Urabá

Abstract

This chapter returns to the fraught relationship between Medellín and Urabá, which in its latest iteration involved an elaborate regional planning effort aimed at creating, once and for all, a meaningful, lasting state presence in the region. This was the Plan Estratégico Urabá–Darién (Urabá–Darién Strategic Plan, or PEUD). The PEUD was the culmination, which is not to say the end, of the long history of frontier making discussed in previous chapters. As a scaled-up version of Medellín's social urbanism, the PEUD was supposed to “finally bring the presence of the state to Urabá once and for all.” It was the latest and one of the more elaborate iterations of the frontier effect. Although the state-building efforts of the PEUD—at least under this official name—started fizzling out in 2016, their effects are written into Urabá's social and physical landscape, becoming yet another layer of the sedimented histories that continue shaping the political life of this frontier zone.