(Bogotá) Three Americans died in just four days in the Colombian city of Medellín, local authorities announced Wednesday, in a context of an upsurge in violent robberies of foreign tourists lured by dating applications to be drugged and robbed .
Medellín City Hall and the American Embassy had already sounded the alarm in recent weeks about the increase in deaths caused by scopolamine, a drug used to steal and erase the memories of victims which, in high doses or combined with Alcohol can be fatal.
Dakarai Earl Cobb, 47, was found dead Monday in a hotel in western Medellín, without his personal belongings and without any signs of violence.
A day earlier, in the tourist district of Laureles, hotel workers found the body of Anthony Lopez, 29, in a room he allegedly shared with two women.
Both were identified by local press as American citizens. Autopsies are underway.
“These are (criminal) structures, these are not isolated incidents,” Manuel Villa, the city’s security secretary, told local press on Wednesday.
On Saturday, another American, Manley Mark Conley, died after falling from the 17e floor of a rented apartment in the El Poblado neighborhood. On January 19, a Lithuanian identified as Tomas Gedrimas had already thrown himself from the 12e floor of a hotel in Laureles.
Of these four deaths occurring so far in 2024, Mr. Villa notes that at least two follow “the use of dating platforms”.
In 2023, seven foreign tourists, including three Americans, died in Medellín after being drugged by young women met on specialized applications, according to official figures, likely underestimated.
Organized crime is increasingly taking advantage of the flourishing tourism in Medellín to rob flirtatious tourists who are a little too naive, “and in some cases this degenerates into homicide,” admitted the official. The phenomenon also affects the capital Bogota. Some victims are even kidnapped to be released against a ransom.
At the end of 2023, the American embassy advised its nationals not to use dating apps in Colombia.
According to the local town hall, the number of foreign visitors increased from 212,000 in 2015 to 1.5 million in 2023 in Medellín, one of Latin America’s top destinations.
Formerly renowned in the 1990s for its violence linked to drug trafficking, Medellín, the “city of eternal spring” with 2.6 million inhabitants, is today an essential stopover for trendy tourism and for digital “nomads”.
With its vibrant reggaeton-based nightlife and legal prostitution, it is also a hotspot for global sex tourism.