Dr. Santiago Tobón – From Gangs to Growth: Fighting for the Future of Medellín's Teens

Currently, there are approximately 12,000 gang members in Medellín, with between 500 and 1,000 new recruits each year.

Dr. Tabón believes that with the support of the Colombian government, it's possible that interventions could slowly reduce the number of new recruits by several thousand over the next few years.

And the way to do that is to approach this as if it were a labor market.

You want to reduce labor demand.

You want the firms to be less profitable.

Wait, it sounded like Dr. Tobon just referred to gangs as firms.

Is that right? He says that's the right way to think about gang structure.

These groups are like firms.

So in Medellin, organized crime is organized in two layers.

The first one, at the street level, there are the combos, the street gangs, the small street gangs that sell the retail drug market and extort and so on.

And above these combos, there are 19 mafia-like organizations.

And today, these 19 organizations constitute a sort of board.

So every combo is affiliated with one of these mafia-like organizations called razones.

So that's kind of the market structure of organized crime as we see it today.

It's the combos that are always looking for new recruits.

But how big are the combos?

We have 400 combos selling drugs.

A combo is a group of 15 to 50 permanent members.

Almost all of them are men.

Their main revenue source is the retail drug market, mainly marijuana and cocaine.

And the second revenue source is typically extortion, mostly on businesses, but some charge also households.

And then there are different degrees of diversification.

There are groups that have, for instance, loan sharking businesses, others in informal parts of the city that sell land plots.

They regulate this market because the state is not regulating it.

A microeconomist would say that's perfect competition.