Tragedia en Space
I just learned, to my shock, that this happened just up the hill from where I was staying, on the last night I was in Medellin:
Click for the full story in El Colombiano
At 8:20 pm, when the collapse occurred, I was sitting in an internet cafe near Doña E’s apartment. I didn’t hear a thing, and there were no interruptions in power at the cafe. When I returned home at 9 p.m., Doña E seemed somewhat agitated. She was very excited about the Luz. Eventually I figured out that the power had gone out for fifteen minutes, and Doña E had been ready to evacuate. A few minutes later she called one of her friends, and afterwards told me that the Hotel Intercontinental had collapsed. I nodded, assumed that my Spanish was failing me, and went to bed. I had a long day of travel ahead of me, beginning with a taxi at 4:30 a.m. And besides, there was no way (I thought) that a large building could have collapsed in the neighborhood without me hearing it. Once I got to the airport, like all wise travelers, my thoughts were on my destination.
According to Google Maps, the tragedy occurred about 1,000 feet away from where I was sitting, as the crow flies–but it’s also straight uphill, and there was a large office building and a major hotel in between, which would have acted like baffles. Perhaps there was a rumble, and I just assumed it was a passing truck.
In the following map, A is where the building collapsed, B is the cafe where I was at the time.
An English language version of the story is here.
Both my arrival and departure from El Poblado were marked by tragedies in the neighborhood: in one luxury building, a internationally wanted fugitive murdered his local girlfriend and jumped or fell to his death about 15 minutes before I arrived, completely befuddled; and another luxury building collapsed while I browsed the internet and sipped a glass of wine, completely oblivious. But I still don’t think Poblado is dangerous, not the way Medellin used to be. These weren’t the grim embattled tragedies of all the years of La Violencia (the various wars, both civil and narco, that have torn Colombia apart since 1948), but more like the gaudy tragedies of early Hollywood: a place where foreigners can reinvent themselves, money is to be made, and the reach often exceeds the grasp.
