Tag Archives: Colombia

Nearly every neighborhood in Medellín, Colombia, has a combo, or local street gang—almost four hundred in all. They earn most of their money from local drug sales. Some also run protection rackets, while others market legal goods—arepas, eggs, and even cooking gas—to locals. All these revenues make each Medellín neighborhood a valuable prize for combos to control. That competition for prime territory should be a recipe for violence. Yet the city has an annual homicide rate far...

I’d come to Colombia to find a man named Isaac Bedoya, described by the Colombian media as Latin America’s most notorious sloth trader. The country’s wildlife authorities estimate that he and his accomplices captured and sold as many as 10,000 sloths into the pet trade during the three decades before his conviction in 2015. That is Natasha Daly writing in National Geographic on the sloth cartel, with photos by Juan Arredondo. But (as is so often true in so-called organized crime, but seldom...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action First a plug – my colleagues at IPA have done amazing work this year quickly pivoting a big research organization to tackle the covid crisis head-on, studying hunger, refugee issues, education and 80+ other topics, and staying up late into the night, over and over again. Not all of our expenses are covered directly by research grants, so we rely on donations for the rest. If you donate here BEFORE TUESDAY you gift will be...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Medellin, Colombia New results from my colleagues in Colombia with Chris Blattman, David Cerero,  Gustavo Duncan, Sebastian Hernandez, Benjamin Lessing, Juan F. Martínez, Juan Pablo Mesa-Mejía, Helena Montoya, and Santiago Tobón find the sensationalized headlines from early in the COVID days about gangs enforcing quarantine don’t hold up, at least in Medellin, where gangs do provide a lot neighborhood municipal services. Using...

If you’ve been wondering where Chris has been, all I know is that it seems to involve a Colombian unicornGuest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action First, congratulations to Dave Evans, everybody’s favorite public good generator, on his upcoming move to the Center for Global Development, where he’ll join an impressive bench, including Pam Jakiela, Susannah Hares, and Kristaps Porzingis. (And subscribe to his blog at that link for great book reviews, and other interesting...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. This blog’s landlord, Chris Blattman, was on the Economic Rockstar podcast talking about Crime, Cocaine, Chicago Gangs, and the Colombia Mafia. (iTunes) And if you liked those projects, IPA has a job posting to work on projects like those with Chris and others in Colombia. This was fun – the Development Aid Project Jargon-ator is supposed to come up with nonsense development project titles, but so far all of mine sound pretty...

Guest Post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Alex Tabarrok summarizes the story from the new book on RCTs, Randomistas, about how TOMS shoes invited an external evaluation of their program giving away shoes and discovered it wasn’t helping recipients very much. This isn’t that unusual in development, but faced with the evidence, they agreed to be named in the paper and be public about it, and tried to figure out how to use the insights to do better. (See study author Bruce...

An announcement by Columbian President Juan Manuel Santos Friday said Colombia joined the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, known as OECD, and starting next week, will become a "global partner" of NATO. "We will formalize in Brussels next week -- and this is very important -- the entry of Colombia into NATO in the category of global partner, we will be the only country in Latin America with this privilege," the president said in a televised news address.... NATO is...