Introduction
This story happened because of an escalator.
No, really!
The city of Medellín, Colombia had atrocious problems. It had been the center of Pablo Escobar’s drug-running empire, and his terror war against other cartels and the government itself until his death in 1993.
In the last twenty years, the population has grown from two million to almost four million people. And that massive urbanization has occurred mostly due to the agglomeration of slums around the periphery and the less desirable mountaintops that surround the city.
The commute for the service personnel from the slums to the prosperous core could easily take an hour or more, despite often being less than a kilometer apart as the crow flies. Roads were indirect, and transit was nearly non-existent. Essentially, co
