The
city that the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar made his personal
fiefdom in the 1980s has gone through a major public image overhaul in
the past decade.
Murders,
drug trafficking and kidnappings have plummeted in Medellín as upscale
shopping malls, a new transit system and tourism have flourished in the
“city of the eternal spring.”
While the city has enjoyed a renaissance of late, some of the nasty vestiges of the bad, old days still remain.
Up
on the city’s sprawling hillside slums, street gangs that sprung up in
the wake of Escobar’s death are luring young girls, most between 10 and
15, into a vicious business where their virginity is auctioned off to
the highest bidder – mostly drug barons and foreign sex tourists.
“They
start drawing them in with perks from a culture of high consumerism,”
Luís Pardo, Director of NGO Corporacion Consultoria de Conflicto Urabano
said.