Offers an intimate portrait of Colombian adolescents’ first steps into the drug trade

Today, Medellín, Colombia, is widely recognized as a model of urban innovation following its stark homicide drop. Yet behind this transformation lies a far more complex reality of persisting violence affecting the city’s most precarized youth.

We Are the Nobodies offers an immersive ethnographic look into the hidden world of adolescents working at the bottom of the drug economy in Medellín and its surrounding region. Far from the spectacular violence of the Escobar era, the lives explored here are less known but no less tragic. These youth perform the most dangerous work, enjoy little upward mobility, and often become addicted to the very drugs they sell. Akin to gig workers, they are paid per task, lack any belonging to the organization, and can easily be dismissed, replaced, or killed the moment they become inconvenient.

Drawing on a decade of research, Elena Butti reveals how these adolescents are recruited with promises of respect, economic returns, and upward mobility. In reality, however, they find themselves trapped in a condition of “augmented precarity” in which their criminal labor is intertwined with the devaluation of their lives.

In the context of global debates about the neoliberal precarization of work, the book illuminates what precarity means at the bottom of illegal economies, where insecurity is not only material but also ontological. It reveals how Medellín’s criminal apparatus today operates like a neoliberal enterprise that turns violently on its lowest-level workers. In this way, it challenges simplistic understandings of gangs and organized crime as forms of “youth violence”, proposing instead that we read them as violence against youth.

Offering an engaging, accessible, and comprehensive look into the invisible workforce sustaining Colombia’s drug economy, We Are the Nobodies reveals what it means to live—and die—at the bottom of a precarized global illegal market.