Atlético Nacional, once financially backed by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, is the biggest club in Colombia and a team steeped with both success and horrible tragedy. Santokie Nagulendran visited the club in Medellin to tell their story.
‘’I don’t care about when Nacional are playing, why do you want to go?’’ my Uber driver, an Independiente Medellin fan, exclaims as I tell him of my plans for my short stay in Medellin. The drive from the airport in the nearby town of Rionegro to Medellin is a beautiful one, its night time, so the vast mountains encompassing the city are illuminated as we drive around the long winding roads into a city now described as Colombia’s hipster capital. A far cry from being the murder capital of the world in the 1990s. The reason I wanted to watch Atlético Nacional was simple: they were infamous for their passionate atmosphere and the best club team in Colombia in recent times and defending league champions. Luckily, they were due to play a home game the next day, in Colombia fixtures are officially confirmed only a week or so before the game, so I was ready to enter the cauldron.
In the Harry Potter books, Hogwarts is a bustling place, full of magic, vibrancy and a charm unbeknownst to the ‘’real world’’.
Yet there is always a lingering darkness and fear brought about by the mere mention of villainous Lord Voldemort, ‘’He who must not be named’’, that leaves an everlasting fog of terror over everybody.
While Hogwarts is fantasy, and despite hard-core Harry Potter fans disputing this…it does not exist; Medellin, Colombia’s most notorious city due to the sheer scale of drug cartels and violence prevalent, on the contrary, does exist and actually does mirror Hogwarts. It’s an extremely vibrant place where the whole atmosphere can change swiftly with the mention of a name which has come to be associated with bloodshed and death, and brings memories of two significant and very different people: Pablo Escobar.