Meeting in Cartagena? Why not Medellín? Oh, wait…

And Medellín, Colombia’s industrial heartland, was promoted as the embodiment of the country’s renaissance: the murder rate plummeted by about 80% over five years, reaching a decade low of 34 deaths per 100,000 in 2007. Once called the “city of death”, Medellín was now open for business.

But the root cause of Colombia’s violence – the country’s status as the world’s biggest cocaine producer – has not disappeared. And Medellín’s apparent peace lasted only as long as its underworld was run by one man, through the Envigado Office.

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But it would not prove so for Medellín. With Murillo out of the way, a vicious power struggle erupted between his successors. Medellín’s homicide rate doubled in 2009, leaving about 3,000 people dead.

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The factional fighting within the Office came to an end last year with the capture of one of the rival leaders, and since then most of the group has reunited under a new boss, just in time to confront a new threat: one of Colombia’s emerging narco-militias, the Urabeños.

The Urabeños sprang up after the peace deal with the far-right paramilitaries. While the main militia leaders were jailed alongside Don Berna, most of the mid-range commanders – those who had been running the day-to-day cocaine operations – were free. Many of these commanders reorganised their old outfits, recruited other demobilised fighters, and returned to drug‑running.

The Urabeños are now a force across much of northern Colombia, bringing a military discipline to organised crime.

“They don’t think like average narcos,” said Jeremy McDermott, founder of Insight Crime, a thinktank that tracks organised crime in Latin America. “They are extraordinarily political, mixed with deep criminal experience.”

The group’s power was felt earlier this year when it forced dozens of towns to close all businesses after authorities killed a Urabeño leader. And now they are eyeing Medellín.

The looming battle between the Office and the Urabeños is for control of Medellin’s underworld, the vast local market and for positioning to be able to negotiate with the Mexican mafias that ship cocaine to the US.

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