Sustaining the Medellin Miracle

"It is one of the effects of globalization," said Juan María Cock, president of Uniflor, one of the region's biggest flower exporters. He is also an economist and former adviser at the International Monetary Fund. "We have the advantages of labor and a tropical climate with lots of light and sun. There was no way you could compete with us or any good reason why you should want to."

The thousands of new jobs in the flower sector provided economic refuge for many Colombians escaping the violence of a drug-fueled civil war. Inside one of Uniflor's vast greenhouses, Luz Dari García, 20, waters flowers for a living. Her father was killed in 2002 in their village 50 miles north, caught in the crossfire of left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries. She fled with her mother and elder brother to the suburban belts of Medellin "because we knew there were jobs here."

Her older brother landed work early tending flower fields. She began similar work last year, earning the minimum wage of about $250 a month. By no means a princely sum -- even in Colombia -- it is far more than the family earned raising fruit and vegetables in their village. "We were able to build a life because there was work," she said.

Transforming a City

In the steep hillsides of Medellin, warring drug gangs long ruled the dense western ghetto where Lina Marcela Zapata resides in a two-room cement-block home. The 26-year-old single mother recalls huddling with her small son in the corner during shootouts, fearing a stray bullet such as the one that killed a neighbor's daughter. More horrific, she said, was the time drug gangs sought to teach locals a lesson, cutting off the legs of a 9-year-old girl and flinging her body off the highest cliff. "We could not sleep because of all the gunfire," she said, closing her eyes and shaking her head as she remembered.

The guns have quieted in Medellin. In 1991, the annual murder rate was 381 per 100,000 people -- a virtual war zone. In 2001, it was 174 per 100,000. Last year, it fell to 26 per 100,000, or lower than the District.

A combination of factors produced that change. President Alvaro Uribe, Medellin's native son, came to power in 2002, shifting from Andres Pastrana's policy of dialogue to one of force. The Colombian military and local police stormed the most violent barrios of Medellin in armored vehicles and helicopters. In other neighborhoods, calm came as the drug gang headed by the notorious paramilitary leader Diego Fernando Murillo finally overpowered its rivals. Murillo was extradited to the United States with 12 other paramilitary chiefs in May.

Around the same time, Sergio Fajardo, a mathematician with Bee Gees hair, became Medellin's mayor and launched his own campaign to renew the city. He rolled out social programs while building schools, police stations and "library parks" celebrated for their architecture. Two cable cars systems were constructed, linking some of Medellin's toughest and most isolated slums with the city's expanding metro system.

If those efforts became the bricks of Medellin's house of change, globalization was the mortar that helped keep them together, officials say.

Exports to the United States from the state of Antioquia, with Medellin as its core, went from $268 million in 1991 to $1.18 billion in 2005, creating an estimated 360,000 jobs and helping halve the unemployment rate to 10 percent, according to government statistics and Colombian export associations. The windfall in taxes became a critical source of revenue to fund the projects that transformed the city. "You could say that export growth helped us help ourselves," Fajardo said.

The Cost of Uncertainty

Some of those gains are slipping away.

Over the past two years, Ralph Lauren closed a regional office in Medellin and one major jeans factory shut its doors, dismissing 2,500 workers. Crystal has shed 1,000 jobs -- or 10 percent of its workforce. Other textile makers have been forced to do the same, with the industry losing an estimated 10,000 jobs in total.

As in many developing countries with manufacturing-based export industries, one huge problem is China. Colombia's average textile wage of $1.42 an hour is about double similar wages in China. Many here argue that the United States and Europe must pressure China more to revalue its currency, something Beijing has resisted. They are also pressing for a formal free trade agreement with the United States .