand side by side, one smooth and whole, the other forever marked by violence. Neither sculpture tells the complete story on its own. Together, they acknowledge both the tragedy the city endured and the determination to continue beyond it.

Standing between them, I realized why the memorial felt so different from others I had visited. It wasn’t asking visitors to choose between remembering and moving forward. It insisted on both. The damaged bird refused to let history disappear, while the new bird quietly rejected the idea that history should have the final word. It was one of the most honest expressions of resilience I had ever encountered because it understood that healing isn’t the absence of scars. Healing is learning to carry them without allowing them to define everything that comes next.

By that point, a pattern had begun to emerge. The Metro, the cable cars, and the two birds all reflected the same philosophy. Medellín wasn’t attempting to erase its past or persuade visitors to forget it. Instead, the city seemed remarkably comfortable acknowledging where it had been while investing enormous energy in where it hoped to go. Every stop on our tour challenged the story I had unknowingly brought with me, replacing the familiar narrative of violence with something far more interesting: a city determined to become known not only for what happened there, but for what happened next.

By the time we reached Comuna 13, I had stopped looking for evidence that Medellín had changed. The evidence was everywhere. What I found myself wondering instead was how a place recovers without pretending nothing happened.

No neighborhood embodies that question more completely than Comuna 13. Today it has become one of Medellín’s most visited destinations, drawing travelers with its murals, music, cafés, and outdoor escalators. It is vibrant, energetic, and unmistakably hopeful. Yet for much of the 1980s and 1990s, it represented something entirely different. Drug traffickers, guerrilla groups, paramilitary organizations, and government forces all fought for control of the neighborhood, leaving residents caught between forces they neither created nor controlled. Violence became so commonplace that children grew up distinguishing the sound of helicopters as easily as they recognized the voices of their neighbors.

Reading about that history before arriving is one thing. Walking through those streets beside someone who lived it is something else entirely. Our guide had grown up in Comuna 13, and as he shared memories from his childhood, history stopped feeling like something preserved in museums or documentaries. It became deeply personal. Statistics became families. Political conflict became neighborhoods. Every story carried the quiet weight of someone remembering not an event, but a life.

As though the city wanted to remind us that travel rarely unfolds according to plan, the weather shifted without warning. Rain pounded against the Metro windows as we approached the neighborhood, reducing the valley to little more than blurred outlines. The cable cars slowed, swaying gently in the wind, before coming to a temporary stop. Our guide looked out the window, smiled with admirable understatement, and said, “This is…not good.”

A few minutes later, our entire group found ourselves climbing the hillside in bright plastic ponchos that transformed us into what can only be described as colorful garbage bags. There is something wonderfully equalizing about a cheap rain poncho. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an experienced traveler or on your first trip abroad, whether you packed meticulously or forgot half your suitcase. Once that thin sheet of plastic goes over your head, everyone looks equally ridiculous. The laughter that followed felt strangely appropriate, reminding me that even in places marked by difficult histories, ordinary moments of humor continue to exist alongside everything else.

As the rain gradually softened, the neighborhood revealed itself one mural at a time. Our guide encouraged us to look beyond the colors and read the walls as though they were pages in a history book. A hummingbird represented the helicopters that once filled the skies above the neighborhood. Elephants symbolized memory because, as the saying goes, elephants never forget. Portraits honored neighbors who disappeared during years of violence, ensuring that the people who had been lost would not also be forgotten.

What struck me most was not the beauty of the artwork but the purpose behind it. The murals weren’t there to replace history with something prettier. They weren’t an attempt to cover scars or distract visitors from what had happened. Instead, they acknowledged the past while refusing to let it become the neighborhood’s only identity. Comuna 13 hadn’t painted over its history. It had painted through it, transforming walls that once reflected fear into walls that now carried memory, grief, pride, and hope all at once.

That distinction stayed with me because it challenged the way we often tell stories about transformation. We like before-and-after narratives because they offer satisfying conclusions. A dangerous neighborhood becomes safe. A struggling city becomes successful. The old story ends, and the new one begins. Comuna 13 resisted that kind of simplicity. Its transformation wasn’t built on forgetting. It was built on remembering honestly while choosing, day after day, to keep creating something different.

The outdoor escalators captured that philosophy perfectly. On paper they seem almost disappointingly ordinary, hardly the sort of landmark people travel across the world to see. Yet these six escalators fundamentally changed daily life for thousands of residents by replacing a long, exhausting climb with a journey that took only minutes. Like the Metro and the cable cars before them, they represented much more than infrastructure. They were quiet evidence that hope often arrives not through grand gestures, but through practical decisions that communicate something profoundly human: your neighborhood matters, your time matters, and you matter.

When we reached the overlook, the storm had passed and evening was settling over the valley. Lights slowly appeared across the mountainsides until the entire city shimmered beneath us. Looking out across Medellín, it became impossible to separate the stories I had heard from the city I was seeing. The violence was real. The loss was real. The rebuilding was equally real. Rather than asking visitors to choose one story over the other, Medellín seemed to insist that both belonged together. Only by holding them side by side could you begin to understand the city itself.