Excerpt
FRED DE SAM LAZARO (NewsHour): For two decades, Martha Alvarez has held dance classes year-round seven days a week. For the 350-odd students who cram into her tiny studios, it’s an alternative, she says, in a city that offers few.
MARTHA ALVAREZ, Dance Instructor (through interpreter): I started this is 1992 out of concern for the amount of drug use and prostitution in the neighborhood.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: That was back when Medellin had become the world’s murder capital, the cocaine capital, home of the drug lord Pablo Escobar, who was killed by police in 1993.
MARTHA ALVAREZ (through interpreter): It has changed a lot since then in terms of drug use, and the armed conflict has certainly diminished.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Medellin has seen a dramatic drop in violence. The murder rate is down from about 380 per 100,000 people to about 50. Experts credit a general calming trend in the country’s long-running civil war, also the efforts of new political leadership to bring people together in the city, says Alejandro Echeverri.
ALEJANDRO ECHEVERRI, Architect (through interpreter): When we look at the narco-trafficking years of Pablo Escobar, people didn’t trust each other. They built barriers around themselves and they put walls up. So public space in this city takes on a far greater significance than anywhere else, because people didn’t look each other in the eye when they walked down the street.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Echeverri is an architect. He was part of the administration a decade ago that set out to create safe public spaces.
We spoke in front of the Exploratorium he designed, a science museum that’s one of several distinctive new buildings.
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